Nerd hat!

Been a long time since I posted anything here; going on for two months! Not much has occurred to me to say or even to write down so I can remember it later. Hey, it's winter. It's pretty much just get through the cold days and wait for things to warm up to start living again... :)

And with that in mind, several weeks ago, I was visiting a buddy I've known since we were kids. He's always had a flair for building useful little gadgets from scratch, and while we were in an unusual little hardware store in his neighbourhood, I hit him with a longstanding idea I've had for a hat camera mount. It suggested it only half-seriously, but he took it on. They were selling nondescript baseball caps for two bucks, so I grabbed three and we went home to his workroom. He'd pointed out earlier that he'd discovered that 1/4" wide rods with 20-to-the-inch threads are universal for camera mounts. Using bolts, nuts, and washers to those specs, he drilled a hole in the peak of one of the caps, and voila, the shutterbug nerd hat was born.

Here's what it looks like, unmounted, and with the IR-converted S80 on it. It also works with the HX5V I used to shoot these pictures.

I actually tried it out at my buddy's place... his wife was highly amused at the sight of me wandering around with a camera on my head. I imagine so will other people be this summer when they meet me on the trail. The idea is to video things with an almost human's eye view, while leaving my hands free for photography. Like I said, a nerd hat. :) And just for good measure, here's a quick vid I shot a while ago just to test it out with the weight of the S80... seemed manageable. The cats were unimpressed, unfortunately.

P.S. Excuse all the junk in the living room... they've been "working on" our balconies since sometime last summer... >:/

"Too stark"

As we wait for the subway to pull away, the bald man with the close-cropped beard is telling us all, through the woman he's technically solely addressing, that "Ansel Adams is this famous American photographer" and that "I really don't like his work. It's too stark." This is, apparently, in response to questions arising from the news on the front page of the free transit daily that 65 glass plate negatives have been authenticated as being from Adams's early career, long since considered lost in a fire, and valued at approximately $200 million dollars. All for 45 bucks ten years ago in a garage sale; about 70¢ a plate for things worth over $4 million each. I should be marvelling at the fickleness of fate, wondering at the artistic glories the world has recovered, thrilling to the acumen of the owner who has done both humanity and himself a great service. And I do. But mostly, above all, I can't help thinking that somewhere in the world there's a guy buying 45 dollars worth of shotgun shells with which to blow his brains out.

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...

The Photographer's Ephemeris

Last weekend I was at the library to photograph photographs by Ted Chirnside, an amateur who recorded much about the rural fringe of Metro in transition in the 1950s and 1960s, and then donated much of that to the city. A couple of the shots I was able to capture for myself purport to show the old narrow bridge that once carried Finch Avenue East over the East Don River just a little west of Leslie Street. I was delighted to find them because I know the place well.

(Incidentally, the above shots, today, look something like this.)

But when I was looking at them, a couple of things bothered me. First, the hill leading up from the bridge towards Leslie seemed away too abrupt. There's nothing like that there now. Even taking into account that the newer bridge is probably set higher from the river, it didn't jibe with me. But when I checked the single aerial photo I have of the area from the late 1950s, sure enough, there's steep incline suggested on the east end of the bridge, and a fence line that's visible on the crest in the shots. I'm at a loss to explain the difference in topography today, but there's no denying them's the facts. Things change. A few of the trees still give me pause, but I'm more convinced now than I was.

But the other contra-indicator, and this was a big one for me, was the shadow angles. They fall across Finch Avenue from the north side, which I considered impossible. The sun, I told myself, is always in the southern sky if you're north of the Tropic of Cancer, so the shadows can't fall southerly. Yet that's what I was seeing. Long sunset (or, I suppose, sunrise) shadows across Finch Avenue from the north. Impossible! The photographer, I mused, must have gotten confused over the years as to the location of which particular little tree-lined bridge (and there were dozens of them around northern Toronto and beyond) he was looking at.

