Vancouver is an unbelivably beautiful city, as it turns out. I was there for pgconf.dev, and took a couple days before the conference to take pictures, get sunburnt, and get over jetlag.

I finished the trip with nearly 400 photos, with almost 300 from just Sunday. (A typical day out usually gives me 50-100 photos, with ~5% that I think are worth publishing — maybe 10% on a really good day. This trip had quite a bit more of both.)

Vancouver was teeming with life. There were so many photos where I'd accidentally also caught a bird in flight, somewhere I wasn't looking. In one otherwise bland picture of Stanley Park (not included here), there happened to be a bald eagle soaring in the distance. Or, in the picture of the helicopter below, there's a seagull flying just below it, that I didn't even realize until combing through photos after the fact.

Other things that caught my eye:

• the BC Place stadium has these distinctive support pillars in a ring around the top, kind of like a suspension bridge. I can't quite describe why I was drawn to them - maybe something in the idea of rugged metal reaching to grab the sky?
• the port had so much color, especially on a cloudless day in the morning light. Not to mention the slow movement, which I wish I could adequately capture. I got carried away at the time & had to cut down what I actually put here.
• the crows at Stanley Park were fishing for clams and then dropping them on the rocks to crack them open. I tried for a little while to get a picture of them - the crows would often not quite get it on the first try, and grab the clam again and almost throw it in an arc onto the rocks again. I wasn't quite fast enough to catch them, though, and eventually they left to go do whatever it is that crows do.

And, for fun, I've also included a couple pictures crossing London on the way back home.

P.S.: Apologies in advance for anyone looking for alt text on these ones. It'll take another week or so for me to get through writing the rest.