Infrared revisited

I don't post a lot here these days. I guess I've really fallen out of the habit of just writing up everything I've seen, everything I've done, etc., etc... which, in a way, is a shame; because I look back at the last half of the previous decade and really see how I was spending my time and what I was doing with my life. A diary, of sorts, and I seem to have lost the desire to take the time. I regret it. No promises. I guess the best I can do is the best I can do...

But anyway, blah blah blah; the standard "sorry I haven't posted anything for a while" apologies out of the way; here's what I'm actually interested in this morning.

One of the things I do, sporadically, is take pictures and videos of the changing (or changed) landscape around here. Given that I've been doing this ten years now, or so, it's actually beginning to pay dividends that even I can now appreciate. I have a dash cam and not quite a month back, P-Doug and I were up in Bolton where considerable changes are happening to an area northwest of town that we know and love well. This morning I've been processing the video. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. :)

 

One of the many dated folders of "The Millennium Project"

In the process of doing it, I was strolling through the old photos, which are arranged by date. I noticed in one of the folders, I had a few infrared photos. Now, I've had digital infrared cameras since March of 2006; all of them Canon reconditioneds... G1 (subsequently sold to a friend), S70 (backup), and now an S80. I probably have several thousand infrared images... most of them nothing special, once you get over the fact that they're, y'know, infrared and all. But some of them, maybe one in every 25 or so, really do stand out. If the photo is taken between May and October, and it's a bright, sunny day with just a few interesting clouds in the sky, and you catch the angle of the sun on the leaves against the sky or water just right (and I still haven't put much thought into what that actually entails), you can really get some shots that you can really stare at for minutes and feel like you're not really on Earth when you do.

I spent maybe 15 minutes rolling through some of the stuff and picked out about a dozen images, then touched them up just a bit to boost the contrast (IR photography does have a tendency toward being a bit hazy). Other than that, I haven't altered them.

These following six photos were taken Canada Day, July 1, 2007 at Scenic Caves in Collingwood, Ontario. To my real surprise, I find I never blogged about this; especially given how many ethereal photos I took that day. I suppose I meant to at the time but never got around to it. One of the reasons might be because almost immediately afterward I and P-Doug and G took off for several days in Ottawa, and I did blog extensively about that.

What I really like about these photos is how much like, well, I guess a stereotypical idea of Heaven they seem to represent. Sunny. Serene. Timeless; even breathless. Everyone appearing to be dressed in white (natural fabrics tend to reflect infrared wavelengths; it's important to plants to be able to do this or they'd overheat). Oddly enough it was a surprisingly cold day for July; as I recall, it felt more like early spring than early summer. The day was unsettling somehow; I still don't think of it as joyful or contenting, and I'm still not sure why. But the photos I took in infrared light that day still impress me.

A few shots from Twelve Mile Creek; specifically, the Dundas Street bridge over it in Halton. I love how the water is black as ink but the trees look almost snow-covered. The abandoned supports once held a two-lane bridge that spanned the valley from the early 1920s till the late 1940s, when it was removed and replaced by the current four-laner (whose own days are numbered, I think, given the work recently completed at Sixteen Mile Creek not far down the road). The interesting thing is that not only did these supports survive, but within the past year or so they've been put back into use carrying a large water main, and even the bridge span was resurrected in the same original style (though narrower than two lanes). I'm hoping they eventually open it to pedestrians; it would seem a real shame not to.

Finally, a few shots from my second expedition under the 407 to the closed, cut-off stretch of Burnhamthorpe Road at Sixteen Mile Creek. These shots were actually taken by P-Doug, whom I asked to man the infrared camera for me that day. The low angle wheat stalks shot that ends this exhibition has always dazzled me and still fills me with good-natured envy. I only wish I could claim that shot, and the eye to compose it, as my own, but credit where credit is due.

S80, one more time :)

It's kind of a crossover. As of last Monday, I now have my third Canon PowerShot S80, and my third infrared camera. They're one and the same. I don't know what it is; there's just something about the S80 I really like; no other camera I've had feels quite as natural. So while I've moved on to other cameras with better image and video quality since then, when I saw someone in China was selling a raft of PowerShots he reconditions to shoot IR, I had to see if a trusty S80 was among them. It was.

