Week 13: Monday 29th March, 2010

So this week's entry is a little late. A friend of mine is helping organize the Art for Aids fundraiser at Queen's, so I spent part of the weekend combing through my pictures for ones to donate to them. The final album is available here, and a link to the Art for Aids fundraiser is available here. For those in the Queen's/Kingston area, I highly recommend checking it out.

So a little background to this week's shot. One thing I used to do voraciously when I was a wee young whippersnapper was read. Reading for pleasure was replaced with "Sibley's Field Guide to Birds," "Ecology and Field Biology," "Animal Behaviour and Neuroethology," and my personal favourite, "Fundamentals of Biostatistics" which was a riveting and compelling story of the little p-value that could.

Anyhow. I've started to read more lately, but, like my taste in music, my taste in books is all over the place. So I laughed when I saw this on my bookshelf.



From left-right: Something Permanent (Walker Evans, Cynthia Rylant), Many Are Called (Walker Evans), The Defector (Daniel Silva), Lincoln Revisited (Harold Holzer), The Inferno of Dante (translation by Robert Pinsky), Stones into Schools (Greg Mortenson), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith), Moby Dick (Herman Melville). Between the 14th century Italian poety, 1930's photography, life lessons from the 16th U.S. President and the simple fact that "a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains," sometimes I wonder how I ended up with this eclectic collection of books.

Week 12: Sunday March 21st, 2010

This week's picture has no changes to it from the original picture - no changes in Lightroom, Picasa, Photoshop, nothing. I usually underexpose my pictures slightly (you know that little EV setting on your camera? I set than to about -2/3). Two reasons for this: 1) it is easier to increase exposure in post-processing than decrease it, and 2) it means the photos can be quicker (as it needs less time to let the light in). When I'm doing indoor/night shots, it is the difference between a crisp shot, and one that looks like it was taken through the bottom of a dirty glass.

Anyhow. Here is this week's shot:


As always, I welcome your comments :)

Week 11: Sunday, March 14th, 2010

So St Patrick's day is coming up, and the Irish Society of the National Capital Region (link) had a St Patty's day parade to celebrate. Lots of people were there, including Falun Dafa/Falun Gong, the Knights of Columbus, and, my personal favourite, Vaders Fist, the 501st Legion Canadian Garrison (link). Grown people dressing up as Tuskan Raiders, Stormtroopers and even Snowtroopers complete with random green paraphernalia. Good times all around - full album is available online here.

Technical info: I used the stock lens for this shot, as I was outdoors and so the fixed length of the faster f/1.8 became a bit of a liability. Canon XSi at ISO400, 1/400s, 43mm, and f/16.

Week 10: Sunday March 7th, 2010

This weeks shot was done as part of a contest at Gizmodo (link here). They do biweekly shooting challenges, and this week's was to do a shot with only a single candle for illumination. They've had some amazing shots up in the past, and it's always great to see what kinds of things people come up with.

Technical information: This was shot using a Canon XSi with the Canon 50 mm f/1.8 II lens at ISO 1600, f/14, 6.0 s exposure. I didn't use a tripod, since I don't own one, so I propped the camera on a book while I set up the picture (full manual focus, f-stop and exposure length), set a 2 second delay, hit the shutter and then let it do its thing. Special thanks to my sister for letting me borrow her jewelry for the shot. No post processing for this one beyond the conversion from CR2 to JPEG.