Avalon Photographers

On the 28 I went out to Stiles cove with my parents and brothers on a photographing Mission. It was a nice crist sunny day with great light on the clifs. 

Another HDR experiment

This is a HDR merge of 17 images, probably rather more images than I need, but I am still experimenting.
I was hoping to get enough dynamic range to expose correctly got the bright sky and the dark shaddows under the sheds.

The sky came out very noisy again and I think the camer amay have moved a bit because ther eare some weird effects on the legs of the shed. 

CarPark HDR

Another bash at HDR, here I took a set of 10 images ranging from 1/30 to 40 seconds, was going to do more but it was clod and snowing. The was a lot of contrast in the scene, from the flurescent lights to the shaddows by the walls, this processing seems to have worked fairly well, even if the subject is rather boring. 

HDR-Tone mapping Experiment

I have been messing about with HRD images for a while now and have not had much sucess, I usually produce images that have a uniform flat dullness, not the vibrant colours and interesting lighting effects that I have seen on the web.
Here is today's effort, probably my best yet, still not quite there.
This image was created from 3 camera RAW images with different EVs, one for the brightest parts of the sky, one for the bottoms of the trees and one in the middle. I merged to HRD then tone mapped and compressed with FDRtools (the most basic and crappy looking HDR software I have used) It is actually a DOS application with a very basic GUI.
I think I could improve on this image by taking 5 images covering an even wider range of EVs. There is also more I could do in FDRtools to reduce the glow around the trees, and If I paid for it I wouldn't get the magenta crosshairs (which I have managed to mostly desaturate in photoshop)
I think this technique has some potential for me, but I have a way to go yet. 

Eaton Centre

My host took me on a tour of Toront yesterday, this is a view of the Eaton centre with a very large, perfectly conical plastic christmas tree. The Mall was very busy, with line to get into some of the shops, we didn't stay there long. 

Tom's Image Blog

Where am I staying?
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&om=1&z=18&ll=43.800294,-79.705521&spn=0.001978,0.004978&t=h

Well if that link worsk you should see a larg house in the centre of the image, that is where I am staying while working in the crone office.

Where am I working? http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&om=1&z=18&ll=43.57556,-79.652156&spn=0.001986,0.004978&t=h

and If this link works you should be able to see the Crone office and yard, just North west of the yellow busses.

Playing with google maps

Where am I staying? http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&om=1&z=18&ll=43.800294,-79.705521&spn=0.001978,0.004978&t=h

Well if that link worsk you should see a larg house in the centre of the image, that is where I am staying while working in the crone office.

Where am I working? http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&om=1&z=18&ll=43.57556,-79.652156&spn=0.001986,0.004978&t=h

and If this link works you should be able to see the Crone office and yard, just North west of the yellow busses.

arrived

Arrived at the crone office today.

Red or Yellow!

Rainy day, so I am sessing around trying to make interesting boring photos. It is amazingly difficlut to photograph a shiny metal pipe like this without getting any hot spots. I think I have got it now. I 'll try a few more then see what Istock have to say. 

Made it!

Finally, home at last. Got in last night at about 6:20pm

3 planes comming

They have chartered 3 planes to get us home, I should be leaving this afternoon, weather permitting.

Stuck in Raglan

We were supost to leave today, the weather was perfect, the plane came in, but had a problem with the landing gear and had to go to toronto for servicing and they could not carry passangers. Hopefully it will be fixed by tomorrow, or they will charter a plane to get us home.

Aurora over Donnaldson Shaft

Pretty impressive Aurora last night, didn't last long tho. The weather took a turn for the worst and they were soon hidden behind viscious blowing snow, which is still on the go now. 

Drills in zone 5-8

This is where I spent most of wednesday night. We surveyed the hole drilled by the drill in the foreground, unfortunatly we had to do it in 3 sections because the rock was unstable. doing a hole in sections is a slow job, the drillers pull the rods up so the bit is just below a bad area of rock, the rods keep the unstable rock from falling into the hole, blocking it. We lower out probe down the rods, through the bit and into the rock where we do out survey. When we have finished the first section the drillers pull the rods up to the next section of bad rock and we start all over again and survey down to where we started the first time. We have 4 probes we put down the hole, the first is a dummy that we use to check that the hole is not obstructed and is safe for our other probes, the Z, the XY and the IFG probe. it is a lot of up and down. 

Crazy Frost!

Another walk behind the camp, here you see the frost build up on the tops of some grass sticking through the snow. This frost grows on almost everything outside, and the hightr above ground the more frost, so the VHF radio repeater antennas are looking very strange, probably over a foot of frost in some places. 

Fog Bow?

While setting up for our survey yesterday the sun was shining through the ice fog and illuminating this arc in the sky. There were two, one below the other, but as my story usually goes, by the time I got my camera out I missed it. I managed to capture the lingering single arc. Note the length of the shaddows, this was shot at about 2pm, so the sun is really starting to get low, it always looks like early morning. 

