Musings

The play yard we picked up several months ago has been experiencing minimal use recently, since Hannah doesn’t react very well anymore to roaming about with plastic partitions. We routinely let her walk around the living room and study these days, and she’s learned to sit by herself at the entrance of the kitchen and not enter unless one of us asks her to. Wonderfully learned behavior of the part of our little girl.:)

That said, our favorite spot – as in for Daddy and Daughter – still remains our bed in the master bedroom. She’ll climb all over the mattress and linen, play hide and seek with the little red clock, and – of late also – sprawl herself on the bed, giggle and on the occasion stone too. All under my watchful eyes though. While she’s learned to recognize the danger areas, e.g. where the edge of the bed mattress is, there still is always the possibility of her accidentally falling and hitting herself on the bed’s wooden frame.

Plenty of photo opportunities when she’s at play with the little red clock, though it no longer works very well anymore since she’s been pulling at its knobs and dials.:)

Day three of the long weekend! We were originally intending to head down to Ikea and Tampines Mall for brunch and to pick up replacement cabinet handles for the kitchen but decided not to squeeze with the rest of Singapore at these two popular joints. So, it was the usual haunt at Compass Point – Ling always has stuff she can buy at Kiddy Palace. Couple of pictures before we headed out first.:)

And the following at the mall itself by Ling:

Hannah taking a walk with Daddy.:)

Hannah’s almost exactly 1 Year 6 Weeks old today. And I realized that of late while I’ve taken a whole bunch of pictures of her during weekends, I’ve hardly taken very many shots of her during the evenings.

So here’s a couple that I took just now at 9 PM when we were setting her down to bed. You can see her two new teeth growing from her lower jaw in the first two pictures too:

She’s normally pretty hyper chirpy most evenings, but this evening was strangely quiet and even docile. She was contended to quietly sit on my lap while I was answering emails on the computer.:)

The third group of panorama compositions were created on the Sunday visit with our Ang Mo bud to Provincetown aka Gay town. The weather was foreboding the minute we left Boston harbor, and stayed cloudy for most of the rest of the day.

The compositions were from two places: the first two, including the one on the right, were done from the base of the Pilgrim Monument Tower.

I haven’t done nearly as many vertical panorama compositions like the one on the right here, as compared to the typical horizontal panoramic sweeps. But it’s much easier getting acceptable results. Distortions with vertical compositions especially if you’re dealing with straight structural lines typical of tall buildings pointing towards the composition’s top edges.

That’s as compared to the horizontal sweeps where as you approach the corner images, perspective gets significantly skewed; you can see it tellingly from about the leftmost and rightmost quarters of each image.

I’ve been experimenting with compositions comprising two and up to as many as a dozen images, and alternating between shooting in landscape and portrait modes. And so far, the (somewhat) best results seem to come from compositions involving three or less images, landscape mode, and shot at about 24mm onwards.

The next three compositions below were at the top of the Monument. Like the Skywalk Observatory, visitors got a viewpoints from each of the tower’s four sides. The first shows the harbor area where our fast ferry – the Provincetown III – berthed at:

The next two are from the same side, but the field of vision was wider than what my lens protruding through the iron grills could possibly cover in one sweep from a single spot. So, the first of the two was taken on the leftmost, and the other from the rightmost spots of this tower’s side.

I think what especially struck me about the viewpoints from the top of the Pilgrim Monument was the size of the Barnstable County. The visitor maps certainly didn’t nearly give me the correct idea of the area’s sheer size. The both of us had initially thought about walking from one end of Provincetown to the other (Matt especially wanted to see lighthouses and the sand dunes), but as soon as we saw how far they were really, we gave up the idea of walking there.

The last composition in this post here was done at a pretty deserted part of Pering Cove Beach. There were lots more activity towards the right end of the beach. That’s not the ocean on the horizon by the way, but Cape Cord Bay.

As before, larger versions of the panoramas are here.

Part 2 of the series of posts on panorama compositions I did during the Boston trip, and this time from the Skywalk Observatory. These were taken in the late afternoon from level 50 of the Prudential Tower.

