Sully Syed

Last week Christabel and I purchased three large (20.7" x 32") prints from Justin Van Genderen‘s Minimalist Planets collection on Imagekind.com. We then had them mounted onto foam core at The Allen Gallery (with a turnaround time of two days).

At his home in Palm Springs, McQueen practices his aim before heading out for a shooting session in the desert.

– LIFE.com – Steve McQueen: 20 Never-Seen Photos, Mar 20, 2010

Yesterday Samsung’s mobile phone division sponsored a short but sweet outdoor concert starring the very excellent Metric.

The band hit the stage at 7:15 PM and played a tight fifty minute set before taking their final bows and disappearing. Front St. was closed in both directions in front of Union Station where they performed; most of these photos are taken while standing on the concrete median in between the two directions for traffic. Before and during the show, Samsung representatives circulated through the crowd to demonstrate the Samsung iPhone Galaxy S, which looks like a pretty decent Android OS phone. I hope Samsung’s marketing department decides this was a good way to promote their products, companies should be encouraged to put on more free summertime concerts.

Lately I’ve only been taking pictures with Christabel’s new Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. Here are a bunch of photos taken at Toronto’s newest beachfront, Sugar Beach.

My walk home on the 29th was so beautiful that the next morning, hoping for a repeat of the same weather, I carted my 40D with me to work and back, taking photos all the way. Here are the results.

Photo #1: In the morning, I walk a half block south to King St. E and ride four or five stops to Bay St. (The somewhat leaner Canadian version of Wall Street.) The first photo is taken right after I’ve gotten off, having turned on my heel to take a photo of the streetcar that delivered me there.
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I spent my Christmas holidays in New Zealand with my girlfriend and her family. We flew Air New Zealand from Toronto -> Vancouver -> Auckland, and Auckland -> Los Angeles -> Toronto on the return trip. It’s an breaktakingly beautiful country in the middle of its summer season – coming back to -25C weather was rough.

I’ve still got a few photos left to post from my last couple of days there, but here’s 9/10ths of what we snapped. Enjoy!

If the slideshow embedded into the page doesn’t show up above, click this link to view it in its own window.

If I was the type of guy who framed and hung vintage photographs in his home, I’d put this one up. How ridiculously cool is this lady?

So I was doing some Web browsing before leaving for work this morning on the RedFlagDeals.com Forums, trying to find links to local art shops I could buy frames at, and came across a post asking where frames could be found for his The Rasterbator project. His inspiration were these two images:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? The Rasterbator’s website offers free software that you can download and use to “create huge, rasterized images from any picture. Add an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size.”

As a big fan of the now-concluded television series Battlestar Galactica, my inspiration was this:

Here’s how my attempt worked out.

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I’ve mentioned this technique to a number of people I know and referred them a couple of websites for an explanation. Most of the time I need to then discuss what those explanations meant. This is my attempt to create a simplified explanation of the technique known was “exposing (to the) right”. I thought I’d share it here as well – and create a discussion of its pros and cons.

Introduction

So you’ve become a pretty competent photographer with your digital SLR camera. You know how to balance shutter speed, aperture and ISO to capture the kind of scene you want in your photos. Now it’s time to start looking for efficiencies. How can you capture more detailed, less noisy images with the equipment you already have?

One technique that’s made inroads as referred to as “exposing (to the) right”. The term is named thus because use of the technique leads to the histogram representation of the image being shifted to the right on the X axis (which is mapped to the brightness level of the photo). But to understand why we would want to expose to the right, first we need to learn a little more about how your digital SLR camera captures that image.

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I’m giving serious thought to a purchase of the watch in the centre (click to enlarge):

So with help from the fine folks at the WatchUseek Forums, it turns out the the watch I’m looking at is is an Omega Electric Constellation Chronometer, model number ST 3980803, priced at 117.50 pounds back in 1973 (the latter info care of Old-Omegas.com). It contains a Bulova patent tuning fork module and is commonly referenced to by “f300″, referring to the 300 oscillations per second the resonator within the watch vibrates at.

Now let’s see if the watch store I spotted this fine piece at will make a deal. $450, take it or leave it…

Update: My bargaining couldn’t net me a deal better than $690 final as their best offer; I walked.

Update II: I returned to the scene of the crime on November 19, 2007. After some yet further bickering I made the purchase for a significant amount less than the number quoted above. It truly is in incredible condition and is slowly becoming my daily wearer (the Kenneth Cole’s battery keeps dying prematurely).

I’ve included an expanded writeup on this particular watch below. There’s also a fantastic article about the Omega f300 series of watches over at DeskDivers.com that’s worth reading.