The World As It Is (was in 1836 anyway)

I own a lot of books. I mean thousands and thousands. I was given a few when I was a child and a few more since then but most of them I bought myself and they have tended to accumulate. Once in a while I have gotten rid of a few of them. Sometimes I have regretted doing so and Ihave never gotten rid of enough to make a big difference.

Probably the oldest book I own is called "The World As It Is: Containing a view of the present condition of its principal nations." It was written by Samuel Perkins and published, in its second edition, by Thomas Bellknap in 1836.

I bought the book almost fourty years ago in Belleville, Ontario when the Quinte Bookshop was closing down. It cost me a quarter. The owner of the store, Joy Nicholls, told me, I think, that it had belonged to her father. She was a little reluctant to see it go but she sold it to me.

She had run the bookshop on Bridge Street for a long time but she had decided it was time to retire. It was not a big place and the selection was not extensive. The service was personal and old fashioned. I remember her starting a special order for me which involved a handwritten letter. One of her big markets had been Grade 13 textboks back in the days when students had to buy their own books for that last year of high school. It goes without saying that I would never have addressed her as Joy, only as Miss Nicholls.

The book is in reasonable condition with more than four hundred pages of small print and engravings. Many of its pages are only slightly discoloured thanks to its publication before the invention of paper made from wood fibres which needed to be processed with acid.

The book is American in origin and viewpoint. It is patriotic and full of enthusiasm for the United States and the ideals under which it was founded:  "Every citizen enjoys equal privileges. His life, liberty and property are alike under the protection of the law. No person, however high his station, can trespass upon the rights of the humblest, without subjecting himself to make ample satisfaction."

Naturally, the word citizen in the quote means "white citizens"; the book notes that the inhabitants of the United States are of four classes: white citizens, free persons of color, slaves and Indians. Much of the language in the book reflects a fundamentally racist view but the author wrote honestly about the problems of "free blacks". For example, he mentions that people desired to set up colleges to provide a liberal education to free blacks and noted that no community "has been found willing to have such an institution in its neighbourhood".
The almanac has a lot of the kinds of details that endear a book of this nature to those who enjoy them. Much about the consititions of the individual states, their cities, manufacturers, religions and schools. To someone used to modern almanacs and books of facts, it seems odd that so much data is presented in narrative instead of tabular form.
The book covers the rest of the world. The British Empire gets a lot of pages although very few of them are devoted to what it is now Canada The author notes that some people have some reservations about Britain: "Its speedy bankruptcy and dissolution was long ago predicted, in consequence of its enormous national debt". However the Mr. Perkins is more optimistic himself, "Although it is certain that her national debt can never be paid; and that many of the principles on which her government rests are unfounded; and although the crown must in the usual course of events soon be placed on the head of a female now fourteen years of ago, entirely incompetent to understand or manage the concerns of the nation, a mere burlesque upon government; yet her duration for a long period on the present basis is confidentialy expected".
When I first strarted reading the book, that reference to the person who become Queen Victoria was the one that struck me the most. I was prepared for most of the prevailing attitudes and prejudices of the time but not to think of the Old Queen as a helpless incompetent.

Looking out the front door at night

For the past few days most of my pictures have been of the open water in the Moose River resulting from some unseasonably warm weather. There were still boats in the water on November 26th and probably will be for a day or two more.

It is a bad idea to focus on one subject to the exclusion of everything else and while I do want to document the unusual conditions on the river I wanted to get pictures of something else.

I looked out my front door tonight and was impressed by the view across the river. The clouds over Moose Factory were lit up and were reflected on the surface of the Moose River.

Took a few shots.

Nothing hard about taking these, camera on tripod with exposures of a few seconds and focus at infinity.

When I take shots at night the choice of white balance makes a big difference. Setting the proper white balance for a pictures is basically deciding which object should look white (or gray) and making sure it does in the picture. Most cameras come with a variety of preset white balances for common situations such as daylight, cloudy, flash, fluorescent and tungsten light bulbs.

