death of a hard drive

Pat's rat gives me a tickle

Over the Christmas Holidays I had a major flood that damaged my hard drive. At the moment, I have lost everything I have ever shot photo or video of in the last 12 years or so. Not cool. Luckily insurance is trying to have the data recovered through some complicated and expensive process. I am really hoping they can get it back for us. In the meantime I haven't been up to anything photo worthy. I haven't had time and not in the mood to lug the camera around. Here are a bunch of iphone pics from the last year.

Florida day five

great view above the ocean

The final full day. We made our way back through the keys stopping at places we saw on the way up. We had to get back to Miami that night as we had to be in the airport for 4am. So we did some parasailing, checked out a bird sanctuary, and caught our final sunset before heading into Miami for a nice dinner and a movie. We saw Django Unchained and it was great. Then made our delayed flight back to Ottawa to hit terrible conditions as expected. We were very tempted to just stay a lot longer. It was a great trip, but too quick. Hopefully this keeps us sane until Costa Rica. Thanks for checking in.

Florida day four

8ft Lemon shark takes a bite

Day four was great, but not as good as it should have been. We booked a shark tour on a boat. I am not yet dive certified, and even then there are no dedicated shark dives in the US. Well, you are not allowed to bait for sharks on dives. So unless you go to the bahamas, etc, then the shark tour was the next best thing. They bait the sharks off the side and you enjoy the show. Usually 12-20 sharks, with several big species coming through. Unfortunately we had a real cold snap over night, dropping the temperature so low, the sharks get very lethargic and their metabolism slows. They need warmer temperatures to be active. The shark tour wanted to cancel. I had other plans. I am Canadian I say, I can handle the cold. So tour guide eventually said yes. Problem is the sharks couldn't and I didn't know. Would have regretted not going, but we certainly did not get the show we were supposed to. The sharks were just not interested. Oh well. We saw an 8ft Lemon and 7ft Nurse feed a bit. One of the best parts was a giant loggerhead turtle that passed us while we watched the sharks feed. This thing was easily the size of a big 4-wheeler. Cruised on by and he was gone just like that. Then we enjoyed Key West afterwards as it warmed up for the evening. Key West is a really neat place. Party everywhere all the time, but we were the youngest people by far. Very weird dynamics there. Furthest Southern place in the US!

Florida day three

getting ready for the water 

Day three was awesome. Dark rainy weather when we woke up, so we hit the turtle hospital and got educated. Really great place and you get to see a lot of big turtles and stuff. We finished that and the weather was perfect. We hit a well known snorkelling spot. My go pro battery let me down, but you will simply have to take my word for it. I also have a 6 second video clip before she dies. What you ask? I snorkelled all alone, about 400ft from the boat and everyone else, with two Carribean Reef sharks. Don't be an idiot and ask if they are man eaters. Google that specific species and take a look. Not known to be too aggressive when left alone, but a very capable and well built killing machine. I swam with them 3 times, and the last session was about a minute and half at 10ft away. Go figure, I had exhausted my go pro battery in the previous 1.5hrs of the swim. I decided I had used enough of my luck (since nobody would even see or know if I went missing until way too late) and headed back to the boat to share my ultimate experience. I can't stop thinking about how perfect that encounter was, well, minus the go pro dying. One of the best days of my life so far. We also saw lots of barracudas and neat fish as expected.

Florida day two

just a neat pic Brenna shot while we drove

Day two brought us further south into the glades. We took most of the day to go through the South East area and hit some nice driving and walking paths in the glades. We saw a lot more than we expected. Once again, lots of great photos I can't even squeeze in here. And lots of photo credit goes out to Brenna. Check back, day three coming soon!

Taz session Jan 2013

Tommy with a trick rarely seen these days. The fufanu. Not all is lost with the younger generation after all?

Check out some recent Taz photos from this month. People shredded and we logged some great footage as well. Shot with the T3i - canon 35mm and Opteka 6.5mm fisheye. 

Florida trip day one

cruisin' the Everglades on the airboat

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Now that all of that is done with, I can get back to life.

Brenna and myself took a small trip. We were over due. We flew to Miami, with intentions of going to the Everglades and the Keys, looking for cool stops and adventure along the way. We really hoped to see animals and catch some nice weather. Here is day one of the trip. These are only a select few photos as we snapped a lot. We didn't do so well getting to Florida though. The airline screwed us over, providing us with a transfer that was unattainable, forcing us to miss the flight they provided us with. Ridiculous. So we had to take a later flight, killing our afternoon plans. I was sitting in an airport waiting to start my vacation after having worked the night before and only getting a tiny bit of sleep on the plane. We finally arrived in Miami, but to only find that our luggage didn't make the trip and it never even left our transfer location. Brutal. We didn't waste anytime. We got into the rental car and headed straight to the everglades. We stopped at Coopertown air boat rides. The first one we could find before it got too late. Our guide was super and our small vessel only had 2 other passengers. So it was pretty awesome. Things turned around and we got our luggage delivered later that night at 3am... but we trooped it out and chugged along. I apologize as I cannot remember all the names of the animals. All these pics were shot with the T3i - Tamron 18-270mm lens. Check back for more pics soon. I have 5 or 6 days to upload yet.

Hallowe'en

Derek as Two Face

Sorry for the late post on this one. Thanks to everyone who came and dressed up. Some really, really good costumes! The theme was film characters. Unfortunately some people don't even make an appearance on here because I was shooting some pretty out of focus shots that night.

An afternoon at the Brose Farm

Jay was trying to perfect his no footed cans all afternoon. It's a good shot when you can see the waffle in the sole

I was unable to ride the last Brose Farm jam, but got lucky enough to have Josh have myself and a few others out for a session before it got too cold. Here are a bunch of photos and video edit of the shredding. People went pretty hard for the camera. The video below captures MOST of the best things that went down. On a roll here recently, let's keep it up. Somehow motivated to ride and film while the weather runs out on us. Hey, make sure to watch that video in HD from the vimeo page too! Click for more pics and video link!

2012 end of summer mix edit

2012 end of summer mix from Dirty Lens Productions on Vimeo.

I had a fun summer doing all sorts of things. Here is a video simply smashed together since I had too many random clips and not enough to do proper individual edits. Cherish the warm sunny days, they won't last long now!

Make sure you click the vimeo link and go my page and watch in HD. It won't be amazing quality because I don't have vimeo plus, so I had to squish a big vid to fit a small margin...

Enjoy!