Hiatus is over

I finally got a job...I'll be joining a couple of my friends at a place called Multimatic in Markham, Ontario.

I'll be working in the design department designing hinges for cars...doesn't sound too exciting, but there's a lot involved in designing door/trunk/hood hinges. It should be a really good learning experience for me...I'll be working with other engineers and being supervised by more experience engineers. It's a really good change from where I was working before I decided to go on my career break.

It's all happening pretty quick...I start on Monday on training for Catia for week and then get at 'er the following Monday.

I'll be busy hunting for an apartment or some sort of accomodation. I had a quick look and the prices seem ridiculous for some of the places I see. I wasn't a big fan of living in the big metropolis before, but I didn't exactly live in the best neighbourhood either. I'll have to find a balance between rent and location and hopefully find a place that'll be a good value.

The photography stuff will obviously be on hold for a little while...

Around Fort Erie

I had a few developed B&W rolls lying around of pictures of around Fort Erie. I decided to scan some of them in and try touching them up through GIMP.

I basically played with the levels and tried to increase/decrease contrasting. I also tried a few things with masking techniques. Here are a few...

One of the statues at the entrance of the actual fort:


The Peace Bridge at night:


NCC...A few of my friends here went to high school there. We used to play basketball their gym:


This place is now closed...but the sign is still there:


Mather Arch...


Monochrome photography is a challenge. Colour helps a lot in terms of composing a picture, but when you're shooting black and white colour isn't much of a factor. You have to see the scene in terms of shades, contrast, and intensity. I have two bulk rolls of Kodak Tri-X to go through. That's plenty of film and I should improve over the long run. A quality film scanner is at the top of my shopping list though...trying to compensate for poor scans using photoshop techniques is a pain.

Photo Retouching

I've been going through my pictures trying to pick out the best one for organizing some kind of album...one that I could print out or post on the web...or both. I kept looking at some pictures and thinking that their compositions were great, but they lack some pop.

So I did a little digging around for GIMP tutorials and saw a couple useful ones on Gimparoo: basic photo retouching and contrast masking.

The results are pretty good. The techniques don't work with all pictures...for some, the original looks better than the modified one. For others though, the originals look flat in comparison. Overall, the tutorials were very useful and really improved the look of some pictures. Here are a couple of examples:

Original:



Retouched:




Original:




Retouched:




In both cases, the retouching has a vast improvement on the picture. The colours pop more in both and they seem a little more interesting. Some of the background detail sticks out a little more.

I don't want to go through and retouch 3500 pictures, but I will retouch the ones I pick for the albums.

British Navy personnel held in Iran: FInal Note

After watching the press conference and hearing what the British Navy personnel held in Iran had to say, it's pretty sad to hear what they went through. The solitary confinement and not knowing if your crew mates are still there or not must have been pretty tough.

At they same time, I can't help thinking about the pictures of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and what the American soldiers did to those Iraqi prisoners.

Neither scenario seems humane at all...very cruel. I can't grasp how someone can treat another person like that. History is filled with stories like these though...and there will be many more stories about people being imprisoned and maltreated. It's all part of a bigger chess game...

Nikon Small World

Just ran across the Nikon Small World gallery. It seems like some labratory science people got creative with some cool lighting.

The pictures are cool to browse through...some of them are really neat. I wonder if you can do the same thing at home with a microscope rig...obviously, you'd need some interesting subjects too.

British Navy people released

CBC news article here. It seems the Iranians got what they wanted and agreed to release the captured British Navy people...with the usual rhetoric as well.

From the picture in the article, it looks like the boys got some brand new Iranian suits. It's also evidence that Iran has a ways to go in terms of equality for women. The lone woman in the group got some pretty shabby clothes.

The truth of what really happened here will never be know to the general public, but, to me anyways, it looks like Iran played this smart and got the better of the British and the Americans.

As far as repercussions go, I don't think much will happen here. Already mired in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, I don't think the British or American public has the appetite for another war...I don't think their governments will have enough money for a war with Iran anyways.

For a better analysis of the subject, read the PINR report here.

British Navy people held in Iran

If you're watching the news and puzzled by the whole issue of British Navy people arrested by Iran, there a side of the story that's not so readily available on the mainstream news channels.

If you're of the belief that Iran is run by a bunch of crazy radical muslims who hate everything not muslim, then the news makes total sense to you...the Iranians are crazy and the west should invade their country asap and get rid of them.

However, if you understand that Iran isn't run by a bunch of crazy people...at least not any more crazy than the people running the US...and that an unprovoked action by Iran against the US is incredibly risky, then a less risky, albeit seemingly uprovoked, action against a more level headed ally of the US seems like a calculated move. There must be a good reason for why Iran took the British Navy people.