This works pretty well when you have a scene that is lit up by a single type of light (e.g. daylight or flash). It gets trickier when there are lights of different types shining on objects in the scene.

Night time pictures in town are often illuminated by the ugly light of street lights. The worst are sodium yellow lights.

At nighttime the source of light can be the moon. That one is easy since the moon is, mostly of the time, pretty close in colour to sunlight, just softer and much weaker.

Tonight was cloudy and there was no moon visible. Everything in the foreground of my pictures is lit by street lights. What about the rest of the scene?

For one picture (the one that looks bluer) I decided that the clouds should be white and set the white balance that way. That is not the way the scene looked but it does a reasonable job on the grass in foreground.

I wondered why it works and realized that the clouds which were providing most of the light in the middle and background were lit up by the street lights in Moose Factory which are likely pretty similar to the ones in Moosonee. Taking white balance off them is almost the same as taking a white balance off the street lights here.

The funny thing with light from street lights is that things look yellow to people. Our eyes have a limited ability to compensate for the colour of light that is present and sodium vapour lights are just too far away from normal for this to work.

My camera choose a white balance that produced a picture that was much more intense than what I saw (the reddish picture). I changed the white balance in the other shot (first one in this blog) to make it look more the way the scene appeared to me.

You can fiddle with white balance in most image editing programs but the most flexible way to do is to shoot RAW pictures and do the conversion to JPG on the computer. RAW pictures do not have a defined white balance. The camera suggests one but you can set it to anything you like. Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras almost always can take RAW pictures. Some point and shoots can as well, e.g. the Canon S90. The drawback of RAW shooting is that the files are much bigger since they contain all of the data that camera picked up instead of a particular impression of it. I started out to write that there is no image compression but realized I needed to qualify that and say that it is a lossless compression. All of the data is preserved and just stored more efficiently. JPGs are compressed and the more you compress them the more data is lost.

Online in Moosonee in the early 90s and before.

Today, everybody uses the internet. We take for granted that we have local high speed access to websites from all over the world.
Well, most of us do. There are still some remote communities where the internet is available only by very slow dial up connections or by satellite. I hope that will change very soon because having fast internet is, by definition, a good thing.
It was not always so. Public and local access to the internet arrived in Moosonee in 1996. The local telephone company, then called ONTEL (hence ONLINK) and now ONTERA starting providing dial up access that year. It would seem slow to someone used to using high speed but it was an amazing thing to have.
One of the best things about ONLINK was that it was a local number. Before it started up, anyone who wanted to use the internet had to either belong to a privileged group that had access via an 800 number or pay for long distance.
In the early 90s the internet was just transitioning to the World Wide Web. All kinds of text based systems were still in use, developed in the era of dial up where nobody could afford the bandwidth for fancy graphics.
Dial up access uses a modem connected to a telephone line.
The first time I ever saw a modem was in the mid or late 1970s. We got a portable terminal with a keyboard and a printer that used thermal paper. It had an acoustic coupler, something that you laid your phone into (remember all phones were identical in those days) and listened for the sounds of access. It worked at 300 bps or roughly 30 characters per second.
I think the first modem I bought for myself, around 1985, was a very impressive 1200 bps, a big improvement over the old 300 modems. I used it to connect with computer bulletin boards. These were basically computers that had one or more modems. You could dial one up and leave messages or files and pick up files from other people.There were literally millions of them at one time.
I also used Compuserve, a commercial dialup service and Quicklaw, a legal research service.
The big problems with these things was the cost. It came in two parts:  long distance bills and hourly charges. I think that I figured out that it cost $20 an hour to use Compuserve once you factored in the phone bills. Quicklaw was more like $150 an hour via an 800 number but fortunately, I was not paying for that myself. Still I found that I was paying out a couple hundred or more dollars a month to be online for ten to fifteen hours per month.
The early online services, while expensive, were great for keeping up to date on topics of interest. In my case these were mostly related to computers and amateur radio.
One thing I never thought of doing was setting up a bulletin board system (BBS) in Moosonee. That idea came from Colleen Kappel. She was a teacher at Moosonee Public School with whom I was teaching a computer course for teachers in 1993-94.
We first setup up a BBS using software called TinyHost that was just for the students in the course. This was well received even though not too many people had their own modems (or computers).

