Photo Contest

My city is holding an amateur photography contest. I tried shooting the city from a hill at sunrise, but the hill was in the wrong spot. I couldn't really get the sunrise and the city in the same frame. Should have stayed in bed. Then I tried going downtown to shoot some of the landmarks. I think I'll submit the last one, it has two landmarks in one and good representation of the French and English, something that the city is known for.

Messing with Design

This is just me playing around with text:


This is a card that Julie designed and I put together to give out to friends and family:

Kings Landing

Visited Kings Landing Historical Settlement a while ago. It's like a living museum in the form of a town with about 70 buildings. My favorite was the fully functional, water powered saw mill.

Powered Paraglider

After the balloon launch in the last post there was a Powered Paraglider demonstration. A paraglider is basically a large parachute, but can glide for a longer time then a parachute. A powered paraglider is a paraglider with a big fan strapped on the rider's back. This looked like a lot of fun. I've been parachuting a few times and thoroughly enjoyed it once the parachute opened and everything was alright, but the few seconds before that was a bit scary. I can feel my heart rate climb just thinking about it. Seriously, it's climbing as I type this. Paragliding seems like it'd be much more enjoyable for me, and you don't need a plane, 'cause you can start from the ground. I bet you could get some great pictures up there too!

Balloon Fiesta

Sunset

More Ducks

Ducks

HDR Tests

I've been playing with some HDR (High Dynamic Range) techniques. Not really sure how I feel about the outcome, I think they look fake, but I think I'd rather look at them then the originals. There's a battle between "trying to represent reality accurately" and "making something that looks nice". Don't get me wrong, reality looks nice when I'm looking at it, but it's not the same through the camera (no matter how sophisticated/expensive).

My other HDR attempts
The link above will show other post with at least one HDR image, not every image is HDR.

Dynamic Range in photography refers to the ratio between the lightest and darkest amounts of light the camera can see at one time in a scene. It's nowhere close the dynamic range of the human eye. A camera has a hard time seeing details in clouds on a bright day and the shadows under a tree at the same time. One way to get around that problem is to take multiple photos at different exposures and then blend them together on a computer afterward. That's what I did here, using GIMP. But the problem with that is all it really does is darken the light areas and brighten the dark ones so the details can be seen. It looks un-natural because there could be areas in the sky that are darker then areas in shadow, that really shouldn't be.

I've also adjusted the colour saturation and contrast too.

Anyway, what do you think? Where do you lean, would you rather photograph/look at an accurate representation of reality or something that looks nice?


I thought a farmer's field was a strange place for this.

Fundy (Part 3)

One more low and high tide shot.


There was a nice cool breeze most of the time.

Most of the coast line is pretty rough.

Fundy (Part 2)

Here's some more photos of the tide. I didn't do a very good job of making sure I was standing the same place when taking the low and high photos.

The guy with the white boat below not only has to time his coming and going with the water below him, but also with the bridge (visible in the last two photos) above him.



Click the photos below for larger versions.

Fundy (Part 1)

It's been pretty hot and humid here for a while, so for some relief we headed to the coast for some cool Atlantic Ocean breeze, specifically, Fundy National Park on the Bay of Fundy.

As you can see on the sign below, this area boasts the highest tides in the world. The official vertical measurement is 15 meters (50 feet).


Everyday 100 billion tonnes of water flow in and out of the Bay of Fundy... twice! That's more than the combined flow of all the freshwater rivers in the world. I took these pictures of this bridge at low and high tide and stuck them togeter. The hight of the tide varies throughout the bay, here it's only 10 meters (33 feet).


While the vertical hight is 15 meters (50 feet) the horizontal affect can expose kilometers (miles) of sea floor. In the photo below, everything gets covered in water, aside from the cliffs.

(Click for a larger view)

Reuben Mosaic

I've taken A LOT of photos of Reuben. Here's about 2,000 of them:

Click the picture for a larger view.

Well it's 2,000 tiles, there's really only about 500 unique photos.

Made with AndreaMosaic.

At the Lake

Did some camping a week or two ago by a lake, here it is. First at late afternoon then again at about 10:30pm.

Wow! 50 Followers!

When I started this blog back in October 2008 I wasn't really sure how it'd go. I didn't think that I'd keep it updated very often or for very long, but it's been 10 months and I'm still going! I thought that most of my followers would be people I know, but it turns out that I've only met six of you. Aside from followers, there's been over 750 unique people that have visited more then 3,100 times from more then 50 countries. Thanks to everyone for your encouragement, it's motivated me to continue with the blog and has pushed me to get out and shoot when I'm low on material.

I look to forward to the next 50!