Here's one explanation that I haven't seen on the tv news over the last couple of weeks. There are other news stories about Iranian diplomats being arrested/abducted/kidnapped...read about one here and here.

An Iranian diplomat was released today in Iraq...news releases are not very detailed but you can see them here and here.

Don't be surprised if more Iranian diplomats are released and the British people are released over the next couple of weeks.

There's no doubt that Iran has operatives, or 'diplomats', working in Iran...they'd be stupid not to have anyone there. It seems that this whole standoff is about getting those people back. The Iranians seem pretty shrewd here. Abducting US forces would have been difficult practically and, politically, would have provoked a lot more rhetoric about being a threat to the skittish American public. Abducting British forces avoids a potential military conflict and deals with Blair, a British politician already getting a lot of heat from the British public about being in a military conflict.

Using the British to get the US to release the Iranian people rather than trying to deal with the people who are itching to invade Iran doesn't seem so crazy.

Hybrid Car from 1969 !

I was digging around the web looking for stuff about electric cars in terms of motors, battery technology, and other general info. I came across this site about a hybrid car from 1969 !

I've already watched "Who Killed the Electric Car" and knew about GM's EV1 car. The whole issue is still puzzling as to why the car was discontinued, but know finding out that a plug-in hybrid car was developed almost 40 years ago is troubling.

With hybrid cars only now being produced by car manufacturers, one can't help but wonder what 40 years of production and development would have produced. Would big city smog be as bad as it is now ? Would the demand for oil be as high as it is now?

In any case, have a look at the Tesla Roadster for an interesting electric car.

There are tons of sites out there about building your own electric car. You can start here, here, here, and here.

Interested in racing your EV ? Have a look here.

I like this idea...probably has lots of appeal for students and big city residents. Not really practical in the Canadian winter though.

It seems like our government could be a little more agressive in giving car companies more incentives to produce hybrids and electric cars. They could set up a contest scenario like what Richard Branson does and the X Prize. You think a struggling car company like GM would benefit from a 2-year tax free status from being the first company offering a production electric vehicle with a 300km range per charge ?

Tech News

A couple of interesting articles from the cbc site...

The first is an article about linux from one of the regular contributors of the technology news section. He talks about Ubuntu and linux in general.

The other article is about some amazing new technology...think Star Wars holographic projections. Pretty wild...

CBC Test the Nation

The CBC's got a game show on these days about the IQ level of canadians in general. The show's called Test the Nation.

I took the this week's test for the fun of it. Here's my result:



50% on math and logic. Hmmm...maybe engineering wasn't the best career choice.

Web Design

Over the last couple of weeks or so, I've been busy designing a website for my friend Michele. She took a cake baking/decorating course a while ago and has been making cakes for people as a hobby/side job.

She does a really nice job and the cakes look better in person than in pictures. Have a look at the site and let me know what you think of it:

http://www.sweetnuniquecakes.com

It was a good learning experience for me. I've definitely enhanced my html programming skills and learned some javascript along the way.

Here are some really good resources for learning, if you're interested:

http://www.w3schools.com
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/myfirstsite/basicwebdesign.html
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/campus/1924/

I was working in linux for the most part and used the Quanta Plus web development software. It was good for the most part. Any text editor in linux also doubles as an html editor as well, so there's no real need to use specialized software. However, Bluefish is also an excellent package to use.

For windows users, I did some research and am telling people to use Alleycode. It's fairly simple and has all the features you really need.

Anyways, as I was finishing up the website, it dawned on me that this would be a good format for a web album. I may develop a template for a web album, but it's easy enough to replicate.

Incidentally, in doing research for the project, I came across some neat sites:

Dynamic Drive
Hoverbox

There are lots of internet resources for web design and it's not that hard at all. It just takes a little time and patience to learn it.

David Burnett

I first found out about David Burnett when looking through a National Geographic issue on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He had these pictures that seemed to have selective focus and the pictures made everything look miniature. I did some digging around and found out he uses an camera view camera called the Graflex Speed Graphic that uses 4x5 negative sheets.

Have a look at a lot of his neat pictures here. The NY Times also has a little write up on him. The audio slideshow on the left of the page has a picture of him carrying all his gear...it's crazy how he manages to steady himself for a shot with all that gear !

Linux and Digital Photo Management

I started using linux about a year ago and slowly began moving over from using Windows software. If you don't know anything about linux, have a look at this intro from IBM and check out the Distrowatch site for the range of linux "flavours".

Basically, linux is an operating system that's designed to function like Unix but run on consumer PC hardware. It picked up speed in the early 1990's when a software developer named Linus Torvalds came up with the Linux Kernel. The same people who developed the original web browser that eventually became Netscape also got involved and the anti-windows movement began as software geeks began to hate paying high pricess for the microsoft software. You can read about it here and/or watch a movie called "Revolution OS" that talks about the whole story (it isn't all that exciting to watch, but is informative if you like documentaries).

