I've been to a number of Zombie Walks now but stopped going because it's so much work. It's not the walking, it's the running around taking photographs. Plus, to be in the spirit of things, you have to be part of it, not just gawk and not just take pictures. So I hadn't been there for three or more years so I was amused to see that the hordes of the undead had swelled. From the picture below I would estimate 2000 easily, and probably more.

Two days into 2010 I took a trip into the Fraser Valley. I don't like to do a lot of driving but decided to take advantage of a minor spot of good weather to visit a place I'd read about in the news. Nicomen Island is a flat piece of farmland bounded on two sides by the Fraser River and by a tributary called Nicomen Slough. For some reason, it is a chosen spot by both Bald Eagles and Trumpeter Swans Cygnus buccinator to overwinter. Apparently, there were some recent killings of the swans ("Swans shot at Nicomen Slough") so I decided to check it out before they moved on (trumpeter swans are a protected species and no hunting of them is permitted).

This was probably the only decent shot I took "out of the box" per se with my large format setup after a long drive out to seemingly the edge of civilization to meet the waking of dawn.

Now that I live on The Drive and am a laid back East Vancouverite I have no excuse but to go to any festival that shuts down Commercial Drive. I've done the Car Free Festival three years in a row now and while they change it up a bit and have been spreading it out to other neighbourhoods in Vancouver I stick with the original location. After all, it's in my new hood.

Yesterday it was cold, wet and not getting any better when we arrived at Hornby. We had a lodge to warm up and needed to get dry. Not a good start to the day. But this morning: beautiful sunshine and the whole world was awesome.

Here is the running tally of fauna I've seen today in order of seeing: bald eagles, Garry Oak moths, turkey vultures, assorted small passerines, weasel, seals, deer, and lots of ducks.

As for photos? Not so much. Hopefully I am just warming up.

Don't worry, I'm not being stuck in a niche, if you can call a niche being obsessed with taking pictures of people with guns. Guns are not surprisingly popular on Flickr and not just because the U.S. is a gun-crazy culture; Canadians are too. In the past month, Vancouver has been the absorbed with an ongoing gang war that has claimed dozens of lives in brazen hits including the life of a young mother this week. It has brought home the fact that criminality isn't just fantasy, it is very real.