You can force it but it will not come

You can force it but it will not come
You can taste it but it will not form
You can crush it but it’s always here
You can crush it but it’s always near
Chasing you home saying
Everything is broken
Everyone is broken

You can force it but it will stay STUCK
You can crush it as dry as a bone
You can walk it home straight from school
You can kiss it, you can break all the rules
All the rules…
Everything is broken
Everyone is broken

Everyone is, everyone is broken
Everyone is, everything is broken

Why can’t you forget?
Why can’t you forget?
Why can’t you forget?

Goofs

I spent a few hours Sat shooting a model. Lucky for me the weather cooperated or else we would have needed to reschedule the shoot. I was very fortunate to have my gf assisting me during the shoot. She’s becoming an excellent VAL (voice activated lightstand). Half way through the shoot I was setting up the lights as the model was getting her makeup done by the makeup artist. My gf then decided to pose and goof around and resulted the following pic:

Yes she’s that rad!

Some pictures from the shoot:

I really like the B&W pic. God I love B&W pictures. I can pretty confident to declare that I’m taking good portrait pictures on a very consistent basis now. This is quite comforting to see how much I’ve improved.

A long awaited post

It’s been a while since I posted. No I haven’t given up on this blog. It has been difficult to sit down by myself and write a blog post the last while.

• I launched my photography website: http://www.boblai.com. Corinna of Gus Greeper wrote a nice review about my photography business. If you’re looking for headshots or portraits definitely hit me an email.
• My back has been bummed for the past 2 months. It has been pretty frustrating not being able to hit the mountains all summer. I’ve bagged 0 peaks and climbed once this summer. It’s pretty frustrating. Hopefully it’ll get better before the skiing season.
• It has been 9 months since I met my girlfriend. Kinda amazed that she’d put up with me for this long, considering I’m crazy and all





• I really wish I can afford this. I think it will further develop my photography skills. One can dream though.

Canada Day & more

Canada Day came and went too quickly. Since it fell on a Thursday I decided to take Friday off to give myself an extended long weekend. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a while. A 3 day work week is very nice! I spent the Friday in town enjoying the Canada Day celebration. It was really neat seeing the Olympic caldron lit up again. It was not the Olympics but the happy atmosphere around Canada Place was hard not to notice.

The plan for the rest of the long weekend was to drive down to the US on Friday, check out Chaukanut Drive and camp at Deception Pass state park. However the hour long border lineup and the long US customs office lineup meant we didn’t cross the US until well past 2 pm. I was glad to use the truck border cross instead of the Peace Arch border cross as the Peace Arch cross was backed up all the way to the last Highway 99 exit. The worst border lineup I’ve ever seen!

Chaukanut Drive was very pleasant and the views were stunning. Deception Pass was just as stunning. Unfortunately since we arrived at the park just before dust on a long weekend without any reservation meant we had no camping spot. So instead of camping we decided to drive back to Vancouver, since we weren’t too far from the border anyway. I’ll definitely have to go back to Deception Pass sometime this summer and camp there.

Summer is here?

Yes I’m officially complaining about the weather… for the gazillion time! Weather has been pretty damn terrible for far this spring/summer. First the weather forecast is as accurate as predicting if Lindsay Lohan is on crack or not. It is rather frustrating when you’re planning a weekend outdoor trip. Rain? Sun? Shower? Thunder shower? Gotta love the most general forecast of “cloudy with sunny breaks and a chance of shower.” Hopefully the we’ll get some “real” summer weather soon…

Did you hear that there was an earthquake in eastern part of Canada this afternoon? The earthquake was felt in Ontario and Quebec? I guess Quebec is finally separating? In other news the fake lake that the Harper government made specifically for the G20 summit caused a tsunami, wiping out the million dollar security system that was put up for the summit. The Canadian government is now in huge budget deficit and is believed to be raising income tax in the near future. After further analysis of the earthquake the scientists and geologists determined that the earthquake was caused by a chaotic result of excessive usage of vuvuzela! I guess more earthquakes are expected in the near future…

Back on the blog bandwagon…I think?

Wow I haven’t posted in over 2 months! Even my friends are bugging me about my lack of blogging…crazy! This must be the longest blogging break I’ve ever had in my 5 years of blogging life. Life has been keeping busy lately and sometimes when it’s late at night it’s rather hard to sit in front of the computer and blog when the gf is waiting in bed ready to share body heat.

Let’s see, what’s new?

Photography is going pretty well. I’ve been shooting lots portraits and slowly improving my skills. I really enjoy working with the subject in producing pictures that reflect his/her personalities. Looking around pictures on the internet I think I definitely have a long way to go still. But hey having a goal to aim for is always important right?

Last month I was on a 2 week whirlwind tour in the UK with my family. I’ve been to London and Edinburgh 6 years ago and it was interesting going back to somewhere you’ve been before. It was neat to walk around without a map and knowing what you’ll encounter. Walking around in London and Edinburgh brought back lots memories. We started our trip in Bath, then headed to Penzance, spent the majority of the time in London, did some side tours to Canterbury and Straford upon Avon, made our way up to Edinburgh, down to York, and finally back to London. My favourite place was Edinburgh. There’s just something magical about this Scottish city. Canterbury and York were very neat since they are both medieval cities. I sure didn’t know the Romans and Vikings lived in York back in the day! I ended up taking 16GB worth of pictures which corresponds to about 1000 pictures since I was shooting in RAW format. Needless to say I’m very backlogged in terms of editing my pictures…

The only disappointment the last 2 months is that I haven’t been heading out to the mountains as much as I’d like. This season was rather disappointing in terms of skiing. I only managed to get out on the skis for 23 days. The majority of them were spent in the backcountry which is something to be happy about I suppose. I’m now looking around for a new pair of fat skis. Hopefully I’ll find something before the start of the next skiing season. In the mean time I’m trying to head out climbing as much as possible and wait for the scrambling season to start. There is still lots snow up in the alpine. I guess if I want to rack in more days on skis I could always head out for a few days of skiing. Yes it is possible to ski in June! Heck you can still ski in August if you try really really hard.

I’ll end the post with some pictures I took the last 2 months. Back to the blog bandwagon? We’ll see about that.

The Natural World: The Fizzer

Each year UBC engineers have a film competition on the last day of engineering week and each department produces a short film. I just discovered this year’s entry by Engineering Physics, aka Fizz. I graduated from Fizz so it was nice to take a look what Fizzers are doing nowadays

This short film was really well done! Good job kidos!