Off to watch the freight train

Moosonee sees two different trains: the Polar Bear Express which looks like a mixed train and shows up every weekday and a twice weekly freight train. I miss out on the train most of the train because I am at work. Today, I took a holiday and decided to get some shots of the freight train.

I used a Canon 5DII and my usual walk around lens, the 24-105mm L f4.

The Polar Bear Express operates on a schedule and is often, these days, pretty much on time. I am not keen on standing around for hours waiting for a train to show up (not a real serious railfan, I guess) so getting shots of the freight can be a little troublesome. Fortunately today I timed it just right and showed up at the station just as the train could be seen in the distance. Yes, I took a taxi and yes, I have lots of radios.

It was snowing more than a little bit but not that bad. The snow adds a blanket of blur to every picture especially for anything that is not up close. So when I am taking pictures of a train in the snow I can count on brilliant images of what is close to me with the far end of the train being an obscure dark blob. I guess that is art.

I got a few shots from the station and then, when the train stopped, headed closer to the bridge across Store Creek. The freight train is pretty long compared to the station platform. It arrives a couple of hours ahead of the Polar Bear Express so it can be switched out of the way.
The train today carried mostly boxcars, some flatcars with insulated pipe and a few other flatcars with vehicles that cannot be accommodated on the Polar Bear Express. Other days the consist can include fuel tankers and containers, sometimes double stacked.

Not a lot of photography so far this year

2010 has not been a big year for photography for me. I did something to my wrist which made it very uncomfortable to do simple things such as zooming and focusing if they involved turning anything and I got very busy at work over the holidays.
I missed out on some photographic opportunities because of my wrist. At times it seems a little better but then it reminds me of the agony it can cause when I go to do certain things.
I should be out taking a lot of pictures given that I have two new cameras, a Canon 7D and a Canon S90. Instead I have been sitting in my office moving pieces of paper around and typing stuff into the computer. Doing these things gives me a great feeling of professional accomplishment. However, taking pictures would be a lot more fun.
I have done some reading, on paper and online. One blog that I have started to read is called Canon Field Reviews by Ole Jørgen Liodden, a photographer in Norway. I first saw it when he was talking about the cold weather performance of the Canon 7D. That is a topic of considerable interest to me since I bought one and it is cold outside here in the winter.
Generally, the first thing to do in winter photography has been me, not the equipment. Battery life is an issue although it is easily handled by carrying an extra battery in a warm place. Usually I come inside when it is much below minus 20 or so although I have made some exceptions.
Liodden has an amazing video that demonstrate the cold weather tracking abilities of the 7D and also the obedient nature of his dog. That second item amazes me the most as I have never owned a dog that was so well trained as to sit still in a designated place.
He has also written a bit about a much more expensive camera, the Canon 1DIV. Buying one of those could put off my retirement for another couple of years but I suspect it would be worth it.

Yesterday I stuck my 2X extender and the 100-400mm on the 7D. This means that there is no autofocus as the maximum aperture is f11 (yes I have heard that you can tape the pins so the camera will try to focus but I decided to try manual focusing). I picked a dark day to shoot at f11. I tried to focus on the hydro towers a few miles up the river. My eyesight is not what it was thirty years ago but I think it almost worked. I shot at ISO 3200 so there is a bit of noise. I should try this on a brighter day; 800mm on the 7D is the equivalent of 1280mm on a full frame camera.

Second walk with the Canon S90

I had to go to the store today so decided to take along the S90 in case something presented itself to photograph.

Took the long way to the store and realized the Polar Bear Express was here for a special Sunday run to make up for there being no train on Christmas Day. Not only that but it was leaving a couple of hours early, at 3:00 p.m. which meant it would be leaving in daylight.

Headed over to the train station and grabbed some shots of the train. The one I liked best was a shot of a woman with two suitcases and a small child.

Walked past the head of the train and across the rail bridge to get a shot of the train as it left. Once again reminded of the short telephoto range (28-105mm) of the S90 when I took a shot of the train from the opposite side of the creek.

