Pork, peanuts, plunges, and pique

I'd thought about going up to Kettleby and photographing the place on the weekend and sent an email to P-Doug on Thursday to that effect, but P-Doug fired a suggestion off to me at exactly the same moment... it was creepy-weird; his email was waiting for me when I hit the Send button. His suggestion entailed going out to the annual ribfest in Victoria Park in Kitchener, stopping at Piccard's Peanuts, and maybe visiting Otterwa if there was time on the way back. The ribfest is a once-a-year event, and presumably Kettleby will be there for a while, so it was pretty clear to me his suggestion trumped.

He picked me up around 10 and we headed west on the 401. The traffic was moving, but it was busy all the way. I guess there's hardly ever a time now when the 401 isn't busy.

We stopped in Cambridge and looked around a retail outlet that used to be some kind of factory; it was nicely refurbished sometime in the 90s, I guess, and now houses the kind of stores that yuppies are drawn to. In our particular case it was a clothing store that sells brand name items at reduced prices. While I was there, I heard a song on the radio I really wanted to find, but promptly forgot everything about (melody, lyrics, any hint of the name of the band) and was left only with an itch I can't scratch now, unless I happen to stumble across that song again. That's extremely frustrating. It's like one of those zits that's nowhere near the surface and you can't do a thing about it... I seem to get more and more of those as I get older.

Anyway, we got to Kitchener about 12:30 or so. P-Doug had brought folding chairs so we wouldn't have to sit in awkward ways under the trees this year. We also brought several cameras and decided to casually record the event for posterity. Nothing major or important, just one of those "how life was in the 2010s" kind of things. By and large, these consisted of candid shots of People Who Look Faintly Ridiculous. That's said in the full knowledge that we may end up in such a collection ourselves for all the same reasons.

From Dr. Seuss's unreleased manuscript, Pimp a Wimp.

A number of Ontario's microbreweries had set up shop there and for $20 I got a small souvenir glass for the beer samples and eight tokens, which I split with P-Doug. In the course of the afternoon we tried a few things, but about half our tokens went to Nickel Brook's Green Apple Pilsner (in my estimation, probably second only to Innis and Gunn, imported from Scotland as the best beer I've ever had). It's one of the most delightful beers I know of. Naturally, the LCBO has discontinued it, which means driving to Burlington if we ever want to pick any up from now on.

P-Doug picked up a 1/3 rack of ribs from the Boss Hog's exhibition. These guys were up from somewhere waaay down south. They were wearing shirts with "01" on the back (which those of us over 35 will recognize as a reference to the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard), and would occasionally draw attention by sounding a fanfare horn that played the first dozen notes of "Dixie". We had three ribs each and yeah, their sauce was pretty good.

But me, I came for the pulled pork sandwich. When I was my turn, I went to a crew from New York called Fire Island. Now, with a name like that, I would have expected their sauce to have a real kick to it (either that or be gay). It was actually a honey garlic sauce. I also got us their baked beans and mashed potatoes; the former were possibly the best I've ever had, and the latter had chunks of potato skin in it, a real first for me. The sandwiches were satisfying but, unfortunately, not really spicy. Ah, well.

I guess it was about quarter after four when we left. P-Doug wanted to get to Piccard's Peanuts to pick up some stuff for his missus before it closed, guessing that would be about five-ish. On the way back to the car, I paused to get a shot of a pioneer's house, fretting out loud about whether we could spare the time. The shot took, of course, slightly over two seconds to set up and take, after which we laughed all the way to the car about how disgusted James Salmon would be with how all the art and nuance had been drained from photography by modern technology; two seconds on a whim to do something that probably would have required most of a minute for him to set up and frame, and serious deliberation as to whether the shot was worth the film.

