climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker
Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic
I ran into the U.S. ambassador to Canada in the upper library after dinner. I told him that my mother immigrated from Czechoslovakia to the United States and became a citizen there, and he suggested we get a photo:
When I told her that she now lives in Vancouver, he asked me to tell her: “Things in America are getting better, and the president is going to win”.
I have some preliminary photos taken around Massey College on Flickr. You can see them all at once now or watch them appear as photos of the day during the next while.
New photos:
My friend Janel provided valuable assistance in frog-spotting and reflector-holding, for the creation of the first set.
Some interesting advice on photographing people from Sara Lando, directed at serious photographers. Much of it is about handling photographic subjects.
My father and I will be in Montreal until Saturday, visiting my brother Sasha.
On the way up from Toronto, we stopped at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station. Unfortunately, there are no tours of the main complex. We were able to wander around the general area, as well as visit an information centre.
I put some photos on Flickr. Later, I got some of a ‘casserole’ protest in Montreal, near Rue St. Denis.
As part of Doors Open Toronto 2012, my friend Mike and I took a tour of the Portlands Energy Centre: a natural-gas-fired peaker power plant located slightly south and east of downtown Toronto.
This is a combined cycle plant with two gas turbines and a steam turbine. Together, they are about 60% efficient at turning the chemical energy in natural gas into electricity. The plant is a peaker, which means it can be started at reasonably short notice to add power to the grid when demand exceeds supply (summer air conditioning creates Toronto’s highest demand peaks).
The plant puts out 550 megawatts of electricity. The peak temperature inside the gas turbines is about 600˚C, and the output from the steam turbine is at about 80˚C (for all those Carnot efficiency fans out there). Neat fact: steam turbines work on the same principle as hurricanes.
I took about 200 photos inside, and I will be posting the best of them to Flickr once I have processed them.
[Update: 10:21pm] The first few shots are on Flickr: Portlands Energy Centre – Doors Open Toronto.
[Update: 2:25am] Done with all the RAW files. Post-processing takes a lot of time!
Some helicopter seeds I saw the other day
Can anyone identify the specific plant?
After much procrastination and delay, I have uploaded the last of the photos from my trip to Boston with Sasha.
These are pretty much all straight from the camera, whether the camera in question is a dSLR, a point and shoot, or my iPhone. I definitely get more photography done when I keep post-processing to a minimum. Unaltered photos are probably more informative anyhow, though perhaps less beautiful or technically perfect.
Boston was a thoroughly welcoming city and a place which I really enjoyed my time in.
It would be nice to get the chance to live there at some point.
Sasha and I are exploring Boston. Right now, we are in the Stata Center at MIT.
As I find WiFi hotspots, I am uploading preliminary photos from my iPhone to my Flickr feed. Better photos from the 5D will come later.
