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!

Skiing at baker

Mt. Baker has to be is one of my favourite mountains. This past Sunday Evan, Kevin, and I drove across the border and spent the day in Baker for some awesome powder actions. Let’s just say Baker did not disappoint us, as you can clearly see from the pictures…

Bluebird sky!!!

Wipe that grin off this man’s face

All smiles

My quads are still burning from all the turns! Hopefully I’ll be able to get a few more turns before the end of the season. Right now I’m looking around for some fat telemark skis as I’m going to retire my current skis…

Speaking of Baker, I still need to summit it. Maybe this summer or later this spring? Summit on feet or on skis. It’s a tough choice!

An update…finally

I just realized that my last blog post was over 2 weeks ago. I guess I have been ignoring this blog a little bit over the last few months. Not that I don’t have anything to say but between Facebook and Twitter often I end up expressing my thoughts and immediately having a discussion with other folks. Needless to say, this blog has been put on the back corner of the room for a little bit. Hopefully I’ll pick up the blog posting soon…

Anyway life has been pretty busy lately. Keeping the tradition I’ll do a quick update…random style!

-Over the last few weeks I have been shooting quite a bit of portraits. Although each shooting session only takes couple hour, post processing takes significantly longer. It’s not unusual to spend over 30 minutes on each picture. Maybe it’s just me but looking back at my pictures I always say to myself “Man this picture is terrible, I should have done this instead…” The self satisfaction usually only lasts a short moment.

For example…

I’m slowly finding my Canon XSi limiting my photography in a few ways. No it’s not a bad camera, as you can tell from the photos I’ve posted over the last 1.5 years or so. I think I’m growing out of the camera. Whenever I shoot I wish the camera body, or rather grip, is bigger so it’s more balance in my hands. I also wish I could get more depth of field control with my camera, which is sometimes difficult to do on a cropped sensor body. I’m 99.99% sure that my next camera will be a full frame camera (i.e. sensor is the same size as film negative). But all the full frame cameras are still quite expensive. I guess I’ll just have to keep eating peanuts as my meals for a while. Ha!

-Sadly skiing season is pretty much over. It has been a pretty disappointing season. I have yet to hit the 20 day mark. Quite sad considering I spent over 30 days on skis last season. This season the snow is not the best we’ve seen in the last few years. I could say November is probably the best snow month this season and that’s pretty sad. Last Sunday Ran, Chris, and I went to Mt. Seymour for some quick exercise. It took us about 40 mins to skin up to Brockton Point and only about 5 mins max to ski down. I was smiling the entire way down. Can’t believe how much I missed skiing.

After about  3 seasons of usage, my skis are getting pretty beat up. The back of the skis are getting chipped quite badly and there are some nasty scratches on the bottom of the skis. Luckily I got them used from the MEC gear swap 3 years ago for pretty decent price. The plan is to get a new pair of skis and bindings and retire the current skis as rock skis. The problem is finding skis and bindings on sale. It’s not as easy as it sounds…

Random Rants….
-What’s up with people using an umbrella and walking below the building rain covers? If you have an umbrella go walk on the part of the sidewalk that’s not covered. Oh and don’t get mad at people who do not have an umbrella and are walking under the rain covers. You have no right to get mad at them because they are blocking your way. To them you are the inconsiderate idiot that’s blocking their way!

-Oh and what’s with people who use the “Express Lane – 15 items or less” counter at grocery stores but have way more than 15 items? I’m not talking about say a few items over, I’m talking about 20 or 30 items over. I don’t care what your reasons are or if you’re an important person or not, clearly you shouldn’t be in this line!

Photographer wanna be

Hi my name is Tawcan, I’m a photographer wanna be.