Decided to try a video. Got a little scared when I noticed an eyedropper that had something to do with changing the colours in a video. Could not figure out how to get rid of the icon but dialed it to zero which I hope avoided its effects.

S90 video is low res 640 x 480. I wish it was a bit better as I recently shot some videos at 1080p (1920 x 1280) and 720p (1280 x 720). While the increased resolution does not always show up online it is clearly visible in the source files.

I was happy with the S90 video of the Polar Bear Express and posted it on youtube.

Once again, I shot in both RAW and JPG. I used the JPG's for quick shots and processed the RAW's in Adobe Capture Raw. I stuck with the Camera Standard profile. I found myself getting better at dealing with chromatic aberration; at times it takes a surprising large blue shift when dealing quite large areas of blue colour that show up.

To illustrate this, I took a shot of the front of the train and posted it with and without chromatic aberration correction. I didn't apply any post capture sharpening to either so I posted a "normal" shot as well. The shot was taken at 6mm (28mm equivalent). Some areas are quite bad, I illustrated the problems in the lettering on the boxcar, the side of the switchstand and the beginning of the railing on the bridge.

Manually correcting for chromatic aberration is no fun and I would love to have an automatic solution. I have DXO which has a module for the S90 but unfortunately that module does not handle this problem.
I am not that fond of Digital Photo Professional; probably because I do not use it very much. DPP did a better job with chromatic aberration than Adobe did.

The day had a nice surprise in store. While walking home I ran into two talented photographers from Toronto, Melissa McCauley and Crimson Hosking. Melissa is originally from Moosonee and brought Crimson here to enjoy the subarctic winter and compare grocery prices. It was great to have a visit and some photographic fun with other people who habitually walk around with heavy camera bags on their backs.

Walking around with a small camera

One of the presents I opened yesterday afternoon was a new camera, a Canon S90.

This is a small camera, a point and shoot that still costs about $500 in Canada or $400 in the US.
I had wanted a pocketable camera, something that could be on my person without announcing its prescence to all the world and also produce pictures of reasonable quality.

The S90 shares its sensor with the Canon G11 which I also considered but decided that it was simply too big or at least too big to be handy.

I spent some time on Christmas reading the S90's manual. Endless options and complications of the sort that delight people who want to be able to adjust lots of things.
And, some nice features including a decent sensor, the ability to shoot RAW pictures, an interesting arrangement of controls including a control ring around the lens with variable functionallity, an f2.0 lens and the claimed ability to take pictures in low light (ISO 12800). On top of that, endless special modes for all conceivable kinds of photographic situations from fireworks to fish in aquaria.
I played around with it at home. Trying to get the hang of a few of the features could be frustrating at times but was helped by the explanations that showed up on screen when using menus.

I head out for a walk on a very mild Boxing Day; so mild that I even saw people playing road hockey in shorts. The biggest surprise was seeing a Sea Gull which should have been long gone. Trying to get a good shot of that bird reminded me that  the S90 has lens that is the equivalent of a 28-105mm lens on a 35mm camera. Nice for wide shots but not much good for small or distant things.

Boxing Day may be a day for big sales elsewhere but all but corner stores were closed up tight in Moosonee. People take their holidays seriously. Nobody was out shopping but lots of people were fishing.

What did I notice about the camera?

Well a couple of things frustrated right away. The camera has a built in flash. To call it up you need to head to the menu. To make it retract into the camera you need to go to the menu and turn off flash. You cannot just push it down or call it up with a finger.

Normally, I shoot in aperture priority mode. So I set the S90 to f5.6 figuring that that would be just as good as f8 on a DSLR and probably give a wider depth of field. There is a control on the back of the camera with multiple functions. It can rotate, can depress in any of four directions and has the Set/Function button in its middle. It is not stiff like the dials on DSLR's so it easily turns and I found that my chosen aperture had to be watched closely.

The day was not cold, just around freezing so not wearing gloves all the time was not a big hardship. But I soon realized that the S90 could not be operated with gloved hands at all, so it is not likely a cold weather camera for me.

