A whale we saw with her cub in Witless Bay

Today we got up and went out for a little trip to a park, where we walked through some woods and down to the coast.  There were ruins at the bottom of an old, old town that apparently got washed away in some great storm.  There were foundations left for an awful lot of buildings, and they tended to be very small (think around 10′ x 8′ for an entire house).  Generally all that was left was basically a rectangular frame of stone, but in some cases there would be a little bit of a chimney left over.

A puffin in flight

After that, we went out on a boat to see the whales and puffins on Witless Bay.  They took us out into the bay towards the puffin sanctuary island, and as we made our way towards it we could see flocks of puffins flying in towards it on their way back from the fishing grounds.  Apparently they fly miles every day just to go fishing, and then they all come back to the islands where they nest.  I took the 400mm f/5.6 out on the boat, so I had plenty of reach on them, and managed to get some closeups of the puffins in flight (and I assure you, tracking a fast-moving bird with a 400mm lens on a crop body while standing on a rocking boat is no walk in the park, especially when you’re trying to maintain focus on them).

Puffin portrait

Along the way to the island, we came across a mother whale and her cub.  First we saw the mother’s spray, and then her and the baby both popped up.  They dove a couple of times for food, each time staying down for around ten minutes before coming back up again.  The captain managed to get the boat pretty close to them, and then they both came up to check us out a little, getting awfully close.  When they went down for the last time, I was finally able to get the tail close-up that you see at the top of the page.  Unfortunately, they managed to get just close enough that the 400 was actually a little too long, and I had to go with a pretty extremely close view of the tale.  Nonetheless, I like it.  It’s nice to be able to see the detail in the barnacles on her tail.

Puffins playing king of the ledge

Once we pulled up alongside their island, the puffins were just everywhere.  They had their nests there, all awfully close together, and we got to see them jostling about with each other, and all their other interactions.  Apparently the brighter outer parts of their bills are only for courting, and they actually shed them after mating season.  Then they head off to travel for something like six months, and then come back to the same place every year to meet up with the same mate as always.

A proud looking puffin

After seeing the puffins and whatnot, they took us back, and I got to look through the gift shop, which proved interesting.  Apparently Newfoundland was once a pseudo-country on its own, and they had some old Newfoundland coins for sale.  And, of course, there were all manner of puffin memorabilia to be had, ranging from stuffed puffins to puffin salt shakers to puffin door stops.  After all was said and done, we came back to the room, had another dinner of lentil and rice tacos (this time microwaved, but still good), and I got to the business of processing photographs and making a blog entry.

George the Groundhog

Okay, so I’m definitely dedicating today’s post to my new friend George, the groundhog.  Yesterday I mentioned running into a groundhog by a bridge, and today we went back to see if he was still there.  He was definitely still hanging around the same place, so I’m guessing he probably lives in the concrete dividers nearby.  We fed him some wheat-thins, and he got just wonderfully close to us.  Didn’t get to pet him, but got pretty close.  George is a pretty cool critter, altogether.  He’s even nearly vegan (apparently they occasionally eat “some insects”).  Well, he does wear fur, but I guess I can let him slide on that one.

Some rocks at the bottom of Fundy Bay

After that we headed off to check out the Fundy trail, which goes around a portion of the Bay Of Fundy and has beach access.  The Bay of Fundy has a tidal change of something like 50 feet, so there’s a pretty great deal of seabed dry at lowtide.  I got out on some nice rocky beach and made some photographs (see one to the left), and then we got attacked by rain.  I sort of incoherently dashed up some steps, which turned out not to take me anywhere near the parking lot where my grandparents had rushed back to the car.  I ended up hiding under a pavilion for a while with my camera stuffed in a bag, but finally got back all safe-like.

Next we drove to Moncton, where we went to see the Hopewell rocks, which are big rock formations that have been carved out by the tidal shifts, so that they’re significantly narrower at the bottom than at the top.  Got some interesting shots there, and then we came back to stay here in Moncton for the night.  After we checked in, I found that there was a vegetarian cafe in the area.  Let it be put down in the record that Calactus Vegetarian Cafe in Moncton, New Brunswick is an absolutely excellent establishment.  I had some delicious curried lentils with bread and chutney tonight, and I thoroughly intend to go back tomorrow for some pizza, or perhaps a veggie burger.  Decisions decisions…

My cat Boo, who's made a home of my shoe box.

