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 firing a flashgun is always a good way to get some funny looks!)