That BBS led to BayNet. This was open to anyone who wanted to call in and ran on a computer in Colleen's spare bedroom. It started off with one local number in Moosonee and eventually got a second line and a toll free number. The Mushkegowuk Council put up the money to pay for the computer and the telephone service. That was a major contribution -- the telephone bills were sometimes hundreds of dollars a month. But, it meant that people from the James Bay coastal communities had access. Other organizations also contributed to the service.

BayNet had messaging (people who used it could leave messages for each other), some pretty unimpressive games and forums or discussion areas. The forums included Computers, Cree Language, Education,General Interest, Internet, Language Arts, Legal Issues ("Ask a lawyer"), Music, Native Studies, Radio, Adult Literature, Children’s Literature, Nature, OPS Teachers Federation, Professional Development, School News, Special Education, Student News, Student Penpals, Swap Shop (Buy & Sell), Teacher and Videos. I suppose you could tell from that list that BayNet was operated by a teacher and a lawyer.

As the internet grew more popular, but still unavailable locally, we looked at ways of integrating it with BayNet. These would have been fairly expensive and probably quite limited. But, lots of BBS systems acted as portals to the internet for their users.
As soon as local access to the internet arrived, there was no point in running BayNet and it was shut down.

Watching the docks get taken out

There are things that happen on a regular basis, year after year. One of them is the taking out of the docks as winter approaches. Despite having lived in Moosonee for more than a quarter of a century I had never witnessed this. The obvious reason is that this task happens during daylight hours and during daylight hours I am sitting behind a desk.

This year I was lucky. I was looking outside and heard some geese. Could not see them but noticed a small Moosonee Transport Limited (MTL) tug near the public docks. Grabbed camera and came back out. The tug or utility boat was towing a group of sections of dock down the river, headed for winter storage. I got some shots of the tug and the dock sections as they headed by me.

Walked down to what was left of the public docks to wait for the boat to come back for the rest of them. I took some shots of the tug coming towards and tying up at the docks but then the operations took a break. The tug does not look immensely bigger than the canoes that are regularly on the river but it is a totally different kind of craft. The patterns of its waves were fascinating, especially when it was right in front of me and I could see how much water it was pushing out of the way.

I guess I could have gone back later to watch the rest of the docks get towed away but I figured that by coming out when I did I had pretty much seen the whole show and headed home.

In past years, when the removal of the docks was part of a contract handed out by the government from far away, the docks often came out much too early. Timing had nothing to do with local conditions and everything to do with the convenience of a contractor from out of town. Now that the Town of Moosonee has taken over the "Port of Moosonee", it seems that the docks come out much later in the year. This is convenient for people travelling back and forth between Moosonee and Moose Factory. The taxi boats stay in the water well after there is floating ice but getting in and out of them is less and less fun at that point.

Scanning film on a Sunday night

I know that my future includes or should include endless hours of scanning film. In theory and often in practice the results of scanning film are far superior to scanning prints made from that film.
I have years and years of film and prints that I SHOULD catalog and organize and preserve.

Scanning prints is fast. I have three (hooked up) flatbed scanners and can load them up with prints and do four to six at a time. Prints, by which I mean typical colour 4 x 6 or smaller images do not have a lot of detail in them. Pretty much any scanner is reasonably capable of doing a good job and recovering all of the information in the print. I usually scan at 600 dots per inch which guarantees getting everything. There is not a lot to be gained by higher resolution, the detail is just not there.

Film is another story. A roll or two is about all I can stand doing in an evening. And, remember that I am no perfectionist who removes slides from the mounts and scans them in oil on a glass plate.