Today’s lesson: cats don’t like leashes.  Or at least that’s what I’ve found trying to leash-train mine.  When we moved to a new house, I was a little worried about Boo (an occasionally outdoor cat) wandering off and getting lost in the new neighborhood.  So I decided to leash train him.  Unfortunately, Boo didn’t take too well to my idea.

For starters, you can’t walk a cat with a leash on a collar, since they don’t have necks like dogs.  So, I got a cat harness to put on him.  Amazingly enough, with a little bit of coaxing with treats, he let me put on the harness.  I even got the leash on, no problem at all, and managed to lead him around with treats.  Encouraging, right?

Deceptively so.  Yes, he’ll wear the harness, and yes, he’ll walk around a little, but without treats there is no movement.  Even without the leash, Boo acts as if the harness (which, I assure you, weighs no more than an ounce or two) puts some unbearable weight on his back, and slinks low to the ground.  Evidently, he’s not a fan.  Moreover, whole ordeal seems to have put him at odds with me for a while, but I’ve given up on the leash training, and he’s starting to warm up to me again.  Especially since he’s learned what a wonderful bed my old shoe box makes.  The moral of the story?  You can’t walk a cat, but it can still be fun to try.

I found this little guy sitting on a tree on the way out

I got to make another trip to Robinson Preserve a couple of days ago, this time with a friend specifically to go photographing.  I only shot with my 70-200 f/4 this time, and it turned out surprisingly well, for the short focal length.  Hopefully next time, though, I’ll have access to a 400 f/5.6 again, which will give me an awfully better view of the wildlife.  In the meantime, I made do well enough at 200mm, just had to be a little bit sneaky with the assorted creatures (birds, mostly).  And, of course, there was a little bit of cropping involved in post processing, but I guess that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

A bee taking off from a flower

The trip was good fun, and I managed to make an entire circuit around one side of the park (the one that stretches out to Tampa Bay).  Perhaps next time we can go the other way, down to the causeway to Anna Maria.  Towards the entrance of the park, there isn’t a whole lot in the way of tree cover, so we mostly stuck to photographing the insects that flew around the various flowers and grasses.  Moving on a little further, we came to the watery part of the park, where we managed to catch some birds hanging around the water, and even a couple of them in flight, skimming over the water or soaring up in the skies (the former proved easier to photograph).  Then we trekked on through the mangroves and marshey areas, and found a nice little flock of ibis pecking their way around in the water.

A white heron, flying just above the water

The park itself is still looking just as pleasant as always, and they seem to be making process on the visitor center (which they’re putting in an old, dilapidated house) and the camp site.  I also noticed that they’ve added dispensers with doggy bags, which I’m pretty sure was my mother’s doing.  Apparently she took the dogs for a walk there one day, and they did their business, whereupon my mom realized she was out of bags.  By amazing coincidence, she ran into a woman who took issue with the situation, and despite my mom having gone to her car to fetch a bag with which to clean up the mess, managed to get a park ranger to issue her a ticket for failing to pick up after the dogs.  So, in any case, she complained about it, and got them to put in dog bag dispensers.

A great blue heron, framed up by mangroves

And, with the exception of the dog bag drama, I don’t believe anything else of any great consequence has really been going on.  Robinson preserve continues to be awesome, just like always, and with any luck I’ll get a good chance to thoroughly explore the other part of the park sometime later in the Summer.  The other way isn’t circuitous, but rather lets out onto the causeway to the island, so I’m thinking some sort of a switchup with vehicles might be ideal.  That is, park one car at the park entrance, put two people in another, drive it down to the causeway entrance, walk all the way through to the main entrance, and then drive back to the other car.  Or something like that.  I’ll leave that planning to another day, and for now settle with the images I have.