We got to Piccard's Peanuts in plenty of time and for once in my life I didn't spend a cent there. On our way in, some family was gathered on the porch and consoling some little girl while one them, in a surprisingly adult voice, was taunting (a la Eddie Murphy) "you don't have no ice cream..." I whispered to P-Doug on the way in "The Asshole Family's road trip vacation". By the time we left, the girl had been mollified... probably by ice cream.

We took the backroads across to Bolton where Otterwa is. The last two times we were there we were sharing the place with anglers. The first time was at the end of the summer in 2008; we completely ignored the place in 2009 as we explored other places. A few weeks ago we decided to go back. We made our way through the brush, down the hills, through the mucky swamp at the bottom, crossed the river to the sandy landing, only to spot a fresh cigarette on the shore.  And literally within one minute of our arrival, two guys with fishing rods came out of the field. We milled around for a bit and realized the day was theirs, so we headed back and just hung out on the hilltop over the road for a while before heading off for the consolation prize of beer and burgers.

This time we were arriving very late in the day. I had some misgivings about the hour and our ability to find our way back out as the sunlight faded (Otterwa is not an easy place to get to... unless you have a fishing rod, apparently), and I wondered if Glasgow might not be a more likely choice, given its proximity to the road, but I kept them to myself. Really, Glasgow's a poor excuse for the pocket Eden of Otterwa.

It was about seven or so when we parked the car. Since May last year, I've started occasionally challenging myself on these hikes by leaving my sandals behind in the car and leaving myself no recourse to them at all, and for the first time at Otterwa I decided to do that and go barefoot the whole way in and out. Asphalt and gravel aren't the obstacles they once were; I'm kind of proud of that. We headed down the road and into the trees, and made our way for the umpteenth time to Otterwa. At the swampy base of the hill, P-Doug sank his right leg in almost to the hip. The only way to extricate himself without ruining his clothes was with my help. Immediately afterward, I stepped over a fallen log by the river and sunk in past my knee myself.

I stepped into the river and it was like tea that had been left out to cool for half an hour. There was still a lingering warmth to it; it was very comfortable. Far warmer than Lake Ontario when we were down at Cherry Beach a few weeks ago. We crossed over to the landing and found, yet again, evidence of a recent visitor; deep boot prints in the sand that had to have been made that day. But, it was pretty clear by then that the guy wasn't around, and even if he was, I wasn't overly bothered. We stripped off and got in the water and channeled good old Walt Whitman. :)

Last year P-Doug happened across a couple of watertight camera bags and he picked them up for me. I put one to the test with the G9, and for the first time, I videoed underwater there in the river. It worked spectacularly. The bare, rusty-coloured rocks on the Humber bed reminded me of nothing so much as photos of Mars. I could see minnows darting around, avoiding our feet; the silt bloom out when I stepped or brushed it from the fallen tree trunks. I've been dying since last year to do that. I want to try it again in other places.

My first ever underwater video.

I was also worried the mosquitoes would be a problem but I didn't hear the whine of the first one till we were approaching the swampy lip of the river, and even then it wasn't so bad. And at first, while we were in the water, they left us alone. I was sitting near the bank and they began to pester me so I moved out to the centre. But as the sun sank lower, they got bolder, until at last most of our time in the water was taken up with keeping our shoulders submerged and warning each other off about impending landings. That, and a few other factors (concern with the failing light, hunger after six hours) prodded me to suggest we consider it a short, successful, Apollo 11-style landing and make our way to either Wendy's or The Toby Jug.

With the mosquitoes being what they were, the possibility of lingering on the bank to dry really wasn't one. We carried our clothes out, up the hills, across the little clearings, over the pine needles, keeping ahead of the mosquitoes till we were within sight of the road, when we dressed. We've hiked out naked from Otterwa before – the first time in a rainstorm – this time due to a different set of necessities.

There was nearly no traffic coming or going; the pavement under my feet was still pleasantly warm even after the sun had set. We got to within ten yards of the car when P-Doug cried out like the damned: his keys were in his belt pack, and his belt pack was back on the landing by the river.