But the more I thought about it, the more I started second-guessing myself. I remembered sunsets in the summer, and the angle of them over scenes I knew well, and it struck me that those angles might have been possible by very late in the day. But how could I check? I thought, there must be some resource on the net that will tell you the angle of sunset on a given day at a given latitude. So I went looking.

I found a fantastic new application called The Photographer's Ephemeris. It's freeware, and it runs on Adobe AIR (which is also freeware). It overlays rays showing sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset on a GoogleMaps map set to the location you choose, and is phenomenal for planning dramatic shots. If you know where you want to be standing and where you want to be looking, this thing can tell you down to the minute when you're going to see that. Apparently, with a little bit of work, it can even take the elevation of the horizon into account. This thing is wholly amazing! And it looks cool, too. :)

If you want to see the sun setting over SkyDome (sorry, "The Rogers Centre") from the shore of Algonquin Island, set your camera up just before 9 p.m. on June 17th. :)

Oh, and as for my "impossible" summertime shadows at the Finch Avenue bridge? Oh, yeah. They were possible, alright. Which means I'm cool to go ahead and shoot the "now" scene there with confidence. East Don River, here I come. :)

New camera, new hero

On a Tuesday not quite two weeks ago, I drove down to the Thornhill branch of Henry's, a Canadian camera chain, at lunch time to buy a Fat Gecko suction cup tripod for my car in anticipation of getting a FujiFilm FinePix 3D W1 camera in the spring. In the process of doing so, I noticed they already had a counter set up for the camera and a price for it ($699). I inquired and found out they'd already received their first shipment and blown through them on the first day. I put in for a pick of the next litter, and was told to expect the arrival in about two weeks. Despite the fact I've been trying to pay down my credit card, I was happy I'd left a few open spots on my dance card. The world's first commercial 3D digital camera doesn't come along every day.

As it turns out, my camera arrived the following Friday. I picked it up that evening.

I've been using it for the past week or so. The image quality is what I'd call passable. It's noisy, even at ISO 100. But I went into this with my eyes open. This is a new technology; basically, two cameras wedded together. For reasons I'll get into in a moment, I felt it was important to adopt this technology as soon as it was feasible, even if the output was marginal.

A couple of years ago, I started mulling over what I've come to call The Millennium Project. I started shooting digital images in February of 1997, well over ten years ago. I have something like 120,000 stills and videos now, even with the stuff I've lost from early on. Since one of my hobbies is comparing old photos of familiar places to what I know now, it's occurred to me that, if I start cataloging my efforts now, the things I've recorded might be of use and value to someone like me in the future. Since I started just before the turn of the century, well... "The Millennium Project".

Think of the advantages we have now. We have colour. We don't have to develop film, or print from negatives. We can adjust, clarify, and enhance our images digitally with an ease that would have astounded people just 20 years ago. Add to that now the ability to easily capture a scene in three dimensions on the fly. Yes, we've arrived at that point, if only just. I have that capacity. And I think in the future, that's going to be very important.

The Toronto Public Library has a many thousands of the Toronto Reference Library's images online, and they're searchable. Lately, they've updated the selection with a whole new raft of images; ones from the 1940s, and 50s, and beyond. These are often images right at the cusp of change in what's now the mid-range areas of town, which were back then the rural fringe. Hard to image now, but it was the case when people who are still working now were children. Some of the images have been truly remarkable to me, and one of the names that kept coming up, over and over and over, was James V. Salmon. His collection speaks to me like no one else's. It seems like nearly every place I've been in the past 15 years, he anticipated and got there first... and took a picture for me, and people like me.

I was interested in Pottery Road when they started building the Bayview Extension that relegated it to a dirt track through encroaching forest... he was there. I went looking at the abutments of lost bridges carrying Lawrence Avenue over the Don and Albion (Flindon) Road over the Humber, trying to imagine what they might have looked like... he was there. What did Eglinton look like at the gap over the Don Valley before they completed it in the late 50s?... he was there. On a map I spotted a long-lost bridge that once carried Bayview Avenue over the Don and went to photograph it in 2003... he was there in 1953. The TPL's online archives are awash with images that mark this man as my spiritual father. Black and white images of the environs of the city I love, wrestled out of film negatives, showing me things I was born too late to see.