He had other, better models available too, for a lot more. But the S80 is pretty much the most compact PowerShot I've ever seen; they managed to pack just about everything into it and my hands never really stopped hungering to feel the thing again. As I said, I've had two before. One was my workhorse for nearly two years. The other was really just to slake the hankering, but it pretty much just sat around until I found a good home for it in Indiana, where it wouldn't just sit around but would do some real work again, as is this camera's due. Ah, but as an infrared camera, I have reason to start carrying one around again.

It was a little over two hundred dollars, and largely financed by the sale of my first infrared refurb, the G1, to a friend interested in getting into IR photograph himself. So, again, it served two happy purposes: I was getting a better camera for just a few dollars, and I was rescuing the sturdy G1 from sitting on the shelf and getting it into the hands of another amateur photographer.

The S80 has some significant advantages over even the S70 I've been using for IR work over the last couple of years. It's about a quarter smaller, it responds faster, it takes slightly larger pictures (8MP vs 7.1MP) of better quality (Digic II processor vs Digic I), and, best of all, its video abilities are significantly superior. The S70 is limited to recording, at best, 30 seconds of 15 frames-per-second 640x480 video snippets. The S80 can record a full 30 frames-per-second, and the only limit on it is a 1G ceiling on file size. At 640x480, that translates to, on average, about ten minutes (but about 40 minutes at 320x240). I'd prefer something longer (particularly for filming on the road), but ten minutes isn't bad, and it sure beats 30 seconds. Admittedly, the S80 doesn't shoot RAW like the S70, but that's a minor concern, since it's reasonably fast on AEB spreads (one of the reasons I bought my first S80, actually).

I've been putting it through its paces over the last couple of days, and yesterday, one of the Wednesdays P-Doug and I have booked off this year with an eye to hiking and nicely breaking the weeks up, I used it to reshoot the abandoned bridge abutment on 11th Concession (last visited at the end of April, but now with the trees nicely leafed out), and a recently-closed but gorgeous pony truss bridge in Bolton (I'll have to blog on that in particular).

Below: a shot of the lost bridge on 11th Concession location taken with the S70 in late April, and the S80 in early August. The S70 shot is also HDR, composed of three exposures. I like the moodiness and gloom of the first and the bright 'life goes on' solace of the second. :)

Rail journey in silver

Old Finch Avenue Bailey Bridge

Last Friday was Good Friday. It was a holiday. I was kind of at loose ends so I decided to go on GoogleMaps and browse around and set myself an interesting photographic assignment for the day.

I settled on a place I hadn’t been before (at least, I don’t remember having been before): the Bailey bridge that carries Old Finch Avenue across the Rouge River. I actually had to cross it before I could shoot it. It’s a single-lane span and there was a light just before it that controlled access to it. I had to wait for a bit before I could cross.

There’s a lot for parking in just the other side of the river. I parked there; the lot was wet and muddy. It’s been a very snowy winter here and it still shows. I followed a short path down to the river to shoot the bridge from below. I was surprised just how busy the bridge is. I’d say cars went across it about once a minute on average.









When I’d been looking around on GoogleMaps, I’d also noticed another span further downstream. I wanted to see if I could get a look at it. Doing so involved easing down some rather treacherous stone stairs and following a snowy, shoe-filling trail as far down the river as I could get, which was, as it turned out, as far as I needed to go to glimpse the bridge. I was between the water and the cliffside; I couldn’t go any further. In warmer weather, it would have been no obstacle. I would have forded the river and made my way to the bridge. Not in weather like this, of course. But I really do intend to go back this spring or summer and do just that. Stay tuned. :)





Heading home, I had to cross the bridge again going the other way. I happened to glimpse a raccoon using the bridge to cross. He wandered to the side and tucked himself under the bridge as I approached. I really wish I'd been manning a camera... such a wonderful opportunity squandered.

O this fiery moment

I have two IR-reconditioned PowerShots (a G1 and an S70) that I've been using since March, 2006 and May, 2007 respectively to do most of my infrared work. But I also invested in a 58mm Hoya R72 infrared filter for my Rebel XT. My new G9 has an adapter that, fortuitously, is also 58mm threaded. I took this photo using the G9 and the R72.