Admission to this level was through my Citypass ticket. The view up top was magnificent, though I didn’t enjoy unlimited visibility and colors were somewhat washed out. I haven’t cleaned up the images from window streaks and blemishes either, so they’re somewhat visible.

I had a lot of fun doing between extreme zooms too just to test the upper limits of the Sigma 18-250mm lens. The first set of three are of Trinity Church, all the way from 18mm to 250mm.

And these three are of Newbury Street:

There’s a whole bunch more of these 18mm to 250mm zoom-ins here in the Flickr set.:)

I was doing a check on the number of pictures and amount of video taken during the Boston trip; and I have the final figures: 4,185 images on the D300, 945 images on the E-PL1 and about 6 hours of HD video. All totaled in, it’s a whopping 81 GB of static and moving imagery to process!

Unlike last December’s Kumamoto trip though, I didn’t try creating nearly as many HDR compositions this time. Instead, I did a huge number of panorama compositions – all 106 of them – each comprising between 2 to 11 images. Some of them turned out great, others not so from a host of problems, including gloomy weather, bad lighting, inability of CS4 to process them, and most commonly, too much lens distortion.

I’ll be blogging about these panoramas in a series of compositions starting with the first: a view of the Boston skyline from Charles River. Several of these were taken from MIT’s side of the river, and others along either Harvard or Longfellow bridges.

Here’s a picture showing the general perspective from MIT:

The first panorama below was composed in really gloomy weather, despite it being mid-morning. This one’s a full 180 degree sweep:

The second and third panoramas here were composed in much better weather at late afternoon:

The next two panoramas were composed late in the stay; during the third week when the sun finally broke through the thick cloud layers of the first two weeks, and Boston finally saw the kind of glorious summer that’s just perfect for photography. Both were taken in the early afternoon from Harvard bridge. The second of the two panoramas is a full 180 degree sweep.

And the last panorama was taken just before I left Boston, and a different point of view as seen from Longfellow bridge. A single frame perspective was posted earlier on here.

Larger versions of the panorama compositions are in the Flickr album here.:)

I had a bit of free time today just before I leave for home, so took up another whale-watching trip – this time out of Boston . There are about three whale-watching trip companies operating out of Boston city itself. As I didn’t have a reference point to whether one was better than the other, I simply took the one that ‘looked’ like the most established and comfy one with the New England Aquarium.

Unlike the Yankee Freedom Matt and I took off Gloucester, the Voyager III was a much more luxurious boat. There were much fewer whale watchers taking the trip this time too, as it was a weekday morning (when the boat returned, there was a long queue for the afternoon session).

Everything looked really promising, compared to the choppy madness at sea and hours of fruitless searching for whales from the earlier trip. The weather this time was just perfect, the sky was a glorious blue, and waters were reasonably calm. We ran into the first pair of whales just an hour out of the harbor (compared to the more than three hours it took before we had our first sighting off Gloucester). In fact, I think we saw about eight whales in five different sightings altogether in the Stellwagen Bank.

However, all the whales did this time was to blow and do lazy dives. No breaching, no flipper slaps, no fancy tricks – though on one occasion one of the humpbacks came pretty close to our boat at about 10 meters close.

It brings to mind what some of the experienced watchers shared in the earlier Gloucester trip. That while we were tremendously unlucky to have scouted around for so long before the first sighting, that we saw a mother humpback and her calf as a pair, and that she was teaching her baby breaching was very special. So much so that it was worth the agony of the outbound trip itself, even if we didn’t realize then how lucky we were to have seen whales breaching and doing flipper slaps.

So, here’s one series of pictures taken of one of the sighted whales doing a lazy and slow dive during the Boston outing. I was a lot better prepared this time too. Ditched the polarizer, dialed a minimum shuttle exposure time of 1/800s, braced myself better against the boat railings and shot in JPG instead of RAW. So, the shots this time were pristine in quality – just no breaching.:(

The Boston Common is a central public park right in the heart of the city, and is one of America’s oldest parks at 376 years of age. This park is prominently mentioned in many visitor materials as a must-see. The park is very convenient to get to too from my work place: just two stops and less than 5 minutes train ride away.