James Victor Salmon was born in Toronto May 24, 1911. He lived here all his life. Married in 1942, father to two daughters, a designer for 30 years for Toronto's electrical distribution system, he died, apparently of cancer, on November 18, 1958, at the age of 47. He was an avid collector of photos of the city, and seems to have contributed myriad images of his own to that collection for about the last ten years of his life. That collection was donated to the city, for all of us to see.

I want to follow in this man's footsteps, carrying on the work he was forced to abandon all too soon, and walk the places and see the things he was not privileged to live to see. I also want to see for the people who are not born yet... to see for them the way James Salmon saw for me.

In the fringes of the city, now, as always, things are changing. Fast. I want to record that change. What was, what's becoming, what is to be. Today I can precisely geotag these images. Today I can record these scenes in three dimensions, and give people of the future — whose computational power will dwarf what's available to us today — the ability to precisely map and recreate the spacial relationships of objects. Who knows what they'll be able to do with the meager data we reserve for them today. But even if I just give someone like me, 20, 50, 100 years from now the same unimaginable thrill that James Salmon's work has given me, I'll be able to feel that I've paid him back somehow... the only way I can in a universe where time flows just one way.

So I dedicate The Millennium Project to those like me who follow... and, in gratitude, to James Salmon and the others like him, who came before me, and left me so much. At either ends of my life, I think of you both.

Where I want to go next...

Jim over at the stellar Down the Road blog has a fascination with photography, and in particular photographic technology, that always rejuvenates my wonder at the science behind the fun. He puts a spin on it that often emphasizes the history of the craft that's important to remember, and often intriguing, completely apart from the products that come out of such contraptions.

My own emphasis seems to be at the other end of the spectrum. :)

I consider myself a true early adopter of digital photography. I bought one of the first digital cameras available to the public, Kodak's DC25, for about $500 back in early 1997. It was awful, and I knew it. The pictures were way under a single megapixel (the word "megapixel" hadn't even entered the language yet), looked like they'd been shot through a Vaseline-smeared lens, and (the camera having no facility for expanding its memory) at best roughly a dozen "high quality" images could be stored at a time. The camera ate up expensive, non-rechargeable "N" batteries and had to be connected to the computer through the serial port to transfer images. I knew all that... but I loved it anyway. It was a digital camera! No more getting film developed, no more waiting around to see what worked and what didnt'! You took a shot and you could review it right away and if it was garbage, you could delete it... it was like getting back a frame of film, instantly. Aside from those bloody N batteries, once you'd paid for the system, taking pictures was essentially free, and the results were instantaneous. For me, that's when photography first became a viable hobby. And I knew the technology would get better over time.

And wow, did it. I honestly hadn't anticipated just how fast the technology would advance. I went through a few different models of Kodak point-and-shoots, none of them really quite a "real" camera in my mind, till we arrived at the 3-megapixel DC4800. To me, that was my first "real" digital camera. It was still a bit too bulky to carry around — still not a camera eligible for digital lomography (shooting from the hip; "don't think, just shoot"; "Kodak moment") — but as far as I could see, it could do anything a film P&S model could and give results every bit as good. I used that camera for years. I moved on to much more sophisiticated Canon models after that, which I still favour.

One of the things I most cherish about photography, though, is its ability to make the past real. In particular, I absolutely love looking at old photos of places familiar to me. I like to imagine what it would have been like to be there. Even better when I can recreate the shot today and compare and contrast them. The one thing I regret about all that is the limitations of the day. Photos taken before about 1965 are nearly always black and white. And the further back you go, the less detail the photos tend to depict. And in most cases, much before about 1890, photographically, you're out of luck. How I wish people back then had had something like the technology available to us now.