I can't, I honestly can't, remember an instant where I felt so hopelessly resigned to a disheartening inevitability. P-Doug asked me if I wanted to sit it out by the car. I had to mull it over for two or three seconds. The only reason for accompanying him was, well, to accompany him. Solidarity. That was it, really. But there were myriad reasons not to go. First of all, he was instantly (and understandably) in, shall we say, not the most social of moods, and anyone travelling with him would have been wise to do so in unprovocative silence. Well, sitting by the car, I wasn't likely to say anything to irritate him. Secondly, offering my blood to the mosquitoes again wasn't going to accomplish anything except feeding the mosquitoes. Finally, my sandals were locked in the car. One of the challenges I like about barefoot hiking is choosing my footfalls, but that's enough of a challenge in daylight. I really didn't want to test my skill (luck) in increasing darkness; besides, I would have slowed him down. I estimated a 40-minute round trip. So, feeling cowardly and slightly guilty, I politely begged off.

I settled in the grass beside the car and tried to pass the time reviewing the underwater video I'd shot. Naturally, the battery gave up the ghost after about ten minutes. I settled back, trying to keep out of sight of the passing cars so as not to have to explain my situation to anyone seeking to offer aid (no one did... hmmm...), and watched the telephone pole fade to a silhouette against a darkening pink and azure backdrop. The mosquitoes found me, but I'd liberally coated myself with repellant and it seemed to work. They'd come close, hover around uncertainly, and drift off. But if I didn't provide an appetizing entrée for the mosquitoes, what I did provide was bait for the dragonflies. They were soon on the scene; a dozen or more. The big mammal locked outside the car was a godsend for them. I drew the mosquitoes in; the dragonflies took them out. I felt like an aircraft carrier in the Battle of the Coral Sea or something. Zeroes swarming around me, Mustangs zooming in to pick them off before they could inflict their damage on me. At one point, I watched a mosquito easing its way in toward me, about a foot from my left temple. I reached up slowly, ready to shoot my arm out and try to grab it, when I was suddenly outgunned and outclassed by a dragonfly who flashed through like a Spitfire and did the mosquito in. Not a word of a lie; I actually heard the "gluck" sound of the dragonfly taking the mosquito. I don't care how many thousands or millions of times bigger I was than either of them; it sent a primordial shiver up my spine.

There was no call of my name or sound of footsteps; just a key in the lock of the hatchback. I climbed up; it had been half an hour. P-Doug had shaved about ten minutes off my self-estimated ETA, and I was quietly delighted for him (and in truth, there's little doubt in my mind that my accompanying him perforce barefooted would have tacked at least that extra ten minutes on, if not more, as darkness fell).

Stopping to eat was off the itinerary; he simply wanted to get home. I honestly couldn't blame him; what he'd just gone through was no fun. As he started the car, I noticed a stack of coins by the gear shift. Fearing that the sudden start, fired by frustration, that we were likely about to experience would scatter them under the seats, I gathered them up and handed them to him. He gazed at them like a handful of shirt buttons and promptly hurled them out onto the road... along with them, any legitimate claim to pride in a Scottish heritage, which will always ringing slightly hollow now. I've been mad, I've been frustrated, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a time I've been willing to throw three bucks in change out into the street. It's just not in me to do that.  :) Man, I'm not joking: it fleetingly crossed my mind to get out and claim the salvage rights! Of course, I'd still be standing there, hitching a ride, if I'd done that. :)

His pique didn't last long; he wasn't sore at me, just the situation. By the time we were on Hwy 50 and leaving Bolton behind he was already waxing eloquent on the merits of over-the-counter histamines. Hey, were else am I going to hear these things?

But it all ended in comedy anyway. Typically on our hikes we tend to leave our wallets in the glove compartment. Nothing to buy in the woods and no need for a driver's license; why risk losing them? So as I stepped out of the car at my building, having gathered my things, I gave myself a quick once-over to make sure I'd gotten everything. Felt the hollow place on my thigh where my wallet should be and shouted out just as he began to pull away. He stopped, I pointed to the glove compartment, and he hauled out my wallet with a grin. At least we got a laugh out of it.

