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Forum: Travel, Events, and Groups
03-29-2024, 02:23 PM
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That's a bigger problem, especially if you like to take high enough quality photos to be able to show them off. Smoke haze can cover half the continent from a fire that only covers a few hundred square miles. Sunset photos will look nice, but air quality has a huge impact on the quality of light in your photos, which often doesn't become noticeable until you start downloading and processing your photos. The quality of light in the Rockies on a good day will blow you away.
---------- Post added 03-29-24 at 03:35 PM ----------
The shortest route is Bellingham, WA to Sumas, WA to Abbotsford, BC, then the Trans-Canada to Hope and the Coquihalla to Kamloops. Divided highway all the way except for Bellingham to Sumas. It will take a major disaster to shut down any part of that route, but the alternative is to cross the Cascade Mountains to Wenatchee, WA, turn north to Osoyoos, BC and continue north through the Okanagan to Kamloops. If you don't mind a very long day of driving, that will probably be the most scenic diversion you will ever take.
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Forum: Travel, Events, and Groups
03-24-2024, 03:51 PM
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I haven't driven through the Rockies since December 2023 (the typical November blizzard missed most of Western Canada and brown Christmases were relatively common), but east of the Rockies, abundant snowfall since January has provided normal to above normal snow cover in most areas The key word is variable, we are talking about a lot of geography and the actual impact of wildfires in any specific part of that chunk of the globe is going to be wildly unpredictable.
Any area that had wildfires last year is highly unlikely to suffer the same fate this year even if spring turns out to be as dry as last year; all the deadwood that fuels a fire has been cleaned up by natural processes.
Anyone driving through the mountains who can afford to take an extra 6-10 hours to get to their destination has alternate routes to take to avoid any potential roadblocks. Homes are less mobile than automobiles and people like to place their homes close to fuel supplies for wildfires, but a holiday traveller shouldn't lose any sleep as long as they pay attention to news reports.
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Forum: Lens Clubs
03-09-2024, 08:33 AM
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It looks like a single light (only one pole), but perhaps there are are a pair of bulbs or a wide light source at the end of the pole. Some other lenses will produce similar star bursts from a single light source, due to their specific combination of glass elements (at narrow apertures, the DA 18-135 is one example), but unless this particular DA 15 is at variance with other DA 15's, I don't think that explains it.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
10-14-2023, 09:48 AM
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Kakabeka Falls is the second highest waterfall in Ontario (Niagara Falls is the highest) and in October, the amount of water going over the falls is greatly diminished. The Kaministiquia River ends up in Lake Superiour and water flowing out of Lake Superiour eventually ends up going over Niagara Falls. I think someone else has already posted images of Kakabeka Falls in this thread, but it was far enough back that I thought I would post my shots from a road trip this week.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
04-09-2023, 07:52 PM
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Sometimes swapping primes doesn't make a lot of sense; here is @28mm, 40mm and 88mm.
I bounced on camera flash off the ceiling using P-TTL, with varying results; fortunately some graduated radial brightening in post processing came to the rescue. Trying to take pictures of the two little girls with a complicated lighting setup would have been a disaster, better to try to keep things casual and impromptu.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
12-01-2023, 10:37 PM
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Thanks for your kind words, I've been offline for a few days and just catching up. I use photography to create souvenirs of what I've seen, so there is always a story behind my photos. Sometimes the story is only of interest to myself, but I like posting on this forum because every once in a while someone else finds it interesting too.
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Forum: Lens Clubs
10-14-2023, 10:04 AM
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Two photos of Old Woman Bay on Lake Superior. The first was taken September 5, 2016.
The second was taken October 9, 2023. There are still plenty of tourists stopping here during the Labour Day weekend in September, not so many during Canadian Thanksgiving in October.
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
10-14-2023, 09:34 AM
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I haven't travelled much this year, but I had to make a 6000 km round trip to get my son's household goods out of storage. I would pull over at various scenic viewpoints to get out and stretch and had my camera on the front seat beside me.
Any Canadian alive in 1981 should recognize which Canadian hero this is a statute of. Picture taken at the Terry Fox Monument on the east side of Thunder Bay, not too far from where he ended his Marathon of Hope.