I picked this photo to experiment on in Photoshop because it was reasonably clear. There's a custom white balance setting, but it didn't look like much till I swapped the red and blue channels, when it suddenly seemed to acquire some real life. It's a one-second exposure.

I think this is what the world looks like to you after you're dead.

Brimstone

I don't seem to automatically blog the phototrips I take lately the way I used to. I need to get back to that. Not so much because I really believe scores of people descend here in bright-eyed interest (though there might be one or two, occasionally, who knows?), but mostly so I can remind myself of the details and nuances.

This one's about a place near The Forks of the Credit Provincial Park called Brimstone. P-Doug and I "discovered" it sometime in the summer of 2006 when we visited the aforementioned park. It's at the south end, up a little road called Dominion Street, turning off Forks of the Credit Road. There are no other exits; it's a single way in and out. Brimstone itself today is a nice little community of maybe two dozen homes, and I'd have to say that reasonably comfortable people live there. In the past, it was a lumber town with hundreds of people. Dominion Street today dead-ends at the bottom of the park, but at one time, when it was "the Dominion Road", it carried on up to the community of Cataract at what's now the north end of the park. When we found it last year, I postulated that the place was called Brimstone because of how it must look in the fall, down in a little river valley and surrounded by trees. I'm probably wrong, but my guess at least has some poetry to it. Anyway, it was evocative enough that we decided to come back in the fall and see.

Well, we missed our chance last fall. But this year, I remembered, and we headed out there.

On our way in, we passed a middle aged Asian couple walking their dog, and a couple of men leading what seemed to be a rather substantial pack of Cub Scouts, or something. We parked at the end of the road and headed into the park on foot, along the old Dominion Road path.


The sky was moody that day, constantly threatening rain, and then letting the sun show through. We wandered perhaps 15 minutes into the park along the road, just taking in the beautiful autumn views. Fall's been odd this year; it's mid-November as I write this but there are still leaves on a lot of the trees, and there's still quite a bit of green to be seen on them. It's like nothing in my experience; I hope it bodes well for a mild winter. Anyway, we were shooting the foliage (me in both colour and infrared) and just picking our way along when we came to what was, for me, the highlight of the trip. P-Doug happened to glance up a hill beside the path and spotted the ruins of a chimney, standing alone in a small clearing. We had to go and see it.

It was up a fairly steep climb, and it was slippery. P-Doug remarked that this would have been a particularly useful time for me to be hiking barefoot, but it was late enough in the year that I was back in sneakers and socks. Yes, sad to say, all that traipsing around in shorts and sandals, wandering the forest barefoot and skinny dipping in warm rivers is packed away for yet another year... I like being eccentric, but I try not to be obsessive. :) He did have a point, though; I do find climbing easier when I can feel the toeholds. Regardless, we made it up there and had a look around. What we found was a stone chimney, attractive and nicely masonried, standing at the north side of a clearing about the size of an average living room. P-Doug paced out the area of what he decided had been a one-room cabin, postulating where tables, chairs, and the bed had been. He declared his vision of it all "cozy", and it probably would have been if you only had to be there for, say, a hunting weekend or something. I'm not sure I would have considered it "cozy" if it had been the extent of my home. But it was truly fascinating. I wondered who lived there, and how recently, and when the place had been torn down. Another friend, when shown the photos of the place, pointed out the evidence he said indicated that the place had burned down at some point. So if he's right, the place was lost either through vandalism or misadventure, leaving only the poignancy of the chimney and its fireplace.

I happened to notice another structure a few yards away in the woods. It was just a small hump of stone, masonried, and matching the chimney in colour and style. I speculated that it was the well, and P-Doug granted that it might be. It made sense to me, because from where we were, the river was a ten or fifteen minute walk away through the woods, and who would want to schlep water all that way, back uphill in the freezing cold, every time he wanted to make a cup of coffee or boil a potato? I couldn't swear to it, but I think my guess was right.