Incidentally, Apple's Mac OS X is based on a similar unix-like operating system called Darwin, which based on something called FreeBSD.

Anyways, the big deal about linux is that it is open source and free. Almost all the distributions on distrowatch are completely free and are readily available for download. Some distros have bootable live cds which you can use to try out the software on your computer without installing anything. It runs from the cd/dvd drive and loads into your RAM memory and leaves your hard drive untouched. After you're done with it you can run your computer as usual. They run on both pc and apple hardware. Viruses aren't much of a problem either since the operating system is more secure in general and the there isn't much of an anti-linux cult of hackers out there tying to bring down a massive corporation.

It's a big topic and I don't want to get into it too much, but there are also different desktop environments like KDE, Gnome, and XFCE. You can read about them yourselves...just google them and you'll get their websites. Have a look at screenshots here, here, and here. I used to use Gnome, but switch to KDE because it seemd to run better to me. XFCE runs well on old machines that used to run Windows 98...I have it running on an old Pentium laptop that I use for web browsing in the living room.

In terms of digital photo mangement, there is a KDE application called Gwenview that I found pretty useful in going through my many pictures. You can browse through your pictures pretty easily and do some quick editing on the fly like rotating, flipping, and mirrorring. There are plugins available that also allow you to do batch operations like resizing, converting, renaming, and applying some image effects. Very usefull when you have a ton of images to process !

There is also an opensource photoshop package called Gimp. Although it's not as slick as Adobe Photoshop, it's pretty good for most people...especially because it's free. There are packages for installing it in Windows and Mac OS X too.

It takes a while to get to know how to use the software, but since it's an opensource project, there are lots of sources on the web for tutorials and help on how to use it. Once source is the Gimpology site where you can learn how to add some neat effects to your pictures like this one about tilt-shift photos like these and these.

The entire opensource and linux movement is kind of a neat phenomenon. It's got a lot of steam in places like Brazil and India where people want access to technology without having to pay a 3 months' wages to pay for a license. Governments are starting to look into it as well.

Personally I use Kubuntu. I've gotten used to how it works and so I've stuck with it. A really good one to look at the is OpenSuse project. Try to download the live dvd first to try it out, although if you don't have broadband it will take a long time.

Square Format Pictures

Square format pictures used to be popular in the 60's and 70's. I wonder why the format faded and the rectangular 2x3 format came out and became the standard? It would have been just as easy for camera manufacturers to make smaller cameras that made square pictures on 35mm film. You would have gotten more pictures on a roll than the standard 24 or 36.

I have two square format cameras: A small Yashica 44A Twin Lens Reflex that uses the now out-dated 127 roll film and a Yashica Mat 124 that uses 120 roll film. The 44A makes 4cm x 4cm megatives while the 124 makes 6cm x 6cm negatives.

I've been itching to take these cameras out. A Croation company called Efke still makes B&W 127 roll film for the 44A. I read somewhere that they use blind people in their assembly line and keep their facilities totally dark...makes sense. I bought 5 rolls on ebay at a decent price. I also have a 120 roll of B&W Ilford Pan F lying around. Unfortunately, I can't go out and buy scanner I want to scan the negatives after I've processed them at home. I could print them on a contact sheet and then scan them on my current flatbed, but I can't really afford the paper and chemicals right now either so the whole project will have to wait until I've got a job.

In any case, I was browsing on ebay again for some other medium format cameras and got to thinking about why camera makers don't make a square format digital camera ? I suppose that you can always crop a picture so that it's square, but that would involve lots of time at a computer just to get an album together. To take it a step further, the camera makers don't even have to change their hardware at all, just put an option on the software side for a square format that would invovle an automatic crop.

After digging around the web for a while a came across a square format digital camera from Rollei, one of the manufacturers of the best TLR cameras. Have a look at it here. It looks more like a toy, but it does work. I wonder where you can buy them here in Canada...

A little more digging around and I found this site that talks about square format 35mm cameras.

In any case, have a look at some square pictures here and here to get a feel for the format.

New Photo Links

I added a few new photo links and took a couple old ones out that didn't work anymore.

Ken Rockwell's site is really good and has a wealth of techincal information. If you're in the hunt for a new camera, this article is worth reading. So is this one.

Since I use an old Minolta X-9 SLR with manual focus lenses, The Rokkor Files is of interest to me. It also has an interesting article on using old, but really good minolta manual focus lenses with the Olympus series digital SLRs.

Justin Oulette's site is pretty neat and his article on B&W film development is good. It got me started doing it at home. I want to do more B&W film, but I'm waiting to buy a scanner like this one so I can scan the film at home.

Matt Denton's camera collection is just really cool to me.