This view of Lake Superiour (with a few iron ore freighters at anchor) is from in front of the monument. I don't have a prime in the 28-31 mm range (the first photo above is at 28mm) and even though I do have a DA 70 in my bag, the DA 18-135 allows me to take short telephoto shots without having to change lenses.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
10-28-2023, 06:16 PM
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That particular tractor was used by 2 different long distance moving drivers before it was passed on to me. The other drivers didn't think it was reliable enough, it had less than 500,000 kms when I started using it (21 months later it has less than 530,000 kms). The longer wheelbase because of the bunk is of no benefit for what I do (although I can take 4 passengers with me, so it has served as a crew van on a couple of occasions), but this 2015 Cascadia is a huge upgrade over the '98 Mack that was originally assigned to me.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
10-27-2023, 09:46 PM
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Taken with my phone, because I don't take my camera bag to work. I don't do long distance moves, but part of my job as a trailer monkey is to drop trailers for local moves. $1.5 million house on a golf course in a closed community, shares a U-shaped side road with two other houses, which allowed me to bend the trailer around the Blue Spruce tree without driving on any lawns. The ramps off the back of the trailer are placed on the front landing, so the swampers don't have to walk so far uphill.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
10-22-2023, 03:29 PM
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Unbelievable. What kind of a maroon backs his trailer out of a parking spot instead of into it. Just your luck he somehow managed to get to the truck stop before you without having an accident on the way.
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Forum: Mini-Challenges, Games, and Photo Stories
10-19-2023, 06:31 PM
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Typical scene on divided highways out here on the prairies. Lots of LCVs (Long Combined Vehicles), because one driver can pull two 53 foot trailers. In Saskatchewan, triples are allowed under very limited conditions.
 20170404-_IGP7430 by Rick Glasel, on Flickr
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Forum: Weekly Photo Challenges
08-19-2023, 06:09 PM
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I was trying to get pictures of ghosts, a five second exposure while the traffic was waiting for the lights to change and pedestrians were approaching the crosswalk seemed to work the best.The foliage in the immediate foreground was hit by gusts of wind coming off the river (the grass in the lower left and the leafy branches in the upper right); I was also trying to contrast the motion blur with the various man-made objects that were solidly fixed in place.
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Forum: Weekly Photo Challenges
08-05-2023, 09:21 PM
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Definitely photographed in the wild (the west side of Prince Albert National Park), the Tiger Lily is the official provincial flower where I live.
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Forum: General Photography
07-08-2023, 09:43 AM
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I would like to see the IBIS/ILIS system that works for 40 second handheld exposures. This isn't video stabilization that merely needs to keep the person watching from getting disoriented; for astro-photography, the image needs to be stabilized well enough to keep the stars and other astronomically distant light sources well-defined.
In terms of patent protection, you can't patent general procedures or processes; even a specific algorithm is very difficult to enshrine as intellectual property. More likely that Manufacturer B decides it is more effective to licence Manufacturer A's fully developed implementation than developing a new one from scratch. Most patents are filed to prevent Manufacturer C from selling blatant copies of Manufacturer A's work.
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Forum: Weekly Photo Challenges
06-23-2023, 07:24 PM
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Ruckle Provincial Park on Saltspring Island. The EXIF is wrong, the lens was a Rokinon 8mm lens, not 10mm. I can't remember if my camera doesn't have a setting of 8mm for manual focus lenses, or if I just didn't bother to correct my camera.
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Forum: Pentax News and Rumors
03-18-2023, 10:34 AM
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In a very real sense, the small crew at Pentax is already immersed in this mindspace. Today, DSLRs are one step into vintage territory and the various J Limited projects and knick-knacks show a keen sense of customizing accessories where the aesthetic is more important than the technology.
The manual vs. power winder is a small aspect of the whole shooting film experience, but is important in determining how to design a film camera for people weaned on digital photography. Speaking from experience, a power winder can make film photography much more expensive; when there wasn't a digital option and you needed to shoot in continuous mode, the power winder was an essential tool, otherwise, it led to wasted exposures that couldn't be checked until the entire roll was developed. If you felt extravagant and decided to waste a couple of rolls in the hope of getting a couple of serendipitous gems, well you knew what your pleasure was going to cost and we tend to get more value from our spending when we can plan for the expense. Also, a manual winder requires an extra level of preparation for taking a photograph; you can't press the shutter at exactly the right time unless you have already advanced the film. If you are using a fully automatic point and shoot film camera, there is as little preparation required as shooting with your phone camera and none of the instant gratification that you get with digital photography. Not a good experience, especially if you can only compare it to digital photography.
If Ricoh Imaging is going to sell new film cameras to people who have no experience of shooting film, manual film advance makes lots of sense. There is no point in trying to emulate digital photography, it is better to introduce customers to the thoughtful, preplanned and patient kind of photography offered by film, by starting with the film loading and film advance steps. I find it encouraging to see that Ricoh Imaging seems to "get" what is truly special about shooting film and understands what technical factors determine that. The Pentax Film Project has the potential to be a gateway into a new market that will eventually end up looking to digital Pentax and Ricoh products in order to get more of those "special" photographic experiences.