Sunday I pretty much just sat around, picking out the photos I wanted for the collection and preparing and tagging them. That and buying $50 in groceries and some of the last sixes of Nickel Brook Green Apple Pilsner  the Liquor Control Board of Ontario is ever going to offer the people of this province for sale. Yup, their radar for figuring out what I like and then getting rid of it is stellar stealth-proof...

Everything old is new again

I had to look it up, but here’s what I know. I bought a second-hand PowerShot G9 early in January last year. Shortly afterwards, in fact, just a week short of a year ago, I sold my PowerShot S80, which I’d carried around for 20 months, to my friend P-Doug for, if memory serves me, $200. That spring, I threw in a spare battery, since he only had the one.

Ever since then, I’ve taken just shy of 10,000 still and moving images with the G9. I’ve dropped it at a basketball game, lost it at a dusky roadside (where it was apparently hit by a passing car) and then found it again after driving half way across the city, and taken it tubing down the Grand River, where its companion, an infrared-reconfigured PowerShot S70, was drenched and cost over $300 to repair. And for all that, I’ve found that I’ve missed the lightness, compactness, and ease of access and control the S80 furnished. And so every so often, I’d look around… eBay, Craigslist…

A couple of weeks ago, I found one being sold on eBay with a starting bid of $35 on it. It was broken – the lens had come open in the guy’s pocket and jammed, leading to the dreaded E18 error that plagues PowerShot cameras. I read up on it to find out what it would cost to repair it, and learned that in such cases, it’s often possible to gently work the lens assembly such that the gears pop back into alignment. So, I bid on it; $51, which raised the bid to $36. The day before the auction ended, someone bid $45, which boosted mine to $46. I decided to hedge my bets and raised my bid to $66. The day the auction ended, a Saturday around noon, I was sitting in the Bishop and the Belcher with P-Doug, keeping an eye on the auction using a wi-fi connection and my little Eee laptop (which I got free from my bank... remember when they used to give you toasters?), refreshing the page every few seconds. With seconds to go, some troll out there bid $52 – which ironically enough would have won it for him if I hadn’t previously raised my limit. In the last six seconds, he gambled I’d bid sixty bucks, and bid $61.05. That raised my bid to $62.05, and he didn’t have time to respond. Screw you, asshole. >:)P

So, for sixty-two bucks US, plus postage, I wrangled… a broken S80. It was a gamble. I hoped I’d be able to overcome the E18 error myself, but if not, I knew a place where I could get the work done. The question was, would it be worth doing? I’d already blown $300 on a camera in the summer I would never have bothered to fix if it weren’t reconditioned to shoot infrared. But, the fellow at the camera shop reckoned it could be fixed for “about $92”… weird number, but that’s what he said. So I felt like one way or the other, it would pay off.

Well, the S80 arrived today, and I started to gently work on the lens assembly. Within a couple of minutes, I heard the “click” while working on the innermost element. I put the battery from my G9 into it, and the S80 sucked the lens assembly back in and then extended it again, and I had a working S80 again. Oh, it sounds rough opening and closing, and I might want to see if there’s something cost-effective they can do about that, but the point is, I got a real bargain. So, after a year, I’m back in the saddle again with an S80.

I’m undecided, just yet, how to handle the issue of the cameras. I don’t hate the G9. It shoots RAW, it does voice recordings, it does better videos than the S80 without the high-pitched whine… but it’s big. Half again as big as the S80. The controls aren’t all gathered to be worked easily with your right thumb. So I’m not sure. I suggested to P-Doug, once I’d won the auction, that I thought maybe the G9 would be my “winter” camera – since I’m not carrying the S70 to shoot infrared much in the winter – and the S80 would be paired with the S70 (as it was in the summer of 2007) to be my “summer” camera(s). I guess we’ll see. Right now, I’m just jazzed to have an S80 again. I honestly don’t know why Canon axed them so quickly; they were only out about eight or nine months – or why they killed off the S line with the S80. An S90, that could shoot RAW (which the S70 can but S80 can’t) and maybe had a bigger, Digimarc III sensor, would have been a big hit, I think.

