Farewell Rexall Place

Yesterday we drove up to Edmonton for the final game at Rexall Place.  In the 80s Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier and company put Edmonton on the map playing for the Edmonton Oilers.  The Oilers were dominant in the 80s winning 5 Stanley cups from 1984 to 1990.  Since that time they have made the playoffs 9 times in the last 24 seasons.  Their last appearance was an amazing run to the Stanley Cup finals in which they suffered a heart breaking loss in game 7... that was 10 years ago...

Since that time the Oilers have been on a 10 year rebuild.  It has not gone well but things are looking up with teenage phenom Connor McDavid leading the team.  The other good news is Rexall Place (Northlands Coliseum) is being retired and a brand new shinny arena will be opened for the 2016-17 season.

I normally would not take a camera (Aside from the iPhone) but being that last night would be the last NHL game played at Rexall Place I wanted to take a decent camera to grab some photos.  Northlands would not commit to what would be allowed camera wise (normally DSLRs are not allowed at a games).  Professional cameras are not allowed, but what a "professional" camera these days is debatable.  I didn't want to attract too much attention with a large lens so opted for the Fuji X-T1 with the Rokinon 8mm and an Fuji X-E2 with the pancake 27mm.  Turns out you could have brought whatever you wanted as they were fairly lax at security.

My goal was to grab a couple of exterior shots, photo at the Gretzky statue, a couple of panorama's and whatever I could get from our seats.  Upon leaving I wasn't too excited with what I captured but tonight I loaded the memory cards and although I didn't check all the boxes above I am pretty happy with what I got considering I the lens I had.

Here is the Flickr Album:

Instant!

My first foray into instant photography came a couple of years ago while planning our wedding.  Our initial thought was to have a Polaroid camera for guests to take photos of themselves to add to our guestbook. I knew that Polaroid film was not longer being made but had heard of the Impossible Project. After seeing the price and sensitivity of the film this was not going to be a viable option. Enter Fujifilm Instax mini.

After a quick search on Amazon I came across a bundle for the Instax Mini 90 and 250 exposures. At the time the Canadian dollar was on par the American dollar which made the total price around 75 cents per picture compared to almost $4 per picture for the Impossible Project film.  Decided to take the plunge and did not look back.

Our next idea was to have pictures on our guests tables with photos of themselves and us.  Enter the Instax SP-1 printer.  This allowed us to take our favourite photos and print them on to Instax film using an iPad/iPhone. The idea was to have them scattered on the dinner tables so guests had some old goofy photos of us along with photos of themselves to reminess or start conversation with guests seated together who did not know eachother.

We printed almost 150 photos using the Instax printer which was a fairly painless process and we got pretty good feedback. It is kind of neat visiting friends and seeing an old photo on their fridge which was on the table at our wedding. I would definitely recommend the printer.  It can also be used to print directly from the Fujifilm X-T1 and Fujifilm X100T cameras.

The Instax Mini 90 also worked fairly well for guest book photos.  I did not provide instructions on reloading the film which did cause some issues with people loading the film cartridges in backwards.  The camera will not startup if the film is loaded backwards and our guests assumed the batteries were dead. I did have a couple of people keeping an eye on it though and we did get around 95% of the guests with photos. I also picked up a couple of extra batteries in case they did die as a backup.  I would also recommend the Instax mini 90!

Install Mini 90 and the Instax SP-1 printer

I still use the camera once in a while for outings, but the pictures are a bit too small for anything other than snapshots with friends.  The Instax printer sees more use for an Instax mini picture frame that I rotate photos through (mainly phone pictures).

This foray into instant film has led me to pick up a Polaroid SX-70 camera from the 70s and shoot some Impossible Project film, but we shall save that for another post.

Cheers!

Staleness...

Well my plans for this space have not really panned out how I thought... But now that we are almost a quarter of the way through 2016 I plan to pick things up a bit...  I imagine my mom will be the only one who reads this but that is good enough of an audience for me!

Since the last post we have been fortunate enough to have done a couple of trips, a nice weekend in Jasper back in December followed by almost of week in NYC at the start of 2016.  I'll put together some blogs on those but in the mean time here is a shot of Calgary last week...

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Fuji X-T1 55-200mm