Digital Orca

The Digital Orca, a sculpture by Douglas Coupland located outside the Vancouver Convention Centre. Douglas Coupland is, amongst many other things, famous for popularising the phrase 'Generation X', and lives in West Vancouver. The sculpture is made from a steel armature with an aluminium cladding, and has LEDs inset into the cubes that twinkle at night.

The clouds were just coming in after another beautiful day, and give some interesting texture to the sky, I think. A few minutes later, they were reflecting the city lights and had turned orange, which was much less appealing.

The sculpture is approximately 25ft high. To emphasise this, I placed the camera low and used my Sigma ultra-wide angle lens -- I seem to be using this quite a lot at the moment. I like the way that the Shaw Tower, the third tallest building in Vancouver, fits neatly into the space under the flipper!

As a lot of the sculpture is black, I used my flash to provide some fill light on the near side -- this was set at 1/4 power and manually fired a few times from the left and right side of the sculpture during the exposure. (Running around popping a flashgun is always a good way to get some funny looks!)

One of these days I might take a photograph at some other time than an hour after sunset!

[Marie]

Cool capture and awesome nightshot of the cityscape in the background.

[Humphrey Hippo]

Sparkly orca. Made my day. :)
Love the low PoV. The building under the flipper looks great. The sparkles are so fab. :)
Interesting how it seems much more abstract close up.

[Reva]

Nice shot! Cool angles. Love the way you framed the Shaw Tower under the flipper. :) Douglas Coupland is one of my favourite authors. I knew he was a photographer, but I had no idea he did 3D artwork on top of all that!

[Glenda B]

Fabulous!! I did not get a picture of the orca like this-- well done!!! Love how you composed this :)

[Mags ッ]

Amazing - you could have pixelated this one!

[naladka]

I adore this shot! You got a new follower!

[Alexis Birkill]

@naladka Thank you very much. Your photographs are fantastic, keep it up!

[Menarose]

You are teaching me a new way to "see and photography" some of the items I have taken before. Your shoots are my new inspiration of my "Old" source :-))).