YGingras^.net

You would think that anyone doing business in Québec would have been bitten often enough by string encoding problems that by now, they would have standardized their pipeline on UTF-8. You would be wrong.

Seen at Canadian Tire.

If you write code, you should know that encoding must be explicit. You can't dodge this question. I would understand if you didn't want to specify the encodings all over the place. That's why as soon as a string falls under your control, you should convert it to UTF-8 and use only that internally. Go and sin no more.

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Right on time to object recent taser abuses, there was a police brutality protest this afternoon in Montréal. Unfortunately, after a few friendly snowballs, the police decided to charge.

After a hard day of running after protesters, policemen enjoyed pizza while the crowd was shivering.

Of course, Pior was right there with me testing his new camera.

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Here I am, in Québec City for a week, with not much to do but to eat poutine and to take pictures. I decided to get up early and to sneak up on some unattended roof in order to catch the sun rise. Well... It's quite fortunate that I discovered align_image_stack because it seems that I'll have to do without a tripod.

In case the glare prevented you from noticing, my crazy tripod lost its head.

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I hacked on my HDR pipeline. What I have now provides some automation but it's still really fragile and generally ugly. Nevertheless, I can now process a few gigabytes of pictures without clicking like crazy until I get RSI.

The first part was to automatically combine multiple exposure into HDR images. Discovering which pictures are multiple exposure of the same scene is theoretically quite easy. All the exif tags should be the same except for the exposure, which should be decreasing, and the time spawn of all the pictures should be no more than exposure time plus shutter lag. It gets complicated when you add the fact that my camera sometimes implements bracketing by decreasing ISO sensitivity instead of shortening the exposure time. That and PIL's miserable support for exif.

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Back from Québec City where I visited my brother's brand new child, Charlie Gingras.

Thanks to the convenient location of the bus station, I had the occasion the take a few pictures of the Vieux-Québec.

This is my first serious panorama. I scanned the scene in program shift mode, compute the average exposure and shot with brackets in full manual mode. I aligned the images with autopano-sift, stitched with hugin, blended with enblend, tone mapped with qtpfsgui, and post processed with the Gimp. Be sure to have a look that the full size version before you decide if you like it or not.

I don't know how to get rid of the stitching lines in the sky; maybe I should just replace it with a gradient. I'm satisfied with the post processing but I have a lot of work to do on composition. Not too bad for a first attempt.

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Tonight, we had the last lunar eclipse until 2010. The sky was clear in Montréal but it was really cold. That was a great show. I was able to snap a few pictures but the low level translated in either noisy high ISO or in exposure so long that it captured motion blurred light trails. Ah well, that gives me two year to buy better equipment.

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After many passionate conversations about photography with Pascal, I decided to upgrade my digital camera. I didn't feel quite ready, technically and financially, for the full power of DSLR but I definitely wanted to try my hands on the expressiveness of manual mode. I retired my Nikon L10 and I'm now the proud owner of a Sony H9.

It features a huge LCD and given it's zooming power, it's quite lite. It also has a bunch of manual controls. One thing that I really wanted was bracketing. I had tried to do HDR with my L10 but you need to fiddle with the control dial to change the exposure. There is no way you can to that without moving the camera and the slightest movement will ruin a HDR image; all my previous attempts where just a bunch of splotchy messes. Now, at last, I can do it. I mean, it just works, and the result is... Wow!

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It was a shock the first time a friend of mine became parent; suddenly, is wasn't all fun and games anymore. I had seen friends committing themselves to long term projects, but raising children is the kind of project that you can't relinquish when you get bored.

It was quite a shock when my brother announced that he was to have a child. My parents were delighted that their lineage would not end with my brothers and me.

Last weekend I went to Québec City for a family diner. That's when they asked me to be the godfather. What a shock!

Tony, my brother, lives with Julie, his girlfriend, in a cute little house in Deschambault, which happened to be in the middle of nowhere. They are really proud of Deschambault's authentic general store, a charming little place featuring a mini museum of old times retailing.

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