Run over by a train

P-Doug and I were exploring a railroad bridge about to be replaced a little while back, and while we were up on the tracks, we noticed a freight approaching slowly. We determined to film it passing over our cameras... his S80, and my already battle-scarred G9. We set them on adjacent ties, back to back; the G9 facing the train and the S80 down the track away from it. Between the two cameras, this is the view we got.

Lone and P’s Bogus Journey (especially Lone’s)

Oh, man, did I sort of catch a break last night. I mean, it was bad, but it could have been way worse.

If you scroll down a little, you should see a video presentation called Unsquare Toronto. I’ve been working on that for about a month. Time-lapse, it’s mostly made up of serial still images taken with my Rebel XT. A few segments are courtesy of my G9 (notably the ferry crossing to the downtown from the Islands, but also the colourful lights spinning and pulsing). I needed one thing to finish it… a sunset.

I’ve been planning this for ages. I picked the site, picked the angle, waited for a clear evening on a weekend. Last week’s forecast suggested it would all come together yesterday, Saturday night. P-Doug was good enough to agree to accompany me on this Quixotic quest and be my stop-watch wielding Panza. The idea was that every minute, we would take one frame. I wound up with about 43 frames I could use. Do the math; we were out there roughly an hour; longer if you count the time walking to and from.

I knew that sunset was at 5:48. After spending a long, enjoyable afternoon at The Bishop and Belcher, we took off about 4:30 to find a place to park and then set up. My intention was to set up on the sidewalk of one of the Richmond-Adelaide bridges over the DVP and shoot into the downtown core as the sun set behind the buildings.

Nothing much went right, I’m afraid. I got something ultimately passable, but not really as dramatic as I’d hoped or imagined. To be honest, we got there too late. We were plenty on time if you were just thinking about the sunset… the problem is, I wanted the sun setting into tall buildings, and that was going on around the time we were deciding to pull up stakes at the pub, not when we got to where we were setting up the tripod. So I had to be content with what I got.

Secondly, it turns out those bridges have no sidewalks, which would explain why they’re so bloody hard to get to in the first place. It took us about ten minutes of wandering around just to find our way to them. Then we were walking in the gutter as DVP-bound traffic soared past us at forty miles an hour. I didn’t say anything at the time but I was deeply grateful to P-Doug for coming along and putting up with the discomfort and the risk, and he never once bitched or acted like he was being put out. Later on I kidded him by suggesting that I imagined he’d had worse assignments (his background includes extensive work in photography in the darkroom and in the field), but not many.

We stood in a snowbank between the two streets in the fading light. By the time I set up, I could barely feel my fingers. The shoots I took were lopsided (I made a movie out of them as such, then rotated that, just the once, for the finished piece, rather than manually straightening 43 frames…). We were facing traffic, and one of our few amusements was to observe cars slowing down as they approached the two dark-coated figures on the hill with the tripod setup. Dozens of people must have assumed we were a speed trap. Who knows; maybe we inadvertently saved a life or two last night.

By the time I got set up, the sun had just dipped behind one of the tall buildings. I knew we’d see it on the other side, but not for long. I think I got about 8 frames with the sun actually in it. In truth, looking at the previews as the shots came up, I didn’t think we’d get anything usable, but as it usually turns out, the images you see on the computer screen tend to be more detailed and nuanced than the camera itself would have you believe. The few frames with the sun were actually pretty nice.

