I’ve posted some (~250) of my photos of the Paralympic torch relay. Also included are lots of up-close shots of Gordo and Rick Hansen.
This one, of the Lieutenant Governor in front of the provincial flag, is one of my favorites. Something nice happened with the flag, the differing light levels, and the focal plane.
Sending a super-low-quality, copyright watermarked, otherwise unprocessed, complete set of photos from Sunday right now. They’ll be available at /van2010/photos when the upload completes.
I’m back from Vancouver and I picked up an external terabyte to store the fotos. I shot just under fifty gigs, and I have approx. three free on my main machine — time to step my game up.
Thanks go out to Dr. Z, his USB SD card reader, and his desktop box for providing temporary storage 
After the raws are off the camera I’ll export the whole whack in a Lightroom HTML gallery and post the link, then get to processing them down to just the good ones.
I changed the “under construction” image to one of my old extended-exposure photos with altered brightness, contrast, and an overlayed elliptical-gradient alpha mask. Here it is with the original for comparison:
Simple!
Not so simple: layering divs with different alphas and background images 
I was thinking of just doing this for browser compatibility:
<!--[if IE]><meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”0; url=http://www.firefox.com/”><![endif]-->
Which uses IE-only “conditional comments” to redirect Internet Explorer users to the Firefox download site — kapow!
But I’ve decided not to be a jerk: IE 8 renders correctly, and I’m just going to pretend earlier versions don’t exist, like Google.
Photo by Kris “Cookie” Fortune via his FB: Colbert rocking the Canadiana! Cookie also told me about a cool mod you can do to Canon DSLRs to play with autofocus functionality — cheers!
I’m working through a backlog of photos.
These are from a Settlers night we had back on December 11th. They’re all pretty bad, but I just post-processed the heck out of them in Lightroom — might as well show someone
PlayOn! is a street hockey tournament sponsored by Hockey Night In Canada. The final is tomorrow at six, but I snapped some of the prelim round games down by parliament today.
Sports photography relies on zoom, flash, and fast shutter speeds to get close to the action and freeze it. That’s what I was experimenting with here, but then I mixed in some longer exposures to capture the motion of the game.
The sky was overcast, which helped the lighting by softening the daylight until it was essentially ambient. The flash then helped fill shadows to highlight the subject.
The last shot in the series was the game-winning shootout goal.
In this video a guy who uses pure mathematical theories to make educated guesses about biological systems before designing his experiments to test those predictions (apparently that’s abnormal) breaks down how vision works in the eye and brain.
Jack Cowan is Professor of Mathematics and Neurology at The University of Chicago. His research is concerned with understanding how circuits in the visual cortex process information, which he uses mathematics to investigate. Cowan developed a neural field theory with H.R. Wilson and then showed how to use nonlinear stability theory to analyze how patterns of stable activity could arise in neural networks.
I’ve loved all my visual hallucinations as soon as I found out they weren’t permanent. Because of the structure of the organs we use to see, we can only hallucinate four different ways. There’s also a trivial-looking topographical mapping of retinal regions to visual cortex region which makes me think weird thoughts of how we see from inside our skulls.
I spent today, the first of the New Year, flipping through the recent photography issue of BorderCrossings and a 2006 astronomy issue of National Geographic.
I reckoned that technology was getting to the point where I could launch a global imaging satellite of my own and take astro-shots, so I started Googling around.
Interorbital Systems, to take the first example I ran across, plans on conducting personal satellite launches later this year for about USD 8,000. I suspect that for about CAD 20,000 one could put up a decent imaging sat, possibly running Linux, and set up a ground station for communicating with it.
I just bought my first DSLR, the Canon Rebel XSI (thanks, in part, to Cookie’s recommendation). More info coming soon. It may, in fact, be hard to get me to stop talking about it.
Anyway, they have one or two units left at the Victoria Future Shop for a very respectable price — actually, an extremely good deal. The body alone is $630 at Lens & Shutter right now, it’s on sale for $699 including the kit lens. This package includes all that, plus a bag, extra battery, and UV filter for $100 less.
Thought I’d put that out there if anyone else was in the market.