The Gummy Bear Project

Inspired by sites like this one about pictures of gummy bears. I decided to do something similar. My digicam, a Canon A520, has a macro setting that allows me to get close. I also had parts of an old minolta manual focus lens that I took apart one day. I played with the inner optics and one of the inner lenses allowed me to go in really close.

I started using an empty styrofoam egg container and different coloured light bulbs, but settled with the regular bulb and a blank sheet of paper. I wanted to build a light tent like this one, but with the bad weather and a driveway blocked with snow made it hard to get out and pick up some tracing paper. I'll save that project for another time.

Anyways, here are a few shots:







I uploaded the rest to an album on my Yahoo Photos account. Have a look here.

Update-- Yahoo Photos is done. Please look at my Flickr album.

An Inconvenient Truth

With a big snowstorm blowing through and nowhere to go really, I decided to watch Al Gore's movie: "An Inconvenient Truth". I bought a copy of it while I was in Hong Kong. I'm not sure if it's in video rental places like Blockbuster, but if you come across it on video or in a theatre, you should watch it. It's basically about his presentation on how bad our environment is getting and he does point out some alarming data.

After the movie I decided to start clearing our long driveway from up to 3 feet of snow. It took me around 2.5 hours to clear it even with the help of our inefficient and highly polluting snow blower.

If you keep up with the news in general, then you'll know that the environment is in the headlines quite frequently these days. Canadian politicians are competing for the public's attention on the subject with the Conservative Party all of a sudden turning into champions of the environment and experts on how to fix it without hurting the economy.

They also keep pointing out that Canada's CO2 emissions rose sharply under the Liberal government and that our record is worse than that of the US. I don't know why, but it seems to me that the Liberals and the other opposition parties are failing to point out some vital facts to debunk the Conservative rhetoric:

1. The substation portion of the increase in Canada's emissions is due to the development of the Oil Sands in Alberta which became financially viable and profitable once the price of oil rose to it's current value. The political base of the Conservative party is predominantly in Alberta and they are not about to put the reigns on any businesses in Alberta.

2. Our levels of pollution are not worse than that of the US. Granted we are far above our Kyoto targets, but we are a long way from being worse polluters than the US.

Have a look at this graphic from Nationmaster.com. In 2003, the US produced 5,762,050 metric megatons of CO2 from energy use and cement manufacturing, while Canada only produced 521,404 from the same type of sources. Canada's CO2 emissions are around one tenth of that of the US. Not even close.

I think that the whole issue about pollution would be a lot clearer to the public if everyone stuck to the facts and not try cloud the issue with rhetoric and half truths.

AJAC Furniture

My cousins in Cebu recently had a website done for their furniture business. Have a look at the site here. They have some neat stuff and are in the process of producing a new line of furniture.

I don't think they take individual orders, but ship to furniture retailers or suppliers. Please pass the web address along to anyone you know in the furniture business and may be interested.

Photo albums....

It's seems I arrived back home just in time for the arctic wind to blow down and send everyone into a deep freeze. It's a bit of a switch going from hot and muggy weather in excess of 30C to -20C with the wind chill. I've been reluctant to leave the house. I've had to shovel the driveway a few times too...I'm just glad I didn't have to do it the night I got back. The upside is that I haven't been bitten by mosquito !

Well this past week has been a little strange. It's nice to be back in familiar surroundings, but it's also been a bit of a sobering experience. I've updated my resume (new version is linked in the sidebar) and started applying for a few jobs. I can't really do or plan much because of a shortage of cash.

I've managed to sort out some of my pictures. I've added Philippines1, Philippines2, Philippines3, and Hong Kong to the photo albums list.

I now have to go through over all my pictures and pick out the best ones. The task of organizing them seems daunting...there are almost 2500 of them.

I took some pictures on the flight back when flying over Alaska at sunrise. The view was awesome and I don't think the picture does it justice. The way the light was hitting the mountains and all the snow and ice made it seem surreal. Here's a picture:

Time travel

I left Hong Kong at 4:30pm on Feb 1 and arrived in Toronto at 8:20pm on the same day after 18 hours on a plane and 1 hour in Anchorage, Alaska. A long trip to say the least, but I'm finally home after a 2 hour shuttle ride from the airport to Fort Erie.

I knew it would be cold when I got here, but somehow it's still a bit of a shock. It's good to be home though.

I'll take the weekend to veg out and get my fill of hockey and the superbowl and then figure out what to do next. There are a lot of people to catch up with and I also have to figure out what to do about income. All in good time though...

As far as this blog goes, I still have to upload pictures from the Philippines to online albums. I'll try to get through it tomorrow. I also have a few ideas in mind for some photo projects. I'll try to keep it fresh with some interesting pictures. I hope to be able to publish at least once a week if not more often. I'll also try to get out to the areas around south Niagara on some mini-road trips.