35mm slides shot with a decent camera can contain a lot of detail. I can scan at up to 5400 dots per inch to pick up all of the grain details.
Decent camera is a relative term. Tonight I scanned some shots done with a disposable (one time use) camera, some with a point and shoot (Olympus that conveniently printed the date on the negative) and some with a single lens reflect (Canon FTb). The disposable negatives are awful. The point and shoot shots were pretty good and the SLR shots were excellent (when I had the camera focused properly -- something that worked much better with younger eyes). I had forgotten how often we used disposable cameras, especially on trips where we didn't bring a camera. They are ok for making small prints but that is about it.
Dust is a big issue with scanning film. When I scan a print I am unlikely to blow it up very much. Dust is visible and fairly easy to remove. On film, tiny bits of dust show up as large defects when scans are enlarged.

There is some help from technology. Kodak has a product it sells to scanner manufacturers called Digital ICE (Digital Image Correction and Enhancement originally developed by Applied Science Fiction which was bought by Kodak). Digital ICE works in scanners that have both visible light and infrared sources.

I have a film scanner (the now discontinued Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400II) that uses Digital ICE.
Digital ICE does not work perfectly with the slide film that I generally used, Kodachrome. Kodachrome was a special Kodak slide film that has a cyan layer that absorbs infrared light.
The point of Digital ICE is to get rid of scratches and dust. This is a big timesaver with both negative film (used for prints) and slide film.
Nikon has a scanner (Coolscan 9000 ED) that it claims can handle Kodachrome.This is very attractive to anyone who has piles of Kodachrome films lying around. Unfortunately it goes for $2729 in Canada. That is almost three times as expensive as the slide scanner I am using now so I may go on getting rid of dust manually.
I also use a third party product called Vuescan. This is software which can operate almost any scanner and which seems able to do a pretty good job with most kinds of film. Because a lot of scanner models have been discontinued and do not have up to date software, Vuescan can be very useful since it can run under current operating systems such as Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6. Vuescan can be set to work with Kodachrome; it seems satisfactory.

Two great skies in a row

It's Sunday morning and I have just finished processing the pictures I took around sunrise. I looked out first about three quarters of an hour before dawn and the sky looked great so I grabbed a couple of shots from my front door and then got ready and headed out.

It was a couple of degrees below zero which is not cold if you are walking around but it gets to me a little when I am standing around taking pictures so I dress warmly.

The colours in the morning are best before sunrise when the sun is still below the horizon.

There is a bit of ice, nothing that is going to stop a boat but enough to remind me that we are living on borrowed times when it comes to open water.

Last night was great too. I noticed the sky when I was leaving the store (Moosonee is a small enough place that when you say "store" people know you mean Northern). A very kind person, Sharon Ross, saw me waiting with my groceries and gave me a ride home. That meant that I had time to grab a few shots of the sunset up the river.

I have been keeping my exposures down a bit when shooting sunrise and sunset. I have always tended to "shoot to the right", to make sure that my pictures have elements that show up at the right edge of the histogram. This means that the image, as recorded by the camera, should have bright things in it, even if the actual scene was not that bright. Things can always be darkened later. Sometimes I ended up with the nasty spike of overexposure. Yes, it can often be saved in Photoshop but I am finding that the colours are much better when I avoid that spike.

Shooting a meeting and a hockey game with a wedding camera

Warning: this posting has a lot of details about taking pictures and goes on and on about ISO's and f-stop's.

Tonight I went to a couple of events in Moosonee. Once was the 27th Annual General of the Moosonee Native Friendship Centre. This is an organization that I have been involved with, off and on and mostly on, since 1982. Every year the Centre puts on a meeting to present its progress to the community and let the members choose new members for the board of directors. I got nominated but declined but was really, really happy that Dechen Khangkar, the other lawyer in our office, accepted and got appointed. I spent 15 years on the Friendship Centre board and it was a very satisfying experience. I shot pictures at the meeting, mostly quick candids. Lots of shots of staff and artist John Reuben (shown here with Marguerite Wabano who is 105 years old) giving out door prizes as well as people sitting and listening intently to financial reports and brainstorming about a potential new housing project. I took no pictures of people eating or with food in their mouths although I was tempted.