But even today I find the technology lacking in one respect: dimensionality. Even after all this time, we're still dealing with two-dimensional images that fail to adequately convey a sense of expanse, volume, placement in a physical space. I've had this idea of spending time just wandering around, shooting this and that around here, with the vague notion of cataloging it all and maybe one day handing it off to some repository where, someday, someone like me in the future will be able to look at what I saw and compare it with what he or she knows "today"... who knows. Digital photography is great for that, especially combined with geotagging, but it still falls flat where giving a sense of place in the world is concerned. For me, the last great hurdle is providing that third dimension... bringing it all together; colour, quality, and visceral depth.

And now it seems like we're at the threshold at last. Last year Fujifilm announced they'd be marketing a system to take and display (and even print) photographs in three dimensions, as well as to shoot 3D video, and to furnish photographers with a host of other interesting abilities that accrue from having two identical lenses in communication with each other in the same camera. And that camera is the FinePix Real 3D W1. Just as the Kodak DC25 was the camera I was waiting for to begin my hobby as a shutterbug, this camera is the one I've been waiting for to really start recording what it's like to be living in this time and place for people who could never see it otherwise.

Followers of this blog (both of you :) ) will know that I've been dabbling in makeshift 3D photography for two or three years now. One version of this attempt was a split lens for my Rebel XT, which gave good results in some aspects but had two drawbacks... one, the effective width of the shots was akin to shooting through an open door, and two, it relied on having the DSLR with me, which I had to plan for. The other version consisted of what P-Doug refers to as the "cha-cha" method; that is, taking one shot, shifting the camera, and taking another. This has been the method I've relied on most of the time and when it works, gives shots of fairly consistent quality. But the drawbacks here are legion: too large a paralax results in strange exaggerations of depth that must be akin to an acid flashback; some pairs, inexplicably, don't seem to "work" in a believable and satisfying way; and, most limiting of all, any movement whatsoever between the shots renders the pair essentially worthless. This has meant that the technique is effectively useless in any urban setting. There's no point trying to use this technique to show someone living in 2110 what the corner of Yonge and Dundas looked like in 2010. But now, with this camera, that's going to be possible. People walking, cars crossing intersections, even water leaping from fountains, will no longer represent impediments to recording a scene in three dimenions. If anything, they will only enhance the experience.

Some people have, not without reason, expressed reservations concerning the technology. The 3D formats are new, proprietary (which means they may not become universally or even widely usable), and technology-dependent (at least for the moment). These are valid objections, but they're not ones that concern me so long as the images and videos the 3D W1 takes can be exported as paired 2D files. It'll be nice having something in the new format (particularly for archival purposes), but so long as I can still combine two images the way I've been doing it for the past couple of years, that's all I'm worried about. I've gotten some pretty satisfying results from the cha-cha with the S80 and G9 (and even the infrared S70)... imagine how much better the results would be if the two images are simultaneously recorded, and exactly the right paralax.

Aside from shooting real 3D, the 3D W1 offers other intriging abilities: shooting colour and B&W at the same time, videoing and shooting still images of the same scene at the same time, and taking two simultaneous images to be stitched together into a single, extreme wide-angle shot. These are all things I've wanted to do in the past, and now they become possible.

The word is that this system (camera, viewer, and send-away printing) will be available in September for something in the neighbourhood of a thousand dollars US, which, at a guess, with the exchange and inevitable mark-up, will probably price it around $1200-1250 Canadian. This is something I'd really like to get my hands on. I haven't really wanted a particular system in this way since back in the days I was waiting for the first DSRL — a real real REAL digital camera — to make its debut. I want to put some money aside and get this thing and start really recording southern Ontario in all its spontaneity and full aspect. This is where I've wanted to go all along, and they've finally built me a road.

Red, white, and natural blue

Red, white, and natural blue, originally uploaded by Lone Primate.

