Better Make Some Room

While I think pigeons are rats with wings and a a scourge on cities, they can make interesting photographic subjects. Here one comes into land on the top of a rotunda in a Toronto park. The rest seemed huddled up there for warmth.

Panasonic DMC-TZ3 f 4.8 at 1/640s ISO100

Kayak Kolor

This is one of the batch of shots I made the first time out with the D300. The richness, naturalness and detail in the colors are spectacular and in this one frame alone I could see the value in every cent that I spent on the camera.

Nikon D300 f10 at 1/50s ISO 200.

Line of Light

Union station streetcar platform, Toronto. Nikon D300 f5 at 1/30s ISO220.

Congressional Content

There's been quote some buzz around the U.S. Library of Congress releasing thousands of archival photos onto Flickr.

There are some spectacular images in the collection which capture elements of life that have since disappeared. This old storefront is one that jumped out at me.


Even better, the images are labeled as copyright free so there's a lot of scope to get in and have some fun. A large photo-collage was the first idea that came to me, but one of the problems with the images on Flickr is that they're all 1024 pixels on the longest size. Good to browse but not good for extensive reworking

You can get to very high-res versions with a little bit if clicking. The description for each image in Flickr has a line something like this; Persistent URL: hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsac.1a34582

Taking that link brings you to the Library of Congress' own website. There you click on the embedded tumbnail image to take you to another page that has links to download either the same size JPEG shown in Flickr or a HUGE tiff file.

I decided to use this fine character as my example.


In this case the Library of Congress offered the option to download a 140mb tiff of this shot. The resolution of the tiff weighed in at a staggering 6162 x 7981 at 1800 dpi. This is a seriously high-res file and you can see that from some 100% crops.




You can see there is an extraordinary amount of detail captured in these scans and while grabbing hundreds of megs of pics may not be everyone's cup of tea, it's good to see that if you find and image in the Library's collection you really love you can get a top-notch version of it.

And to leave you, here's another shot from the collection which shows that time and design may change, but there'll always be some kind of junk left behind.

Four Way View

Here's for separate shots of the rear section of a plane I took recently. I was playing around with different framings and it was only when I got home and reviewed what I'd shot that I saw these work well as a vertical, segmented, image.





All were taken at Hamilton Airport, Ontario on Christmas day 2007.