A taste of home... kind of.

Expect to pay $30 for this plate of fish and chips in Edmonton.

Fish and chips are a kind of a mainstay back home in New Zealand. Appearing on almost every street corner, in numbers possibly higher than McDonald's, Fish and Chip shops hold a wide presence. Such isn't the case here in Alberta, Canada. It could be that fish and chips are more of a british thing, or it could even be that since Alberta is a landlocked province it simply isn't economical or sane to have many of these kind of stores, seeing as the prime ingredient lives in faraway waters.

Despite all the barriers, at least one lonely store seems to have made it through. Calling themselves Brits Fish and Chips, they are more of a fancy eatery rather than a cheap takeaway deal, but the food they serve might as well have been from New Zealand, except perhaps for their different choices of fish. Other differences come from the British heritage of the store, like the ability for a customer to order Mushy Peas if they really want to, or miscellaneous drinks from Britain.

It is a lot more expensive than back home, roughly three times the price to be exact, but seeing as though it is more of a novelty place to eat rather than a common eating ground, I suppose they can afford to charge a little more. It seems popular enough. I suppose I would have to investigate provinces next to the sea like Vancouver to really find out if Canada does in fact have the Fish and Chip store shortage I think it does.

Quiet Times

Well its safe to say that not a hell of a lot has been happening lately worth mentioning on this blog. I thought I would give a bit of a status update to what has been happening, and consider the possibility of changing the focus of the blog into a slightly different direction, as I can't say I'm doing a lot of film related stuff as of late.

Firstly, I applied to become a permitee of IATSE, which is the motion picture union here in Edmonton. Whilst filling the application out, I couldn't seem to find camera operators or photography related stuff in any of the fields, of which you had to pick the three areas you were interested in. While handing in the application I learnt that all camera related fields are actually a seperate union which runs out of Calgary, which is about 3 hours away. Great... I ended up spending over $100 for the Set Etiquette course and then a further $25 for the application, and they don't even deal with the area I'm interested in pursuing. On the plus side I could pursue editing or other areas if I really wanted to.

Secondly, I've been getting more interested in still photography lately, and have been taking quite a few pictures both on the old 35mm film camera, and a Panasonic DMC-TZ3 digital camera. The digital camera takes some fairly nice pictures, being just over 7MP and having a nice lens, but the pictures don't hold up too well to enlargement or heavy manipulation. I guess I'll have to save my pennies to get a nice DSLR camera, preferably one with a full size sensor like the Canon EOS 5D or the Nikon D700.

Thirdly, the change of focus idea for the blog might be forced out of necessity, as I can either keep posting completely random posts or actually try to focus on a particular topic. Seeing as I haven't done any filming for over half a year now, and can really only write speculative posts, it might be for the best to have a slight change of direction for the mean time. I could focus more on photography, but seeing as I don't even have a particularly good camera at the moment that might fall short as well. But seeing as I haven't been posting very often lately maybe something like this would help things along a little.

Sometimes change is for the best. And to quote from the film In My Fathers Den, "Who you set out to be, isn't always who you become."