I was at the mall the other day to buy a picture frame, and as I came out, I was greeted by the sight of the wind catching the 18' flag flying over the parking lot, trailing out into an absolutely clear blue sky. On a whim, I pulled out the G9, put it on continuous shooting, and shot about three dozen stills of the flag as it did its thing. I think this was the best of the lot. It took nearly no work in Photoshop to get it looking like this; this is nearly how it looked right out of the camera. I added the artsy border in PhotoScape, and posted it.

Best of all, I printed the shot, as treated here, with my new Canon inkjet printer, and the print I got was so beautiful it gave me pause. I couldn't believe I'd gotten such beautiful work out of an off-the-cuff shot and a $99 printer. Though I say it myself, I was struck by just how professional the final effect was.

I've always liked seeing our flag with strong blue. Originally, the flag was supposed to feature blue bars at either end, rather than red, as well as a sprig of three maple leaves (as in the bottom of the shield of the coat of arms)... the design was ridiculed by Red Ensign-favouring traditionalists as "the Pearson Penant", but it led directly to the design that was adopted at the end of 1964, that first flew officially on Feb. 15, 1965... which you see at the top of this post. That said, it wouldn't be my flag now if they changed it (and there are such proposals). It is what it is; I grew up with it the way it is and I wouldn't change a thing. But I wouldn't mind much, either, if we had adopted a flag with blue on one bar, or both, I guess.

Forests: home and away...

Last week the forecast led me to believe that the weather on Saturday would be warm and damp, very much like the first time I visited Kirby Road around Labour Day a year and a half ago. I had a really nice hike there that first time. I like overcast weather, the drizzle made the desurfaced road and forest a pleasure to walk on, and the place wasn't crawling with other hikers. For a while it was as though I was the only person in the world, free to "discover" the abandoned bridge there over the Humber.

P-Doug has been there with me before, but never from the heights on the east side, which was the way I approached when Bassmentbeats sent me there that first time. I suggested the trip and, uncharacteristically, he rather willingly agreed to make the hike in what promised to be rainy weather. As it turned out, it made for some extremely moody skies that he hoped would yield good HDR results (stay posted). Personally, I think some of our best hikes have been taken on days with dramatic weather, particularly in terms of photography; and now that he's carrying the S80 around lumographically he might be becoming more amenable to more extreme conditions, at least in the temperate months.

We got a late start, heading out around 10:30 or so, but we made really good time getting there and were climbing out of the car a bit after 11, which was a faster journey than my first trip (I must have taken the back roads that time; this time it was 401-427-Hwy 27). I brought my sandals with me in my backpack but managed not to need them at all the three or so hours we wandered around, which was my intention. I was only disappointed that the weather wasn't as advertised and the ground wasn't as giving and luxurious in textures as I had hoped. But there was still grasses, sand, mud, wildflowers, tilled soil, gravel, pine needles, boulders, cement, steel plates, concrete, water... Plenty to experience while moving along.

One of the first places we came to that really caught his attention, something I had utterly forgotten despite having been there twice before, was the first big curve in Kirby Road where it has to divert north to avoid the relentless plunge to the river. From there, we could see a huge mansion perched high over Huntingdon Road on the far side of the valley. It has had, and will continue to enjoy, an enviable view of the flood plain for the foreseeable future.

Not long after that we started encountering the hillside wrecks I'd noticed in previous trips. I don't know if people were actually in these cars when they went over the side, or if people were just using the cliff to dispose of old junkers, but they certainly make for some interesting kinetic free verse poetry; a kind of three dimensional graffiti sprawled and scrawled across the face of a cliff, where they will likely reside for generations. From the look, they've all been there at least since the 1980s. At one point, P-Doug spotted a cluster that looks like three cars that have been down there probably since the moon landings. Tall trees have since grown up in the path that they would have had to have tumbled through on their way down.

