Pitiful ... Just Pitiful ...

I have seriously been away from this for a while, but I'm back. Sort of. Just a picture update today. This picture was taken at Earl Bales park in Toronto. They operate a sad little ski lift up a sad little hill in the park. It is, however, the only ski hill within a 80 km, so if you're desparate, there it is. They run ski lessons for kids there and it is really the perfect size hill for that.

This shot is of the loading area for the ski lift. It was taken with my new favourite lens, the Sigma 14mm f2.8 This lens is quite astonishing in how much of the field of view it captures and how sharp it makes it all. In addition to capturing a whole lot of scenery, you can use it as a macro-like lens as it will focus really really close. The lens has a bulbous piece of glass at the front, and you can basically bring the front of that piece of glass nearly in contact with whatever you want to shoot and the lens will still focus.


I'll be posting some more pics taken with this lens soon as well as a few shots from our week in Mexico in February.

Adios for now.

Don

HDRI Experiment

Been away from Blogger a while for no good reason, and although I'm still not up for any fancy writin' stuff, I thought I'd post a picture.

I have been experimenting a little with HDRI photography (which stands for High Dynamic Range Imagery). The idea is that you take a photo (on the tripod) of a scene with the exposure artificially reduced such that the foreground subjects will tend to be quite dark, while the sky and its associated textures will be well exposed. You then take another picture of the exact same scene except with the exposure increased such that the foreground subjects are well exposed. This will, of course cause the sky to be more or less overexposed and any textures will be lost.

Using fancy (freeware) software you then combine the two images to create a single image that has both the foreground and background exposures well compensated yielding some pretty cool effects. For some examples of HDRI photography done well visit this guy's page (you might also want to visit his reviews of oddball Japanese food items).

For a less well done example please click a gander at this image


I'm still fooling with the settings so I'm not getting any "natural" looking images yet, but I thought this reject looked pretty cool anyway. I hope you enjoyed it too.

Don

A Grey Weekend

It's been a while, but this will still be a quick post. We were at the cottage this weekend and the weather was as miserable is it can be at this time of year. On the way back from making a trip to the dump, we stopped near the boat launch at the western end of our little lake to take in one last view of the windswept water before it ices over. I stepped out of the truck to take some pics while Debbie sensibly stayed inside in the warmth. Here is a shot I took of her through the driver's side window with the reflections of the leafless trees in the foreground.

Pinhole Camera

This past July, I was wandering down in the basement and I absent mindedly turned off the lights before I made it to the stairs, and was thus forced to make my way in the darkness. I noticed a patch of light on the concrete floor and it made me think. Why was the patch of light rectangular?


I looked up and found that the hole in the ceiling (i.e. the floor of the main floor living room) was round (about 3/4" diameter - don't ask why we have holes in our main floor). I then realized the patch of light on the floor was an image of the living room skylight. The hole in the floor was acting as a pinhole camera!

Naturally, I broke out the digital camera, and after fooling around with the exposure settings for a while took some interesting images.

Here is what the skylight looks like (this pic was taken from the second floor balcony, so the perspective is a bit different)


I laid a white T-Shirt over the patch of light to give more uniform illumination.


Here is one of the later shots. I reduced the exposure time so that the camera would be able to capture what was visible through the skylight.


High Tech? ... Meet Low Tech.

Whee! Fun with science!!!

Don

Weekend Pics

The (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend just past was spent at the cottage. We worked Saturday fixing the furnace and converting the 4500 board feet pile of tongue and groove pine in the driveway into a pile in the living room. Saturday evening we went to the nearby cottage of some friends of ours and had a nice visit and a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat.

Saturday night there was a full moon, so I went out to try some new (freeware) HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) software I downloaded. The idea is to take multiple exposures of the exact same scene but with different exposure settings on the camera and then combine these images into one image having a wider contrast range. I have some ways to go with this technique, but here is one (combined) shot of the moon.



Sunday we finished the wood moving, went for a motor around the lake, and did some relaxing.

Here's a picture of the wood pile in the living room. The big platform in the middle of the room will be used as a surface on which we will construct the triangular panels that will form the interior of the dome.



We had to do some chopping of wood in the living room and the sawdust settled on the cobwebs around the "chandelier" (actually a candle holder hung from the ceiling). The afternoon light through the skylight really highlighted the dusty scene.



Monday Deb went home early to visit her niece and nephew and their newborn daughter while I stayed at the dome. I went for a final sail and did a little cooking in preparation for a new work week. While out, I stalked a group of ducks with the camera. Here is a picture of a young male with his small harem.



I really like this picture because of the reflections of the dying leaves on the water. There weren't any leaves or anything else in the water with them - the ducks were paddling through clear water.

I followed them around a while, moving closer and closer in the hopes of getting them to take off, thereby giving me the chance to get an "in-flight" picture. The buggers waited until I was occupied keeping the sailboat off the rocks before bursting airborn in a flurry of spray and quacking. This is the best I could get by the time I got the camera in hand. I kind of like it. It makes a statement. I'm just not sure what statement.

Slacker

I haven't updated recently, so I shall now beat myself about the head. There.

Now that that's done, here's a photograph taken last weekend of our little 16 foot sailboat tied up to the dock.



We used to have a larger sailboat. For 5 years or so we owned a Tanzer 22 that we kept at a sailing club down on Lake Ontario. The sailing club was located in a municipal park and on weekends one couldn't drive into the club, but instead take a shuttle van in and out. The shuttle van was very inconvenient since you had to be back from sailing in time to catch the last (5:30) shuttle out. In addition, the boats were tied to moorings, so access to the boat was via dingy.

To see how complicated this all was, here's a typical Saturday boat visit. Arrive at the park, unload the cooler and other gear, and wait for the van. Load the crap into the van, ride out to the club, unload the van, and schlep our junk out to the dock. Get the dingy from the dingy lockup, get the oars from the oar lockup, and row out to the sailboat. Tie the dingy to the mooring, untie the sailboat from the mooring, and motor in to the dock. Transfer the stuff from the dock to the sailboat. All of this takes over an hour. When you return from sailing, repeat but in reverse.

We eventually tired of the aggravation, and stopped going to the club. Our Tanzer had a fixed keel and was not really trailerable, so one summer we quit the club and sold the boat. The next summer we bought the cottage and three summers after that we got our lovely little DS-16.

Yonge And Wet

Last Saturday, after a long day of wandering the streets of downtown Toronto, we ended up on a patio looking down Yonge Street just north of Wellesley. We settled in under an umbrella and after a short time the rain began to fall. It rained steadily through two pints, at which point the umbrella was only stopping 80% of the rain. We transferred ourselves and our gear to an awning covered section of the patio and from there spent a little longer basking in the glow of the tail-lights reflected off the glassy asphalt before heading home.