I choose exposure compensation as the function for the control ring around the lens. It can also handle ISO, focal length (set of fixed lengths), etc. That was fairly handy, there was snow covering most of the ground and I needed to allow for that.

I shot in RAW and JPG. the files are good sized, this is a ten megapixel camera after all. I took about three dozen shots and came home with more than half a gigabyte of images.

I took a look at the RAWs and JPGs. One interesting point was that the JPGs were much darker, much more conservatively "exposed" or processed. In Adobe Camera Raw when I used specific camera settings (e.g. Camera Standard) the images closely matched the JPG's. Since it was a cloudy and dull day I did not really have a great range of exposures, not much at all in the way of highlights that might have been recovered in RAW. In fact I am not sure if any of the pictures really benefited from the extra file size of RAW. However, I did increase exposure in ACR so perhaps there was some point. Sometimes I did not care for the Camera Standard, a couple of times I thought its colour rendition was off and found that Camera Neutral a better choice.

Not surprisingly the camera has significant chromatic aberration and fringing. All lenses have this, to some extent, but this one took a fair amount of compensation. It showed up in the both the JPGs and the RAWs. I wonder why the camera does not try to fit it when it turns out JPGs.

I posted some shots from the camera. While it is obvious that they are not as good (not as much resolution, more noise) as those from a DSLR with a good lens, I wonder if they are good enough for typical purposes, e.g. posting on websites or small prints.
The S90 has a lot of features that I have barely begun to explore. In some ways I want two, perhaps contradictory, things from it. I want a point and shoot that takes no effort to use while producing good pictures and secondly I want a small camera that has the ability to let me control it completely both in how it takes the shot and how that shot is processed. The camera seems to satisfy the second, time will tell how well it satisfies the first.
If you are used to a DSLR then controlling a small camera is frustrating. Instead of things being done with convenient and sturdy controls you end up dealing with tiny buttons, tiny dials and the need to resort to menus for what might wish were easily accessible functions. The S90 is no exception. It does try hard to be easy to use and even has a programmable S button and the ability to set up user menus. Most of its menus and functions were easy to use although a few required a bit of manual reading.
This is not intended to be a review of what is a very complicated and powerful little camera. There are lots of those reviews out there. I have just written about my first walk around with the camera; if I get another decently warm day I may give it another try.

Chasing the sunset to the tracks

Sunset comes early this time of year, just a bit after 4 p.m. so I generally miss it since I am stuck behind a desk. However, today we had reduced hours so I got out a bit early and got some shots along the river with 7D and 300mm lens.

When I got the 7D about a week and a half ago one of the first shots I took with it was one of the trees on Butler Island with the 100-400mm lens at 400mm. Ugh! I was not that happy with the picture. Today I shot the same picture with the 300mm and found much more detail. I am still getting pictures at time that are too crunchy (clarity setting in Adobe Camera Raw) but this was an improvement. I posted a comparison composite.

It was getting dark but I tried for birds in flight. Probably too dark but a few shots that I was willing to post. The subject birds, Common Ravens, are challenging in two ways: they need a lot of exposure compensation (two stops) and they are difficult for focus (pretty featureless and dark).

There was surprisingly little snowmobile traffic but got a couple of shots of the one that went by headed towards the setting sun.

Lots of clouds meant a chance for an interesting sunset so I went inside and grabbed a 5DII with my usual walk around lens, 24-105mm IS.

A few shots up the river and then off on foot to figure out best place from which to shoot the sunset. This is not as easy as it sounds. Ideally I would like a place where I have a lot of empty space in front of me and no overhead wires. The best place would be on the other side of the river but I didn't have the time or inclination to head over.

I kept walking until I got the tracks by which time the sun was down but the sky was still interesting.