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Forum: General Talk
06-10-2023, 09:22 PM
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The maximum working length of fibre optic cable varies depending on the material used for the fibre core (short TOSLINK -digital audio- cables and cables used in automotive applications sometimes have plastic cores instead of glass), the cladding over the core, the strength of the laser on the transmitting end and the sensitivity of the photodetectors on the receiving end. High quality fibre with a low-dispersion glass core can be used for more than 60 miles without a repeater.
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Forum: General Talk
06-10-2023, 05:29 PM
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Several fibre optic cables could fit inside a rugged outer casing, the fibres themselves are very flexible and don't need shielding, just protection from the outside world. Played with fibre optic gear in the late eighties, it's awesome stuff, it is just the light to electrical signal interfaces that make it more expensive than copper wiring. In a factory with lots of EMI, fibre optics eliminate lots of technical problems.
Back to the HDMI transmission over distance, the right kind of cable can go 100' without any problems. However those cables might not be flexible enough to install in tight spaces and like CAT 5/6 cable, if you simply connect cables together with wall jacks or adapters without some kind of amplification, you might encounter problems.
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Forum: Weekly Photo Challenges
06-03-2023, 07:50 PM
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I don't know if I have a favourite bird; the Canada Jay/Whiskey Jack/Camp Robber is definitely not a favourite of mine, but this is probably my favourite bird picture. This juvenile was watching me prepare supper in a campground at Haines Junction, Yukon. They will steal food right off your table if you walk away.
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Forum: Weekly Photo Challenges
05-28-2023, 06:43 PM
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I grew up about 30 miles from the end of civilization in west-central Alberta; I remember taking an old motorbike down lease roads (more like trails) and encountering bears and elk. That's not what I'm posting a picture of; if I got dropped in the middle of the boreal forest or even an inaccessible valley in the mountains, I could survive for several days. I took a guided tour to the Tusipono Embera village in the Panamanian jungle 10 years ago; even though the place where we boarded the dugout canoes is only about an hour from the skyscrapers of Panama City, if I got left behind on the Chagres River, I'd be lucky to survive until nightfall.
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Forum: General Talk
05-27-2023, 01:17 PM
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You can get more detail (including a detailed explanation of the mathematical formula) from this Wikipedia article.
The hype about AI is just the latest version of mass hysteria caused by people who know a lot about very little and then try to use their one-dimensional expertise to lord it over people who know very little about anything.
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Forum: Digital Processing, Software, and Printing
05-10-2023, 08:57 PM
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FWIW, this bug is definitely on Mozilla's radar. The second last post has a screenshot of settings that worked for one user at least.
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Forum: Weekly Photo Challenges
05-08-2023, 07:22 PM
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The kit lens with my K-30 was a DA L 18-55. The camera and lens were an early birthday/fathers day gift in June 2012 and my only other lenses at the time were a couple of manual focus lenses I had been using with my Super Program; at least until April 2013 when I purchased a DA 18-135. During that time frame, my kit lens went on a balloon trip and ground level trips to British Columbia, Arizona, Jamaica and Panama. I had a polarizing filter for the 18-55 (and not for the 18-135 for several years), so I put the 18-55 in my camera bag for another four months after getting the 18-135, but after that, the 18-55 went into a cupboard and hasn't come out since.
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Forum: Photographic Technique
05-06-2023, 10:00 AM
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Your shots of the Crazy Horse Memorial and Mount Rushmore are an order of magnitude better than the shots I got in the summer of 2014. I'm going to post two shots from that vacation that hopefully will make the point that hard and fast rules should be ignored. Photography is a matter of first, seeing something you want to capture, second, quickly deciding on how you are going to capture what you see and third, using the results to guide your future photographic decisions. You will never get perfect results, but sometimes you get results that turn out better than expected and over time, unexpectedly good results will come more frequently.
Taken in Program mode, for whatever reason my camera decided f5.0 was going to be the aperture. I learned a long time ago that if you have something in the foreground that you want to feature, get it in focus and don't worry about the background. I do try to use hyperfocal distance with wide angle shots, but for normal and telephoto perspectives it just isn't worth the hassle. This is also an illustration why carrying a tripod with you might not be practical.
Taken at f10, detail and sharpness have more to do with natural contrast and light than your camera settings. I've cropped out half of the original 16MP image taken with the DA 18-135 at 135mm, but you can zoom in on it in Flickr and I won't be embarrassed.
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