Soon we came to the place I'd been interested in showing him: the landslide that had torn about thirty yards out of the road some years back and caused it to be closed to traffic, if it wasn't already (I have no idea when this stretch of Kirby was actually "stopped up", as it's termed on municipal documents). He hadn't seen it when we'd been there before; we'd never really gotten beyond the wrecked truck at the other end. This time, we were high above the river, leaving the path along the lip and slipping down into the sloping roadway that once brought cars and trucks up and down the valley, like a ramp along a steep shelf. It's been totally torn out, leaving a spectacular view but not much of a drive to speak of anymore. While we were there, we saw a man and two boys approach from the other end of the washout. They lingered for a while and even discussed trying to cross along the ragged edge of the washout, but eventually (and wisely) thought better of it and made the same steep climb up the forested face of the hillside I did the first time I was there. We heard them travel along the crest for a few moments, and then were lost in the fields above us. We doubled back and returned to the path.

P-Doug had the inspiration to leave the path again after a few moments and seek the open space created by the landslide. Doing so had never occurred to me. I followed him and we got some really nice shots of the valley.

It didn't rain that day; not to speak of, anyway; so the path down the trail through the woods, while steep, was nothing like the adventure it was for me that first time I was there. It didn't have the character of making my way down hot fudge topping; it was still fairly dry and not slippery. On the whole, I suppose that's good because it's never fun to slip and fall, or feel constantly in danger of doing so, but at the same time, I missed the sensual experience of it that I was hoping to recapture.

For me, the low point of the journey is always the flood plain at the bottom. There's nothing much to see, and the road gets gravelly. I can handle gravel now, but it's still not my favourite thing to walk on. It's at best a transition from one pleasant surface to another. P-Doug, though, was rather taken by the field at the bottom. It had been freshly turned, and he had noticed tractor tracks along the trail down the hillside (which he had initially mistaken for ATV tracks), and marveled at the effort it must have taken to get the equipment either into or out of the valley up the trail, given that it's barely six feet wide. His assumption was that it was a farmer's field, likely to be sewn with corn or perhaps wheat. He headed out into the field but I didn't follow him for a couple of reasons. One is that I just couldn't muster the interest. More importantly, it was strewn with last year's chunks of cellulose-rich stalk remnants. I've learned to walk on a lot of things but I know that this stuff has edges like razor blades if you step on it the wrong way, and you can carry chunks of it around in your sole for a season if it gets into the skin. So, I left him to the field and undertook exploring the river side of the road.

I wanted to see how close the river was to the road on the north side. There's a little band of trees on that side and a bit of a drop, and at the bottom it was a little marshy. I skirted the outside of the pool and made my way into the field, but it was hard for me to tell just how far the river was from me, and I didn't want to get separated from P-Doug for too long, so I meandered a bit, never made it to the river, and started back. I ended up face to face with a much wider stretch of the pool at the base of a steeper climb. But, I was dressed for it, so I decided to take it on. The water was cool, its floor was firm, and while it was nearly knee-deep by the time I crossed it, it was never really treacherous. I stopped to take an AEB spread of it on the other side to generate an HDR shot of the striking reflections later.
I climbed up the slope and got back to the road, didn't see P-Doug right handy, so I started heading for the bridge. He met me coming back from it, having already been there and to the river. We went to the bridge, passing the spot where the wrecked truck used to be, and I noticed that from there, I could see the bridge this time. When I was there the first time, the overgrowth was such that the bridge was still obscured from my view. Early in spring, you see more.

The bridge seems to have deteriorated, especially in the guard rails on the west side. I might be wrong, but it seems more broken down than I remember. I still haven't looked through my old shots to see if I'm right. I went under the bridge, stepped into the Humber, which was abruptly deep and quite cold, and noticed that the graffiti this year is quite a bit less interesting than last year. We didn't stay too long at the bridge before heading back. Around the time we reached the old truck spot, I heard voices, and behind us, the man and the two boys emerged from the woods, crossed the bridge, and headed up to Huntingdon Road. They'd done the trip in reverse to us.