It was about 4:30 by the time I was standing beside the tracks so I decided I might was well wait and get a shot of the train which heads south at 5:00. It was getting darker very quickly. Decided to try a video at high ISO. It turned out very noisy, as expected, and I called it Night Train from Moosonee. As usual, it looks a lot better on my monitor than it does on youtube: viewed at home I can clearly see the smoke billowing from the lead locomotive. The Polar Bear Express is, for much of its length, a fairly dark train. It has lots of head end cars (flat cars, boxcars) before the passenger cars with their lights at the end. In its present form, it is only a couple of years old. There used to a train with the same name that was a summer time only excursion train and a year round mixed train that had lots of freight with passenger cars at the end. The Ontario Northland got some extra money from the provincial government to improve service. They ended up with a five day a week Polar Bear Express that has some freight type cars that mostly carry vehicles for local residents and baggage and a separate freight train. But, there is no longer a train with all passenger equipment.

Pixel Peeping 7D and a stamp

(Images referred to in this posting may be seen in full size)
Pixel peeping is the practice of examining a digital photograph at the lowest level of detail to determine its quality or lack thereof. Pixel is short for picture element. Digital photographs are composed of various numbers of pixels. Early digital cameras had a few hundred thousand pixels; now most have a few million and some have even more. Usually the pixel count is expressed as the number of pixels across (horizontal) X number of pixels up (vertical). For example, a six million pixel (6 megapixels) camera might be described as 3000 X 2000.
In film days, people who wanted to peer at the detail of photographs in a serious way used a loupe (magnifier) to examine negatives. Everybody knew that most prints had much less detail than was actually found in the negative; something that anyone who has ever ordered enlargements from a print will know. Looking at negatives was a serious business and required skill and patience.
Looking at a digital photograph up close is easy with a decent sized monitor and image editing software.

Now that we can pixel peep we may do so and find that our photographs do not impress up up close. When people look at pixels they are seeing their images as bunches of square blocks, each one a single colour; something like building an image with pieces of lego. It looks fine from a distance but not so great up close. What this implies is that we need to have an idea what things look like up close before we judge; we need to realize that there is no such thing as a diagonal line or a perfect circle in a world of rectangular pixels.

Having much to do and no wish to do it tonight I took some time to do some pixel peeping. I wanted to see how well the Canon EOS 7D digital single lens reflex camera did at reproducing a subject. Some of my 7D pictures have given me pause and lots of people on the internet are expressing (to say it mildly) their concerns about the 7D which is new 18 megapixel camera.

I decided to do my best to test things under favourable circumstances: a good lens (Canon 300mm f2.8 IS), tripod, mirror locked up and timer to allow the camera's vibration to settle down before the picture was taken.

For a target, I taped a stamp from an envelope on some books about 12 feet from the camera. I focused with the centre point using spot auto focus (this is when the camera uses a smaller focus point).

I took a series of RAW shots at ISO's from 100 to 12800. I processed the RAW shots in Adobe Camera Raw 5.6. I used default settings except for adding two thirds of a stop of exposure. I did not use the clarity control.

In Photoshop CS4 I added annotations but did not do any sharpening.

After the tests, I realized I could have picked a better stamp. I wish I had used one with fine engraving: lots of thin lines and tiny text. Maybe I will if I want to do more pixel peeping in the future.

I was impressed with the 7D, especially at lower ISO's. I think it has the potential to take some very good pictures given good lenses and steady hands (especially with longer focal lengths). It has nearly twice the resolution of my other cropped sensor camera, the 40D. Does this mean that it magnifies every bit of camera shake and vibration by almost a factor of two? If it does then it means that it may require faster shutter speeds.

I took the stamp and scanned it at 600 dots per inch on a Canon 8800F scanner. It was obvious that the scanned version had much more detail than the 7D shots. The difference in effective resolution was significant but not enormous (468 pixels acros the stamp on the scanner and 383 for the camera).