Under The deck

This little chap was peeping out from under the deck behind the kitchen. Probably waiting for a snack to fall from above. 

Fox b/w

I took this photo the same time as the other fox photo, but hadn't bloged it, 'cos I had hoped to get a better closeup, but I have not had the opportunity. I thought you might like to see this little guy, so here he is. This image was very grainy and I could not seem to get the colours to look right, so I gave up and desaturated it. 

2 generations of frost

When it is foggy here frost grows on everything abd can get quite thick. Here there are two generations of frost. The first has recrystalized to form clear ice, the second is still white. 

3 Foxes

I went and waved the camera about before heading out to work today. These 3 arctic foxes were having a meeting on a frozen pond behind the camp here. 

Northern Lights and a drill

The northern lights were anazing last night, of course getting the camera out had the usual effect and they didn't return to their full intencity untill my battery was flat.  

The Crone Shack

Here is a view of the Crone shack, where we repair, clean and store our equitpment. The rather large snow drift has blocked the door, so some digging will be required as soon as the storm moves away. This was shot at 1600 ISO, because I didn't want to stand out in that weather any longer than I had to. Well actually it was getting dark, any way it has made for a rather grainy image. 

Still snowing!

Here is a shot of the core chack during today's storm. It was taken just as it was getting dark, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO, hence the grainy quality. 

Another blizzard!

Well yesterday was nice, clear sky and not much wind. We got out and pulled the loop wire out of the snow where it was frozen in below a crust. Hopefully we will not get any more rain and the wire will not freez in again, so the wire will be easy to pull when it comes time to pick it up. today we are are stuck in camp again as the weather has taken a turn for the worse. there was snow over night, it might still be snowing, abd the wind must be 80 - 100 km/h, so it is not nice out there. Time for me to get some paperwork done.

At last, we had a hole to survey!

Last night We had our first hole to survey, after a week of waiting. Unfortunatly they were not ready for us untill 0130 this morning. It was an all nighter! we didn't finish untill about 1000 this morning.
Firtunatly it all went fairly smoothly, the Generator only froze up once, I just had to chip some ice off from around the carboretta and it worked fine. The hadest part was staying awake. I kept falling asleep between readings, as did charlie, my helper.

Welcome back to Raglan!

Here is a view of donnaldson camp, my home for the next 4 weeks. All that snow is fresh, mostly since we arrived. After th eplant touched down the weather closed in, so the guys leaving were not able to. so there are over 100 people in a camp built for about 50.
The road out of the camp is closed, so the drillers can't go out and neither can we, so there is 100 of us all stuck in camp with nothing to do. 

Welcome Back to Raglan!

A flash photo of the snow! 

Iqaluit

Here is Iqaluit, well part of it, from the air. 

Iqaluit

Just to prove I was there. This is the sign on the side of the control tower at Iqaluit airport.

A long day!

Well, I was supost to leave St. John's yesterday and overnight in Montreal to catch the 8:30 flight up to Raglan. However, due to a hurricane warning the flight was canclled (as was the hurricane). I had t ogo stand-by on the 6am flight to arrive in montreal at 7:10 am. Fortunatly I made it. The raglan flight leaves Montreal and stops at Rouan-Noranda where our luggage is searched for drugs and alcohol, than it is supost to be off to Raglan. So we were about to touch down In Raglan, about 100m above the runway and the pilot pulled back up. The weather was too bad, he couldn't land, so we headed for the nearest airport where the 737 could land, Iqaluit, Nunavut. We refuled and waited there for the weather report from Raglan. Apparently the storm cleared, so we all got back on the plane had headed back to Raglan, where we approached the runway to about 100m and pulled up again, apparently the weather got bad again just before we arrived, so we went back to Iqaluit and refueled again before heading back to Rouan-Noranda for the night.

Cranberries

Went to flat rock for a climb with Michelle and Lewis today. After climbing we went looking for cranberries further out on the beamer. We found a little ledge at the top of the cliff where there were loads of cranberries, so we spent about an hour picking. 

Bob

Bob, searching for the next good hold. This route is fairly unusual for flat rock in that it does have a number of nice big holds. It is a fun climb, I'd like to lead it on trad... one day.

Top Belay

J belaying Bob from the top of the route. J is attached to a rock bolt behing him.

note the gear placed in the cracks below J. 

Perfect day

Leaving for Raglan on monday, so the weather today was too good to miss. J, Bob, and I spent the day at flat rock. Here J is climbing a trad route (placing cams, and nuts to clip into to arrest a fall). once he topped out he set up a top anchor and belayed for Bob and I as we climbed up to meet him. 

Michelle's Tomatoes

Bumper crop of Tomatoes this year, We picked this lot, and more, green because they had pulled the plants down to the ground and were in danger of getting eaten by slugs. Some have been made into green tomato chutney, some are hanging in the kitchen ripening and I tried making fried green tomatoes with some.