Canada - Momentum Ski Camp - Day 7

It's Canada Day!

Unfortunately, the weather wasn't very good on the glacier for the last day of camp, it was raining and snowing with bad visibility. And even worse then weather was that my legs had turned into wet noodles, all of the skiing and mountain biking had finally caught up to me. So I skied for a little while, but decided that it was better to quit early before I hurt myself.

Jeff really enjoyed the air-bag

To get to the glacier at the top of the mountain where the ski camp terrain park is located was a bit work each day. We would have to take one chairlift, then walk about 100 feet to another chairlift. At the top of that chairlift we would get on a but that would drive us around the mountain to where we would get on a third chair lift to the top of the mountain. The whole process took about 45 minutes. But one of the cool things about riding the lower chairlifts was that we would almost always see bears and sometimes deer.

Japan - Snow Monkeys

Japan - Hokkaido Photo Workshop - Day 06

Japan - Hokkaido Photo Workshop - Day 05

Japan - Hokkaido Photo Workshop - Day 03

Japan - Hokkaido Photo Workshop - Day 04

Japan - Hokkaido Photo Workshop - Day 02

Japan - Hokkaido Photo Workshop - Day 01

Last year while I was in Japan I went on the Hokkaido Winter Wonderland Photography Workshop put on by Martin Bailey and had a really excellent time. We traveled around Hokkaido taking photos of Japanese Cranes, Swans, Eagles, Deer, and the winter landscape.

This year I was thinking about going on the workshop again, but when I checked into it, I found out that the workshop was already fully booked up. I didn't think too much more about it until a week before the workshop was scheduled to start and I received an e-mail from Martin saying that there was a last minute cancellation. So there was now an open spot on the workshop if anyone could make it to Japan.

I was expecting it to be pretty expensive for a last minute flight to Japan and that would prevent me from going. But when I checked the airfares, it turned out that Singapore Airlines had flights from LA to Tokyo for less then $700 round-trip. So here I am, freezing my butt off in Hokkaido, but I'm having a great time and hopefully getting some great photos, and even learning thing or two.

Japan - Monkeys

On one of the mountains surrounding Kyoto is the Iwatayama Monkey Park. It's a pretty interesting area at the top of a small mountain where about 170 Japanese Macaque live. It's about a 20 minute walk up a fairly steep trail to get to the top of the mountain where the monkeys are wild and free to roam around.

Taiwan - Taipei Zoo

Taipei has a really nice zoo. They do a pretty good job of making the animal enclosures look natural, with lots of room for the animals to move around.

Japan - Beatle

I've been playing around with some macro photography lately.

Japan - Deer in Nara

One of the really interesting things about Nara is that there's hundreds of small deer that roam the city freely. The deer are thought to be heavenly animals that protect the city and the country.

Vendors sell deer cookies that you can buy to feed the deer. You have to be a little careful when feeding the deer because if a group of deer sees that you have the deer cookies, you'll quickly be surrounded by a huge pack of deer. I saw several times where little old ladies would start feeding one or two deer, but then they would freak out when they became surrounded by twenty or thirty deer.