I posted full size annotated test shots in a gallery on my website.
Was this a useful exercise? For the purist, with an optical bench in her basement, probably not. There are too many variables that were not controlled. For example, the stamp was illuminated by fluorescent lights that flicker; not every shot is going to have the same lighting.
Was this a useful exercise for me? Yes, it was. It is one of the things that has convinced me to keep the 7D. One of the other things that convinced me of that was my experience shooting a hockey game in a dark arena with the camera.
Was it fun to pixel peep? Not really. It made me realize how much work and how tedious it would be to do this in a serious fashion. I am glad that there are lots of people who are willing to put in the effort to pixel peep and test cameras for the common good. There are lots of great sites on the internet where I go to read about their results:  DPReview, Rob Galbraith, Photography On The Net, etc.

The road to Moose Factory

It got easy to travel to Moose Factory a couple of days ago. The winter road across the ice of the Moose River is open to light vehicles. This means that I can call a taxi to where I live here in Moosonee and get a ride to anywhere in Moose Factory.
For most people, it sounds like no big deal. But for the residents of these two small communities at the South end of James Bay in Northern Ontario it makes life a lot easier for a few months.

No more taking a taxi to the boat docks in Moosonee, getting into a boat taxi for the trip to Moose Factory and then, waiting for a taxi at the docks in Moose Factory. Or, taking a taxi to the helicopter pad at the airport and waiting for the two minute journey across to the pad in Moose Factory when the river is breaking up in the spring or freezing in the fall.

Easy, simple, direct and convenient transportation comes every winter once the Moose River freezes.

This year the gap between boats and trucks was short. I took my last picture of taxi boats in the water on November 30th and my first of trucks going across on December 18th.

The first people to make it across from Moose Factory are daring travellers on fast snowmobiles. They are followed by snowmobile taxis with their passengers accommodated in covered sleds. That service lasted for just a few days this year. The weather was cold and the river froze rapidly. Somebody drove over in a truck one day and the next most of the taxis were happy to drive across.

It can be a rough road and it can have problems along the edges. The reason is that the Moose River has tides. Not great big ones like the Bay of Fundy but big enough (a few feet) that the edge of the ice often gets disconnected or partially disconnected from the shoreline. Sometimes this is called the tide mark, a narrow strip of slush and water along the edge of the ice. At best it is a nuisance, sometimes it is enough to stop traffic for a while or force a slightly different routing.

The road to Moose Factory starts at the bottom of McCauley's Hill in Moosonee. The hill is named in honour of two brothers, Sinclair and Oliver McCauley, who lived at the top of the hill. They were the last World War Two veterans in Moosonee.

I went over to the bottom of the hill last Thursday to grab a couple of shots of workers flooding the ice. They drill holes and pump water from underneath the ice. The water freezes on the surface and this makes the ice thicker and safer for travel. They also dumped some snow along the shoreline to make a bit of a ramp for the road.
On Sunday, I went back just before sunset to get some pictures of traffic. The direct road onto the ice had been disconnected by the tidemark so vehicles travelled a little ways along the shore before turning out onto the river. There was a steady traffic and even one truck heading up the river a ways.

Today I got a reminder that the river provides a road for more than snowmobiles and trucks. As I was leaving the bottom of the hill I noticed a single engine plane fly by. I paid no attention for a minute and then noticed it seemed to be coming right at me. It had turned in flight and was coming in to land a bit further up the river. It was low and fairly close and I really wished I had brought a longer lens with me. But even with a 200mm lens I was able to get some quick shots as it flew by.
My time at the bottom of the hill was made even more enjoyable by two friendly ten year olds, Megan and her Uncle Timothy. They had the patience to repeatedly throw chunks of snow and ice onto the thin ice along the shore to let me test out the frame rate of my camera. Thanks to both of them.

Postscript: Monday 2009 December 21st: This morning I headed over to Moose Factory to get an X-Ray done at the hospital. Taxi showed up at my place we headed across the ice, the road was ok but not great. Got to Moose Factory, "oh, oh". Deep water right along the edge of the island. Bunch of vehicles, including our taxi, sitting and waiting. A couple of people went through the water, it came up over their bumpers as they drove through and headed off. Taxi was a van and driver was not keen to risk it. Fortunately, a guy in an SUV and took us thru the water. Once I was on Moose Factory I was there for a few hours, taxis were not willing to go across until the water went down, about three hours later.