After that, went home and switched lenses but not cameras. I put my Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS lens on a Canon 5DII. I had shot the meeting with the same camera with a 24-105mm f4 IS lens, mostly with flash.
The 5DII is a great camera, it is nice to work in full frame (sensor is same size as a piece of 35mm film so lenses act the same as they would on a film camera. That is great most of the time but for some things, the extra "zoom" from a camera with a smaller sensor is handy. Hockey is one of those times and tonight I was shooting Moosonee Men's Hockey.
At 70mm my lens gave a view of more than half the far end of the arena. At 200mm it was nowhere near as tight as I might have liked.
However, I crop a lot and usually post hockey in 2048 pixel size images so it is possible to get by.
The Moosonee Arena is not a bright place. Tonight I shot at ISO 6400 and started off at 1/500 of a second at f4. That was a little bit dark so switched to 1/400 of a second. Usually f4 instead of f2.8 gives a bit more depth of field which is nice. The pictures are a bit overexposed when it comes to the ice but pretty decent for the objects of interest, a bunch of fast moving men on skates.

I used a custom white balance taken from a whibal card, an expensive piece of gray plastic. The lights in the arena are not consistent, they seem to have two main colourations so alternate shots can look a bit different but the white balance is good enough.At times I have tried doing a white balance based on the ice but find that does not work too well.

I took more than 500 shots at the game so I shot jpg's. I processed them in Lightroom. There is no way that I was going to sit down and go through them and handle them individually in photoshop the way I might for a few very special pictures from a wedding or a sunrise. I picked 299 images including some of the scoreboard.

Most just needed cropping, some not even that. I moved around a bit at the game. I started up high on a ladder leading to a booth at one end, took some shots through the glass from one corner and from behind the goal and then got some from another corner and a few over the wall of one of the team benches.

Shooting through the glass is not always great. Reflections, odd colouration and blur from dirt and scratches are the order of the day. Tonight, I did not do much to the shots taken this way except to make them less soft by adding black.

When I see the amazing shots in Sports Illustrated where they are using a million watts of lighting so they can shot at small apertures I am very jealous. Even at f4 I am putting up with not much depth of field. But, it is better than f2.8 or f2.0. And sometimes, I rationalize keeping a shot where some of the players around the edges are a bit (a bit?) blurry on the grounds that I am taking the shots to show what happened.
Taking pictures of a hockey game is, for me, confusing. Biggest reason is that I do not know the first thing about hockey. I do not skate so I have never played myself. I lack the player's (or fan's) appreciation for what is going on. It just seems like a bunch of guys moving very fast. After taking pictures at maybe a dozen games I am still confused about what is going on. Perhaps I will get better but for now I find that I do not capture the "decisive moments". These for me would be the goals and the saves. I get a few but not enough.
As for the camera--the 5DII is not a sports camera. It only shoots at four frames per second so sequences of action do not always work out that well. I do not trust any of the focus points except for the centre one but it works reasonably well, after all, I am shooting bright and contrasty objects against a white background. But, the high ISO performance makes possible taking shots at a reasonable speed and then being able to use them, right out of the box. When I shot hockey with my Canon 1DIIN I did not dare go above ISO 1600. That meant that I had to up the exposure in processing with predictable results.
Sports cameras are expensive but I am dreaming about getting a 1DIV. I suspect it would be just as nice at ISO 6400 as the 5DII and likely better. If I could shoot with it at ISO 12800 I could up my speed a bit so pucks would look better or use f5.6 once in while. Of course, it would be nice to get back that higher shooting rate and faster focus.
Enough about equipment.