I’d been waiting for the right weather conditions to do a proper photo shoot of the place, and after nearly two weeks of gloomy and badly overcast weather, the cloud layer finally to reveal a stunningly clear blue sky on the last week of my stay. Here’s a selection of pictures taken of the Boston Common; most from yesterday Wednesday morning before I headed to work, and a couple of others from earlier when I passed through the area on my way to elsewhere.

Below: The Brewer Fountain that’s just beside the entrance of Park Street subway station. The 22-foot tall 15,000 pound bronze fountain was cast in Paris, and a gift to the city by a Gardner Brewer. The fountain’s a popular spot for many park visitors to hang out, enjoy the scenery, while having a cuppa. That’s the Massachusetts State House in the background too; you can see more pictures of it in our blog here and here.

Below: Lots of pigeons about:

Below: The 652 large trees in the park provide welcome shade from the summer sun, though the weather was very cooling already (about 21°C):

Below: Lots of people just hanging out in the park.

Below: The Parkman Bandstand, built in 1912. One of the park’s most recognizable structures. It’s commonly used for musical and theatrical performances held in the garden.

Below left: The Soldiers and Sailors Monument, erected in 1877. Right: Lots of flower beds line the foot paths throughout the garden.

Below: The Lagoon Bridge just ahead.

Below: The Lagoon Bridge, with the famous swan boats just on the left hand side (hidden in this picture) of the bridge:

Below: The Lagoon.

Below: The garden also offers a great view of swanky apartment blocks in Boston city.

Below: A Statue of George Washington, cast from bronze and on top of a solid granite base. This statue was dedicated in 1869, and is a popular photographic spot for visitors.

I recorded several videos, and did a large number of panoramic compositions in my visits here. Will post them up at some point.:)

These pictures of Harvard were taken more than a week ago in the late afternoon at about 6 PM after work. They were sort of just sitting in the desktop folder, so posting them up. The sun at this time wasn’t still setting – it only really gets totally dark past 9 PM – but there was still a relatively pleasing blue sky layer. The color tones of greenery and bricks came through a little better than the earlier pictures.

Above two pictures: Harvard Hall, near the Johnston Gate towards Massachusetts Avenue.

Above: Weld Hall, just across Tercentary Theatre and beside the University Hall.

Above: Widener Library. It was just after closing time again when I got here. Have to try to at least see the inside of the library once before I leave.

Above two pictures: Memorial Church, with its distinctive white spire.

Above: Memorial Hall, surprisingly devoid of visitors on group tours this time.

There were lots of people abouts, many making use of Harvard Yard as a thoroughfare to get from one point to the other. Real feat to take images without human persons in the fore or background!

The Thousand Islands isn’t even an appropriate descriptor for the region: there are about 1,800 islands compacted into a relatively small area along St. Lawrence River and right smack in the Canada/US border. Ownership of the islands is split between Canada and the United States, with many privately owned as summer and holiday homes for the rich, famous and powerful.

The region is supposed to be really scenic – except again that the Saturday mid afternoon we arrived was all mood and gloom, and even rainy. Sigh.

Anyway: pictures. Some islands are barely just 12 meters across, like the below that sits a single cottage and a couple of chairs:

Some are slightly larger, like the below:

Below: Though not by that much: same island. Maybe about 100 meters across only.

Below: This has got to the be smallest lighthouse I’ve ever seen. It’s practically a baby.:)

Below: Some of the larger islands have beautifully built-up residences that also make for tourist places of attraction. Yep, that’s Boldt castle on the left, in addition to the smaller Power House in the foreground.

Below: Other islands are little more than rock croppings:

The boat ride lasted for about 45 minutes, and we – momentarily – crossed into Canada. So, while we didn’t go through customs, we can claim to have visited Canada for a couple of minutes, if as illegal entrants!

The detour to Thousand Islands on our way to Niagara Falls added about 5 hours of travel time though. Was it worth it? Well, if you have time to spare, it’s worth a look-see. But if you’re in a hurry, this region can be safely skipped in sight-seeing.