And so there we stood for nearly an hour as the sun set; P-Doug resetting the timer over and over, and me clicking the remote release in my pocket. Once the sun had set, a chill definitely settled on the hill; you could almost feel it change moment by moment. We packed up just about on the dot at six, and that’s where I made The Big Mistake.

P-Doug says, “three good runs between lights should have us on the other side”. We would run, the light would change and we would stand aside while the traffic flowed, then run, wait, then cross. This was the plan, and it worked pretty well. Except…

Earlier that day I had actually noticed that the plastic clasp on my fanny pack was getting bent in and no longer closed really securely. Why that didn’t immediately set off warning bells, I don’t know. What it amounted to at the time was, “better shop for a new one soon”. Yeah.

Somewhere on that first or second run, the goddamn thing gave way. And I didn’t notice. Can you believe that? Well, it’s true.

We got back to my car (P-Doug came to the B&B on the subway), packed up my gear in the trunk, and I drove P-Doug back to East York. The DVP was jammed, so I decided to head home up Don Mills Road.

Somewhere around the time I was crossing Eglinton Avenue, I reached down to my belt level for something. I’m not sure what. But I suddenly noticed I was skinnier than usual. Then I realized I wasn’t wearing the fanny pack.

Do you remember that scene in Pulp Fiction when Vincent realizes Mia’s dying from the heroin overdose and his panic ramps right up? Well, that was me. I pulled into the plaza where Swiss Chalet is and felt around for the fanny pack. Then I dove out, praying it was in the trunk with the rest of the stuff. No dice. And suddenly I’ve lost it all; someone else is the big winner. Yes, contestant, you’ve won:

• An Ericsson stainless steel Swiss Army knife
• A 256 MB CF card
• A 2 GB SD card
• A 1 GB data pen
• A geoposition-logging PhotoTrackr
• A cellphone
• A Canon G9 with a new 4 GB Sandisk Extreme III SDHC card

Fuck!! Months of my life earning the money, stuff I’ve come to depend on, lost! Gone! I thought I was going to puke right in the trunk.

And then, Mr. Logic, so rarely a friend to me, took pity on me. Putting his powerful hand lightly on my shoulder, he took me through it step by step.

Why isn’t the fanny pack on me?

Because it fell off.

Why did it fall off?

Remember you noticed the clasp was weak?

What would cause it break?

Well, just about anything, but a lot of serious movement would probably cause it.

When have I been in serious motion lately?

Running along Adelaide Street. That’s probably where it fell off. And here’s a bonus: there are no sidewalks on Adelaide Street there, remember? Therefore, it’s unlikely anyone will have just come along, seen it, and scooped up the big prize. So if you hustle your ass back there, you just might get everything back.

In the car. Right onto Don Mills. Left onto Eglinton. Down the DVP. Off at Richmond. Park on Sumach again. Scan the lot under the bridge. No. Watch the sidewalk on Eastern Avenue. No. Cross up to Adelaide. Cross the traffic. Is that a black lump a the side of the road? Run… run!! An SUV passes me and I’m just sure it’s going to crush the lump but it doesn’t. I get there, and yeah, it’s my fanny pack. It’s not squashed flat. I open up the compartment and pull out the G9 and turn it on and it comes to life. Jesus. Take a couple of shots; it still works. Cell phone… it comes up, finds a signal. PhotoTrackr… it comes on; that toffee-nosed Englishwoman’s voice tells me it’s looking for the satellites. It all works. I stand there in the snow with Mia saying “something” after she’s been injected in the heart with adrenaline (to completely my Pulp Fiction metaphor).

I’ve only had the G9 a little over a month but it’s already a battle-scarred vet. It got a small scratch on the display when I dropped it at a basketball game. Now it has a big scrape in the metal right beside the display, and some slight yellowish discolouration of the LED pixels at the bottom right, from the pressure of the impact… either my dropping it, or some tire kicking it aside. The fly-wheel was locked solid last night but will at least turn now, though not easily. It will function, but it will be a real pain in the ass to use. Fortunately, almost none of the features requires its use. I’m not happy it happened, but it sure could have been a lot worse if it had happened on nearly any other street in town, or if I hadn’t acted as decisively as I did.

