Pacific National Exhibition

Vancover, British Columbia, Canada
September 6, 2004

The Pacific National Exhibition is a fair held annually in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The location is at Hastings Park, where the worlds fair was held, and also the home of Playland amusement park.
It takes place on labor day weekend and the two previous weeks and weekends.

All of these images were taken with a Minolta DiMage Z1 digital camera.
Click on the small image to get a larger version with details.

The PNE Entrance

Equestriana - Horses

It's about 130 miles from where I live in Shoreline to Hastings park in Vancouver.
The first place we went to after we got past the ticket booth and entrance gates was the restrooms.
I didn't get any pictures, thinking perhaps that other patrons might not appreciate it, but they were bad.
My advice if you go to the PNE, stop somewhere else first and go to the bathroom.

The next place we went was to a horse show they call Equestriana.
It's mostly a dumb little play about a girl and her horse.
There are performances where they jump horses and one person that does acrobatics on horseback.

The Minolta DiMaage Z1 digital camera has a maximum sensitivity of ISO 400 film.
These pictures were indoors with poor lighting and a lot of motion.

In order to get these pictures I did roughly the equivalent of push processing film.
I shot these images with the lens wide open and mostly a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second.
This was about the slowest I could get away with and not have just total motion blur.
It was also far too fast to get anything close to proper exposure.

When I got home I used software to expand the pixel distribution effectively digitally push procesing.
Doing this I was able to get something more on the order of ISO 6400 film with all the attendent grain.
The pictures aren't high quality but I was able to capture images I probably would not have been able to with 35mm film.

If I attempt to take a picture using flash, it just illuminates the snow unless what is behind it is really bright or fairly close.	This is a picture of a neighbors driveway and car. It's fuzzy because I couldn't use flash because the snow reflecting off as demonstrated in the picture to the left and I didn't have a tripod so it was difficult to hold steady for the longer exposure required for a night time shot. The lighting here is just illumination from neighors porchlights and streetlights.	This is a pictures of a neighbors roof, the "grey" part is the edge of the sophet, about eight inches thick. The white on top of it, the snow. As you can see the snow is nearly as thick.

I wanted to document the depth, and so took this picture but of coarse didn't notice the ruler was backwards until I unloaded the camera. It still indicates the depth however as it's a 12 inch ruler. It was six inches on the deck railing as of 5AM. About eight now at 7AM.

This is the corner of the roof where the telephone cable attaches. That thick thing with the snow on it is the cable. Again this is taken just with available light, the orange tints are from sodium vapor lamps and the blue from mercury vapor and flourescent lighting used in various porchlights, etc. The camera really is capable of taking clearer night shots but I didn't have a tripod handy and couldn't hold it sufficiently steady by hand.