P-Doug noticed, more or less at this point, that his camera, a Kodak DC4800 that had once been mine, was taking horribly washed out photos. I wondered if it might be a badly set white balance, but no matter what he did, he was still getting shots that were vastly overexposed. Underexposed isn't so bad... most of the detail is there, except in shadows, and if you know what you're doing in Photoshop, you can usually recover from that. But overexposed shots lose so much detail into a frost of white pixels; they're much harder to salvage. Cursing, P-Doug deleted the contents of the card. It was then he noticed that the manual f-stop compensation setting was set all the way up to +2. He set it back to 0 and suddenly all the shots were terrific again.

Just about at that moment, the Asian couple and their dog emerged from the forest behind us along a path that paralleled the road along the crest. They really surprised us; suddenly they were just there. I think they were speaking Japanese. They wandered past us through the clearing of the vanished cabin without much notice, and down the slippery steps P-Doug and I had climbed minutes earlier, continuing their walk along the Dominion Road. A minute or two later, we started hearing the Cub Scout pack arriving. Given that we had other things to do, I recommended we call it quits at that point and head back. We headed back down to the road just as the Cubs, following the same crest path as the couple and their dog, arrived at the old cabin; their leaders making remarks about life in pioneer times.

On our way back, we happened to spot a plaque, set there by the province, telling about the Dominion Road of long ago, with several photos of cars traveling it and the communities that used it. We'd missed that on our way in because we'd wandered off the road for a bit, but I'm glad we saw it. A lot of what I've just told you, I could only tell you because we spotted that plaque.

We got back to my car. On our way in along the Forks of the Credit Road, we'd spotted this curve full of fall colour that was breathtaking, and we both wanted to go back there and take pictures of it. So we parked close by and wandered over and took in the view. The sky was powerful, and I was frustrated by finding I could either capture the interesting sky, or the bright colours on the ground, but not both, and I whined about it to P-Doug. He stated the obvious — or what should have been obvious — saying, "How come you're not taking HDR spreads?" Which, of course, was the right answer phased in the form of a question. I was a little embarrassed. This voice inside my head went, "Hey, dummy, do you remember why you bought the S80 a year and a half ago in the first place? Because you wanted something you could program to take quick, high-quality AEB spreads for HDR work, remember?" Though I admit, that was always kind of an art-for-art's-sake kind of inclination... it didn't really dawn on me that there was a practical application for it until P-Doug suggested it. I honestly don't know whether he meant it as a solution to my problem or just expressing surprise that I wasn't taking full advantage of the colourful leaves in just taking regular shots, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt because either way, his suggestion was the catalyst.

On our way back, I mentioned that on Flickr, one of my HDR infrared images had been short-listed by Popular Photography for inclusion in an article, and P-Doug seemed impressed... more than I had been, actually. It really wasn't until I got that reaction from him that it sort of came to me, oh yeah, THAT Popular Photography, right... I'd become so focused on the world on the net and how many forums for expression there are that the idea of being dependent on someone else's judgment to have one's work published and distributed was kind of lost on me. Anyway, if you're interested, it's this one (below) and it's supposed to be published in an upcoming issue featuring an article about digital infrared photography.

After that, we drove to the nearby town of Erin, because P-Doug wanted to visit a bakery there. It was just the kind of thing you want to see in a small town, especially in autumn... it was like stepping back into 30s, except for the prices, of course. Everything smelled fantastic. While he was buying stuff for himself and his wife, I had a look around and noticed a cooler full of a local brand of soft drinks. The bottles had local themes, but one of the flavours really blew my mind... it featured a photo of "Honest" Ed Mirvish standing, smiling with arms spread, outside his famous bargain emporium. "Honest" Ed, for those not from around here, died this summer in his 90s; he was probably Toronto's greatest, and certainly its most celebrated, philanthropist and patron of the arts. That his smiling welcome would grace a soda pop bottle in the rural precincts of the GTA is a testament to the warm regard in which this down-to-earth rags-to-riches man is held.

Leaving Erin, we headed back into the city to one of our preferred watering holes, The Three Monkeys. It was unusual for us to be there on a Saturday afternoon, and it was unusually pleasant. The Three Monkeys is a nice pub but it can be a little loud on a Thursday night with a hockey game on. I don't remember what we talked about now, but that's not important. Just hanging out, having a beer, enjoying the day was the point, and that I'll remember.