As for the other things… the 256 MB card is slightly broken open at one corner, but amazingly it still works just fine (some of the photos you’re about to see come from it, in fact). I didn’t notice till I got home but it was actually sticking right through the leather of the pouch it was in like a bone from a compound fracture or something. The 1 GB USB memory pen must have been hit by something; it was bent and there’s a distinctive dent in it. But, it too still works. Most of the stuff is a little worse for wear, but they all still seem to be functional. Oh, man.

Looks okay from the front, at least...

Here's where it landed... or was scraped along the road by something passing by.

The scape, a practice photo, and a hint of the discolouration now in the LED at the bottom right of the display.

Damage to the USB pen memory. Incredibly, it seems to work just fine. The above photos were taken with my Nikon Coolpix 4300.

First image taken with the G9 after the incident. This is looking east up Adelaide towards the DVP overpass. The blur isn't due to a problem with the camera; it's just that it was very low light and I couldn't hold the camera absolutely steady.

Better light this morning. I didn't spend time getting the colour just right; this was shot RAW and the intention is just to show that the camera seems to be working fine, in spite of everything.

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Update

I should point out that P-Doug's participation in this escapade was undertaken with him in some discomfort. He was experiencing sciatica at the time, and might well have begged off. I was aware that he had had some back problems lately, but when he seemed all-go to help me out, I put it out of my mind. I feel badly that I didn't clue in when I noticed he was having trouble keeping up on the rise to the bridges (though in his favour I'll say he impressed me on the run back... y'know, where I lost my camera and all trying to catch up!). I can only imagine the pain he might have been going through standing there for an hour, but he never said a word about it. I guess he paid for it over the next several days. I don't want to play mama bird; I think it's condescending... but still, I ought to have been more empathetic, and I'm embarrassed that I didn't get it at all at the time.

Unsquare Toronto

HDR from a single RAW

Just lately I've discovered the joys of working with RAW image format in a big way. Previously, I didn't have much use for it, but Photomatix has come out with a new version that takes a RAW image, processes it itself, and creates what they call a "pseudo" HDR (high dynamic range, if you're new to this) image from the information in the RAW. (Again, if you're new to this, RAW is the generic term for any file generated by a digital camera that simply captures what the sensor received without processing it.)

I got into HDR stuff about two years back. Basically, it requires you take an AEB spread of at least three images; one underexposed, one overexposed, and one balanced. The detail in the highlights is in the underexposed, and the detail in the shadows is in the overexposed shot. Combine the three and you can an image with startling clarity. The trick is making sure the camera doesn't move during the three (or more) exposures.

One way around that is to shoot RAW. A RAW image typically has 12 to 14 bits of information per pixel, rather than just 8 for a single JPG image. There's also the added advantage that, since it's a single exposure, there's no need to worry about anything moving from shot to shot, or the camera tilting slightly (a tripod can address the latter only).

I haven't worked a lot with RAW for two reasons. Mostly, I couldn't think of a good application for it that justified the huge footprint of the file (usually twice or more the size of a JPG). But also because the vast majority of the photographic work I've done in the past two years was using my S80, and for reasons known to them alone, Canon dropped the RAW format from the PowerShot S line with that model (my S70 shoots RAW). For big treks I'd often bring my Rebel XT, and it, of course, shoots RAW (so it was the source of most of the material I've been experimenting with the past few days). But, again, I rarely shot RAW because there was little reason to... it just meant ages of processing just to see the image. But, now I'm carrying around a G9 that does shoot RAW, and Photomatix gives me a reason to, so I'm considering making RAW my default format rather than JPG.

