It’s possible that you haven’t heard about this, but Vancouver is the host city for the 2010 Winter Olympics. I suppose that could be news to you if you lived anywhere else anyway, but here in Vancouver it’s been wall-to-wall Olympic hype for months now.
I had a quick spin around town with Justin last week (I added some photos to my Flickr Olympics set), and even since then there’s lots more to see there now that construction is coming to an end on all the pavilions, art displays and event locations. One thing I really wanted though was to get some good shots of the rings floating in Coal Harbour. Somehow I missed the fact that they’ve been there since November!
I wanted to take shots of the rings from North Vancouver to get the city in the background. The first location I tried was Harbourside Place, which is a small street right on the water between some commercial docks, with what should be a great view of the rings. Unfortunately, there are a handful of barges moored right off the shore which effectively block the view. There’s nowhere around to get any elevation either so I reluctantly packed up and drove down to Lonsdale Quay.
The view from Harbourside Place on Feb 6th. The Olympic rings are JUST visible above the left-hand side of the barge on the right.
Lonsdale Quay has a 3-story viewing tower on the left side, so when we arrived around 4.30pm I climbed that, set up shop, and waited for the rings to light. And waited, and waited… So nobody thought to mention this to me but the rings don’t light up right at sunset. In fact they didn’t come on until 5.51pm by my watch (official sunset was 5.16pm). I was going to give it until 6pm and then give up so thank god they came on when they did!
I’d been taking pictures of the city, seagulls, the water etc with various short lenses for over an hour, and hadn’t really noted how my ISO was ticking up and my shutter speeds were ticking down until the rings finally illuminated. At this point it became obvious very quickly that trying to handhold a 400mm lens with shutter speeds of 1/6 of a second or lower at ISO 800 was not going to work. I had my tripod with me but had to fetch it from the car, and in doing so I lost pretty much the last of the blue-sky twilight I’d been hoping to catch. And then I’d been taking pictures for about 5 minutes before realizing that I’d left the image stabilizer on while the camera was on the tripod (which basically guarantees soft shots). Now you see why I don’t do this for a living 
I was also disappointed by a couple of other things. First, the rings themselves were lit up a yellowish-white, almost the same colour as the city behind them. In other pictures I’ve seen, they’re multi-coloured, or green, or red. Maybe they’re saving the cool displays for the games themselves? And second, they’re not exactly face-on to Lonsdale. They point more directly north than the north-east they’d need to face for a good head-on shot. So if I do go back to North Van for more shots, I’ll try to find somewhere else to shoot from.
Still, despite all the disasters I managed to get a few decent shots. Click on the thumbnails for much bigger versions.
The Olympic rings, Coal Harbour, Vancouver, February 2010. Canon 40D, Canon 100-400L at 400mm, f/5.6, 0.6s, ISO 800
There’ll be lots more to take pictures of in the upcoming weeks, I’m really excited. I’m somewhat worried about my commute into work over the games, but hopefully I’ll get some good shots to make up for it. Inconvenience is a passing thing but great pictures will be around forever!
I’ll leave you with this shot of the city that I liked from last night, with searchlight beams from the Robson St ice rink light show nicely visible.
Vancouver with searchlights, February 2010. Canon 40D, Canon 28-135mm at 30mm, f/8, 4s, ISO 800
