Cafés, cafés, cafés

 
 
 
 

Checkin' out the hood

 
 
 
 

Rent-a-bikes and users

 
 
 
 
Velibre works, if you have the right card. Get it before you get there.

Dessert on Ile St-Louis

 
 
 
 

View at dinner, first night in Paris

 
Tour St-Jacques, Rue de Rivoli

Ode to Vincent

 
Café la Nuit, Arles

Waiting for Van Gogh

 
We're back safe and sound from two weeks in Provence. This is a pic of Jule sitting in Arles with the Van Gogh - made famous, Le Café la Nuit, in the background. Jule is a fan of Vincent and she says he had an eye for yellow and painted his night sceen with more yellow than was probably there. The café itself is painted yellow now and yellow is a predominate colour along the Van Gogh trail.

We had a good time in Arles and environs, and got to spend a few days in Paris as well. All went well. We avoided two "perterbations" in the train schedule when the railways went on strike. ("Of course in France it is always about the strikes!") And we had good Provençal food and southern wines and we can't understand why so many Canadians find the French, especially the Parisiens, rude. Except for one old hag in Avignon, we found them splendid to deal with and we think they found us and our even more Provençal efforts to speak their language très amusant.

I'm sorting my pics from the trip and will start putting stuff up tomorrow. The bulk will go to flickr in various easy-to-access groups, I think.

Mornin' Dew

 

Happy Mother's Day

 

One interesting pic

Be glad, if you can, that your daughters are able to avoid temptations, er, dangers ... One of Jule's Dad's photos, taken somewhere in England, circa 1972.
 

Market morning

 

Urban fringe

 

Goin' to the pub

 

Photo (shop) flow

 

Shoppin' the image

 

Here endeth the lesson

 

C'est la vie

 

Laundry and lime

 

Fooling around with HDR

 
Digital images just can't capture both the high and low values of a scene with contrasty lighting. If you expose for the shadows, the highlights are blown out and if you expose for the highlights, the shadows are black and without detail. Negative film was much better at this.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging is a technique of combining multiple photos shot at various exposures into one that has the full exposure range of the group. This gives you the details at both ends of the luminance range. To do this, you basically bracket your exposures an equal number on either side of 'normal', taking a total of 3, 5, 7 and even 9 images. You shoot the number you need to get the full exposure range of the scene from white to black.

The trick is keeping the camera steady and a tripod is usually used. This image of the patio is a composite of 5 images, hand-held. There's some movement in the tree branches but it's not bad. I had the advantage of using the D300 and was able to use a small aperture and still have enough light to fire off the 5 shots in about second, bracing myself against the door frame.

Then, after the merge, I played around a bit with the colours. I think it has a "painterly" feel to it. Fun stuff.

This is the straight shot. You can see there's no detail in the patio stones and the shadows in the evergreen in the centre are completely black.

 

Mint Condition

 
 

The Royal Canadian Mint is two doors down from where I work. It makes some of the highest quality coinage found in the world. In fact, it's world famous and its products are highly prized possessions of numismatists the world over. It also makes coinage for foreign countries, like Barbados, whereas Canadian pocket change is made at the Winnipeg Mint.

Back in 1989-1991 we had a security consulting team from Atomic Energy of Canada (AECL) do a study on our facility, which I thought pretty strange until I realized they had done work for The Getty, for one, and knew what they were doing.

I was assigned to them as a liaison officer and one day after lunch they said they had to go to The Mint to commission a piece of equipment they had developed for them, and would I like to come along. I said I would and we went to The Mint where I witnessed the inauguration of a new security device.

Apparently, a long-time employee of The Mint had passed away and in his locker officials found over $100,000 worth of gold dust, shavings and scrap gold. Apparently, the employee had feared that the metal detection system would catch him carting off his hoard. He didn't know the The Mint never had such a system!

(Interesting how the Power of Rumour works. We have +300 cameras at The Gallery, many hidden in walls. I`ve been approached by paranoid staff on several occasions wondering if they were being video taped eating their lunch in the cafeteria or in their offices. So, not only are the Monets safe on the walls, but so it the cutlery in the kitchen!)

Mint management decided they needed a metal detector to foil others trying to secret gold from the premises. They commissioned AECL to build a metal detector - The Mother of all Metal Detectors.

It took almost a whole room. Staff would run a gauntlet, chuted through a narrow elevated walkway where footprints had been painted on a rubber track. You placed one hand on top of the other, placed them on your crotch and walked in stocking feet through the chute following the foot prints while security staff peered at monitors and CCTV cameras recorded you from all corners. You had to be enrolled or catalogued. It was very sensitive. Look out if you bought a new watch or had a couple of fillings changed. The Machine would know!

Sounded like a bit of a PITA to me at the time. Now, thinking back, I recall the cat-who-ate-the-canary looks of the Mint Managers who stood around, watching their Guinea pig volunteers walk though their device without their shoes. And it makes me wonder. How sensitive was it really? A hundredth of a gram of hidden gold is a small amount. And how does that compare to the studs in the new pair of jeans? Maybe the Mint Management was just building a bigger (rumour) mouse trap.

BTW, I hear you can get $50 a filling for a gold tooth. So if you have a jar with ol' Uncle Andy's gold teeth, now's the time to cash them in.

About ten years ago, someone realized that the ol' Mint in Ottawa had been minting gold coins for over 100 years and they'd been dependent on water from the Ottawa River. It flowed in and it flowed out of the facility. They thought,"Hey, maybe there's gold in them there river banks...". They applied for the mining rights, set up a dredge on a barge in the bay adjacent the Gallery, at the foot of The Mint, and began dredging the river's bottom. I guess they found another way to get the gold out of The Mint.