Forbidden Planet

Went downtown with the kids again and took a few pictures (412 - I wanted to experiment some more with panoramas). I took a number of burst shots on the highway because I was curious what AutoStitch would do with them. This is 1 of 12 shots heading down Autoroute 15. AutoStitch assembled them together in a sort of fish eye view. This is one shot (out of 12) on Autoroute 20 heading into downtown. This is the image retouched using GIMP (something similar to PhotoShop, but free). I straightened the image, cropped out the front of the car, eliminated some window reflections and adjusted the colours to make them brighter and more vivid. I think it came out pretty well. Total retouching time was about 30 minutes. This is one shot (out of 34) inside the Ville-Marie Tunnel. I liked the colours and the blur. This is a retouched version of the image (once again using GIMP). The image was straightened and cropped, the colours and contrast were adjusted and front of the car was painted out and t...

I have been trying my hand at panorama pictures lately - taking multiple overlapping shots and then stitching them together. My first attempts came out quite well. My later attempts highlighted some shortcomings with stitching software. 360 degree panorama in a park we went to for Mother's Day. This definitely came out well, even though I was just holding the camera and turning in spot. A smaller view cropped from the panoramic view. Part of a panoramic shot taken at St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal. Subject matter which moves between shots end up looking like ghosts. I tried to capture a wall of graffiti by taking multiple shots and sliding horizontally between shots. Unfortunately, it seems the stitching software expects the camera to remain in a fixed position and not to be moving. As you can see, it did not stitch it together correctly. The red door on the left is in the wrong place and if you look to the right side, the automated parking ticket dispenser is partly ghosted ...

What is a blog from Canada without some Fall pictures. I didn't manage to get too many shots off this Fall. The sun seemed to conspire against me. Everytime I was out with my camera, it seemed to be cloudy. Nonetheless, I did manage to snap a few and here is a selection. Photo credits: Richard of Forbidden Planet

I think it nicely compliments the Long Island spider photo I posted a while back. Photo credit: Richard of Forbidden Planet

One of the neat things about grocery shopping in Montreal is the slightly wider variety of food I can find. There is no need to walk into a specialty store. I think every major grocery store I have been in sells horse meat. Most sell bison as well. Horse is very, very lean. Ground horse meat is cheaper than lean ground beef and leaner than extra-lean ground beef. I recently bought some non-traditional meats (red deer, horse and bison) and used them to make a stew (I just told the family it was beef because they tend to be picky about eating non-traditional animals). Photo credits: Richard of ForbiddenPlanet