Mike Pearson's Adventures on a Pale Blue Dot

Cut 5 wasn't the biggest or the nastiest piece of blasting work on the Sea to Sky project. It was however perched directly above the ferry terminal ticket booths at Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver...all 40,000 cubic meters of it. The usual way to blast, is to start at the "free'" face and send the blast outwards. As powerful as the explosives are, they have their limits on what can be accomplished. Shooting to a "free" face, allows the rock to easily move away from the wall behind. Blasting to a "free" face also greatly minimizes the vibration in the ground when the shot is fired...and offers much more control of fly-rock. Loading a Cut 5 pre-shear blast The roll of green stuff that looks like garden hose...is actually a very high strength explosive The way that Cut 5 was situated, prevented us from doing things the usual way. There were two reasons for this. One was that the ticket booths were in the direct line of fire, if we shot aw...

Several images from a trip to southern Manitoba. Unfortunately I lost hundreds of images in a hard drive melt down. That's really unfortunate, because I discovered a guy with a huge stash of ancient vehicles on his property out there. He was kind enough to let me photograph them all...gave me a guided tour and history lesson...the whole nine yards.  You know how you use the word "un-believeable" ...well walking around his property was like being in a dream...every turn....every new opened barn door...overwhelmed the eyeballs. It was too much too absorb on one pass. I guess a fella needs to go back out and get new photos to replace the lost ones. Here are a few images that survived... from my infrared camera. I'll mix them in with some "Prairie/pick-up truck/cowboy hat/mud on the boots" tunes.

Here are a series of infrared images from the Derelict Textures series. Abandoned, rusty machines, trucks and cars captured in true IR with a D-40x converted by LifePixel to capture IR wavelength light only. It takes a while to get the knack of shooting IR images. You have to re-think lighting, background, white balance, shutter speed and textures. These are some of the first images that I took with the newly converted camera ( I bought it for the purpose of converting to IR )..I would set-up the camera differently now...knowing what I have learned since. Before we begin...here are a few images from the property that these first few subjects were sitting on. A truly magnificent 60 acres of land that edged up to the Georgia Straight. At the time that the photos were done, the property had just recently been vacated by the elderly long time residents. The old house is barely visible in one of the photos...a small beach house on stilts with a kings view is at the oceans edge. The main h...