When I started in HDR, the idea seemed to be to make something as garish and eye-catching as possible. But I can see now that the real treasure in the process is actually making something that's hyper-real, rather than something from a acid trip. Carefully done, an HDR image can look like something from real life, but at a glance can show you the details in highlights and shadows that you normally cannot see all at once. Your eyes would have to adjust to view either one, or the other. And so while the scene looks real, there's a slight, exhilarating otherworldliness to them in the, well, range of what you can see all at one time. Now to me, there's a real value in that, which is why I'm thinking of taking all my shots this way and processing the really interesting ones with Photomatix to show people the entirety of what was really there.

A few purists I've read have said you can't get a good HDR image out of a RAW. I beg to differ. I know from my own experience it doesn't work every time, but then again, neither does a three-image AEB spread either. In both cases, you seem to get the best results when there's a lot of light in the scene, or at the very least, a lot of contrast. But you can be the judge for yourself. The following are HDR images I've recently teased out of single RAW exposures.

O this fiery moment

I have two IR-reconditioned PowerShots (a G1 and an S70) that I've been using since March, 2006 and May, 2007 respectively to do most of my infrared work. But I also invested in a 58mm Hoya R72 infrared filter for my Rebel XT. My new G9 has an adapter that, fortuitously, is also 58mm threaded. I took this photo using the G9 and the R72.

I picked this photo to experiment on in Photoshop because it was reasonably clear. There's a custom white balance setting, but it didn't look like much till I swapped the red and blue channels, when it suddenly seemed to acquire some real life. It's a one-second exposure.

I think this is what the world looks like to you after you're dead.

Candle time lapse

Time lapse sunset

Ice-periment

Thought I'd test the time lapse capabilities of the G9 with something besides traffic. So... an ice cube doing its thing! Excitement reigns! Ah, but there's a twist. Also, retro music. :)

Creatures of night, brought to light!

3D pairs of images taken at the Royal Ontario Museum last Friday night.

It's the first time I've been able to see the dinosaurs. What amazed me wasn't so much that anyone could even imagine such creatures — that they were in fact real — or even that someone could place these skeletons here for us to see... no...

What amazes me, utterly amazes me, is the realization that every one of these skeletons was once a real, live animal; an individual being that breathed our air, walked around, saw the sun and felt the rain, ran and chased and fled, for years and years. And eons upon eons later, here they stand, reborn in a fashion, given a place of honour by a race of animals whose ancestors at the time were humble ratlike things hiding in their shadows.

It's all too remarkable for simple words to really convey.

Two Nights in a Toronto Hotel

Just like the name says. I've just spent two nights downtown on business, put up in one of the city's premier hotels. My second hand Canon PowerShot G9 arrived on Wednesday, just in time for the fun... enabling me to take several time lapse movies of the wonderful views to be seen from the hotel.

Music by the Canadian comedy team of MacLean & MacLean (rest in peace, Gary).

Weapon of choice

The Canon PowerShot G9... I've wanted this one since before it existed. I balked at the G7 because Canon was on a bent of removing RAW from anything below their DSLR range, and I already had the PowerShot S80, which had had RAW removed from it, though the S70 and S60 and likely others prior had featured it.

When Canon announced the G9 late last summer, I took notice. I saved up and started looking around for a deal, and I actually bought this one, used, yesterday from a professional photographer in Ottawa-Gatineau for about 75% what it would have cost me retail. It arrived today a little after noon hour.

Compared to the S80, it's larger and the controls can't be managed with just your right thumb. But it features the DIGIC III processor, a step up from the S80's, including face recognition and image stabilization. I've already noticed it's somewhat better in low light conditions than the S80. Added to that the images it captures are 50% larger, so there's more detail to work with. It also takes 58mm filters with the adapter I also got from the photographer, and I have several of those due to owning the 18-55mm lens that comes with the Rebel XT. So I'm looking forward to putting this one through its paces in the coming year or so. Hoping to use it at the Royal Ontario Museum this coming Friday night. Stay posted.