I’ve been in Vancouver for 10 days now. That’s 10 days of shooting outside the fences. Every venue has these fences around them. Fences and security check points.

The weather since last monday has been outstanding, for Vancouver. It’s been sunny with highs in the upper 40s to lower 50s. This is not normal for the area. Usually it’s a little colder and a lot wetter. I think the weather has played a huge part in the number of people wandering around downtown along with the number of street performers. Several roads are blocked off from cars which helps the large crowds move around and gives the street performers places to perform.

I wanted to check out a different part of the city so I went out to Richmond and Steveston, for the day. Richmond is a suburb of Vancouver with the speed skating arena and the O-zone. Steveston is a small fishing village southwest of Richmond. It turned out to be a very unproductive day of shooting, but it was refreshing to get out from the hustle of downtown Vancouver and check out a different part of town.

Today I set out to do something a little different. After talking with Tim from Luceo Images, I decided to do a fan portrait series. I started out by hanging out outside Canada Hockey Place before the Czech Republic Latvia game. I found a lot of fans leaving the Belarus Sweden game. There was a great diversity of fans to shoot, so my timing was great. I started talking to people and started taking photos then I found the blue wall. Once I found this, I started shooting all my portraits in front of the wall. Here’s a preview of a few portraits. I have several more but will dedicate a post to this sometime later, when I have more photos.

After the game started, the fan traffic died down so I started wandering again. On my way back to the bus, I passed the Russian House where a strange mascot from the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics was getting it’s photo taken.

After a couple slow days and a lot of rest, I was back out today. I headed out to find the Olympic cauldron. On there way to the cauldron, I passed the main media centre and happened to see Bob Costas going up an escalator. Like anything here, there was a line to get to the viewing area for the cauldron. I’ve become very used to waiting in line. After I went through the line I went back to Robson Square before calling it a day.

This morning I got up early for a taping of The Colbert Report. I showed up at 8:30 and taping didn’t begin for another 2 hours. From what I can tell around 2 thousand people showed up. It was pretty much open standing so there wasn’t much room to move around and I ended up in the middle of the crowd about 100 feet from the stage. Given the size of the crowd, I didn’t shoot as much as I would have liked to and just enjoyed the show. Afterward I stuck around and shot for another hour before heading for lunch. There wasn’t any official olympics related events in the park, but it was between the Russian House and the Quebec House so there was a lot of olympic traffic.

Most of the day was a rest day. I’ve been pushing myself pretty hard and I was recovering from walking pneumonia when I arrived, so I needed a day to regroup physically and mentally. I’m also at the point where I’ve been shooting and exploring for several days so I’m getting a feel for things. Now I need to focus in on what I’m trying to say with my story.

I did make it out to the start of the Men’s Hockey game between Canada and Sweden. Then off to a viewing site nearby.

After wandering around I went to check out Livecity: Yaletown. I waited in line a lot and was able see several of the vendor pavilions.

Today I wanted to check out some of the other things going on in the city that weren’t Olympics related. I found out about the Women’s Memorial March. Before I went down for the march, I went to see the Chinese New Year parade with Seth and Vickie. As the parade was ending, the sun came out and stayed out the rest of the day. This was a nice change since it’s heavy overcast or raining since I arrived. After the march, I started walking back to the apartment and came across several of the Canadian provincial pavilions.

Today was much less structured than yesterday. My plan was to wander around downtown then head out to UBC Thunderbird Arena to catch fans coming in for the Canada-Slovakia women’s hockey game. Then for back downtown to check out the public viewing sites.

I wandered around downtown for a while until I stumbled upon Meet the Mascots on Ice. Afterwards I hopped on a bus to get to the arena and I soon found out the game was actually downtown, almost where I left from. So it was back to the bus and pop into to the apartment for a quick dinner then on to a downtown viewing area. After a 20 minute wait, to get through security and inside, I missed the end of the game. The crowd had dispersed after the game finished. It did pick up when they started showing the Women’s Freestyle Finals. In the end they were disappointed to see American, Hannah Kearney beat out Canadian, Jennifer Heil for the Gold.

Click for more photos

I got in to Vancouver last night and after the best night’s sleep I’ve had in several days, I headed over to Granville Island to grab lunch with Seth and catch the torch relay. People lined the route, but it wasn’t packed. Five minutes before the torch was scheduled to come through, the crowd doubled in size. People went nuts as the torch was carried by and the crowd dispersed almost as quickly as it formed. After the torch relay, I met back up with Seth and we went to BC Place to check out the buzz around the opening ceremonies. The police presence was intense. You couldn’t go within 100 yards of the building unless you had a ticket to the opening ceremonies. All the streets around were blocked off to cars and were one way for pedestrian traffic. Several places around the city were showing the opening ceremonies, so we headed over to Robson Square for the festivities.