When we got to the base of Kirby's course up the hillside, P-Doug was interested in taking it, but I remembered it being a walk of several minutes that takes you only about 2/3 of the way up. He wanted to see the washout from the west side, and while I was okay with doing that, I had to let him know that at that point, you have two choices: climbing all the way back down to where we were standing already, or else climbing into the woods, something that literally requires going on all fours... it's that steep. I wasn't keen on either, having already done that twice, and since he'd already seen the washout from the other side, he decided to forgo the view. We headed up the trail the way we'd come down.

At the top, we veered left and followed another trail along the lip of the valley. It carried us past stands of pines planted in rows long ago... P-Doug reckoned about 35 years ago. He pointed out a massive lone pine, and I might have overlooked it on my own, but having it pointed out to me made it somehow worth shooting. I think it was probably one of my best shots of the day.

We followed the path along through a muddy spot where the road turned to the east along the top of the grove. I love walking on fallen pine needles... you'd think they'd be sharp, but lying flat, they're as soft as a carpet. We made our way in to where some of the pines had failed and left a glade. I noticed the ground was furrowed, just like in the field in the flood plain, and I remembered I'd noticed new pines planted across the river in the hellish field I'd spent a couple of joyless hours in during my second visit. I put it all together and decided that that's probably what they intended for the flood plain. Thirty-five years from now, that open field will probably be a thick, linear grove of pines, holding the line on the river. I sat down on one of the raised sections and relaxed, lying back on a bedding of soft pine needles. The air was perfect. The temperature was ideal: it wasn't cool or warm; it neither chilled me nor made me sweat. The sky was moody and the air was stirring, but it was in the tree tops. It barely seemed to brush over my skin. We were there for about half an hour and I was so plugged into it, I think I may have dozed off at one point. It was really special. That kind of communing is the reason I love to get out in the bush, and I'm so grateful there's still so much of it around here, even these days.

Time was wasting and I didn't want to leaving P-Doug sitting around too long, since we both wanted to get back to The Crow's Nest. About twenty after two we got moving again, and made our way back to the car fairly directly. At The Crow's Nest, a guy pulled up in a strange three-wheeled motorcycle. From the front, it made me think, "ah, so this is what Crow T. Robot's been up to since MST3K wrapped up..." We had a couple of pints and P-Doug paid for lunch (shaved beef on bread stick and a side salad for me; perogies for him) since I was to do his bidding on the morrow...

Tomorrow Never Mows

So that was Saturday. Sunday was about yard work at his place. As agreed, he called me about quarter after ten on his way out to Home Depot, and I arrived at his place about an hour later, at which point we started bagging the leaves from his front yard and the side of the house. It was the back yard that was going to be the big task. G, P-Doug's missus, had lunch on her mind so we all headed off around one or so to Boston Pizza. G had some sort of meat sandwich, and P-Doug and I ended up having the same thing, chicken cannelloni, and they were pretty good. Again, he paid.

Then came the hard part. All the saplings in the back yard! P-Doug came out with two saws, and also what looked like a huge pair of hand trimmers that you'd use to trim bushes. This thing turned out to be our salvation. In about four hours, we cut down fifty or sixty saplings, cut them up, and filled up between fifteen and twenty bags with the refuse. And never once did we resort to the saws. It was cutting through 2" green wood with almost no effort at all; I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it, even done it. I'd say it was about the best thirty bucks he's spent all year, and he'd probably agree. I didn't bring my camera; I didn't think there'd be much reason to; but I wish I had and could show you a before and after view. This tool quickly rendered that back yard very different.

Sunday was capped with Satay On the Road, where we had golden baskets (a first for me), curried chicken with potatoes, and a spicy beef dish, all over rice. After that, a quick zip to Dairy Queen for cones. I dropped off a movie for them on my way home, and that was the weekend. Felt like three or four days, but in a good way. Very full. I didn't sit around wasting my time. I like weekends like that.