A quick portrait of my grandpa. The detail in the full-size image is unbelievable.

My grandpa got a copy of Canon’s 5D Mk II lately, and I got a chance to play around with it.  It’s truly difficult to describe just how incredible this thing is.  It does ISO 25,600, and does it better than my 20D does 3200.  That, with 21 megapixels of resolution, incredible detail, and an utterly spectacular field of view and depth of field, just make for an unbelievable camera.  I’d love to pick one up myself, but of course it’s a little cost prohibitive.

I did a couple of portraits of my grandparents (quick ones, don’t look to these as models of perfect portraiture) at ISO 400, to see what it would be like to make a couple of frames and work with the RAW files out of it.  For starters, these things are huge.  We’re talking 20MB RAW files.  The speed boost I was getting out of RAW processing on my new desktop is pretty much gone when working with something like that, but it’s completely worth it: I can make ridiculous crops out of these images and still have perfectly viewable/printable images.  And with a little bit of USM applied, the sharpness is just astonishing.  Admittedly, this is the first camera I’ve used since my 20D, so I’m looking at several years of improvements all at once, but still, this is impressive.

A quick portrait of my grandma. At full resolution, I could fill most of my 19" monitor with an eye, and still see excellent detail.

Unfortunately, the video features weren’t quite as impressive as the still.  Yes, it does record excellent video, and with a small monitor for focusing and some big CF cards, it would make a pretty great platform for recording video.  However, the video stream it outputs is only 480p (while it can record 1080p to the CF card) and includes the focus guides and other information, effectively killing its usefulness in live video, and precluding the use of an external recording device (which would be exceptionally useful, since it can only record 12 minutes at a time).  That being said, the quality of the video is astounding: it’s full HD from a 35mm sensor.  Just needs a little improvement on the connectivity, and the recording length, both things I’m sure will be addressed in later versions.

And speaking of cameras, I’m actually going to finally get out and shoot again soon, albeit with my rusty old 20D.  Sometime this week I’m going to make the trip out to Robinson Preserve for the day, and go shooting with a friend.  Gotta love Summer.  Hopefully in a couple days I can come back to make a trip writeup with some nice photos.

Output from the triangles script

For quite possibly the first time in the blog’s history, I present a non-photographic image.  This is the output from my new Triangles script.  It creates an image by first drawing three points, and then drawing a line from the third to the first, but going beyond it, then drawing from there to the point two points back, and so on and so forth.  With the right settings, the straight lines all sort of dissolve into giant curves.

I wrote the script in PHP, using the GD image library, and the source is also available.  The only thing that isn’t variable is the three starting points for the image, so if you want to alter that, you’ll have to download the source and run it on your own server.

In other news, I’m looking for a Summer internship still, and will hopefully land one in the next couple of days.  It looked like I was out of the running for a bit, but apparently I impressed their lead programmer, and may get another shot at it.  I’ll be crossing my fingers, in any case.

Other than that, it’s been a great lazy Summer so far.  I’ve watched far too many episodes of the X Files, and spent way too much time sleeping.  But then again, I’m pretty sure that’s what Summer is supposed to be all about, so no problems there.  Now to go eat something, and have another lazy movie night with my girlfriend.  Hooray for Summer.

In fact, this morning I woke up to find him missing, and assuming my dad had let him out, went into a little bit of a panic searching about the new neighborhood for him.  In the end, it turned out he’d just gone back to his old hiding place, the cloth on the underside of our couch.  Now he’s taken to his old habit of sitting in front of my monitors atop my desk with a vengeance.  So far he’s nearly shoved just about everything on my desk off of it, and taken up my mouse wrist rest with his own rest.  Now he’s finally settled down in front of one of the screens, with my keyboard, thankfully, only hanging a little bit off of the desk.

We’re mostly moved into the house now, and I’m getting all nice and settled in.  I’m right up by Cortez now, so I have to get used to everything towards the South, and try to stop going to places towards the North, as much as I can.  Other than that, not much of anything to write about.  Just trying to keep the words coming, hopefully I’ll have more to  go on about next time, with some photographs to boot.