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.