Monday, August 31, 2009

Expositions

Last year I attended the southern germany board game exposition at the Stuttgart exop centre, and I enjoyed it enough that I plan to go again this year. I had a look at the website to see when it will take place and was really distracted by some of the trade shows happening in the near future...

I know that almost all industries have trade fairs, but I am quite tempted to go to some of these just to see what the heck is on display:

Trade show for glue technology. Sept 21-24.
Three days on glue. I wonder how many exhibits there will be.





SUEFFA - Exop for German Meat-workers.
I love the logo.



FASTENER FAIR - Dedicated to the European Fastener industry.
So I suppose they will need halls for snaps, zippers, velcro...





INTERPELLETS 2009 - exhibition for pellet technology.
This one is just vague enough to make me wonder.

I like trade shows. I have gone to some pretty strange ones both for work and on a lark, Paper world, Christmas World (awesome) and many electronics ones.

If I have nothing else to do, I would seriously consider having a look at one of these just to see what Fastener Fair had to offer.

Friday, August 28, 2009

More photoshop fun....

OK, I like new photoshop too much.

Here is my new punk band album cover. Maybe a film poster?

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Photoshop interlude - Balancing out uneven lighting in a photo

So while doing some "self service IT" as is our new company model yesterday, I found the HP standard software depository. Much to my surprise and delight, I found that HP holds licenses for some adobe software. 100% ok to install as long as it is on my work computer.

So... Hello Photoshop CS4. Wow, what a nice program. I wanted to try something out quick, so I used some of the HDR stuff I had learned to try and lighten up the shadows in a nice photo while preserving the colours and detail.

Basically, I wanted to balance out the light levels and preserve the image quality.

I started with this:
I made a copy of the photo that I lightened with cruves adjustments, then I made a new layer and pasted the darker image on top of the lighter.

Next I created a layer mask on the top, darker image and paster the lighter image into the mask.

Then I selected the lighter mask layer and added a gaussian blur filter. This preserved and darkened the parts of the photo in the sunlight.

Finally, I deleted all the parts of the mask that were in the shadowy part of the image.
And ended with this:
What do you think? do I have crazy photoshop skills now?

The whole thing only took about 5 min, but I am pretty satisfied with how the end image looks.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

San Gimignano

The next place to visit on our Tuscany agenda was San Gimignano. This town is a UNESCO world heritage site and is famous for its preserved medeival buildings, especially the towers in the centre of the town.
What I can tell you this place will never ever be famous for is its ample parking. Finding someplace to stop was a nightmare. We were alson introduced to our bout of Italian racism, police controlling the parking lots waved in cars with Italian plates (like the Joneses rental car) and made the non-Italian cars (like mine) circle aimlessly until despair took away all hope.

The town was really packed with people. There was also some sort of open air concert happening that evening, so that was also a contributng factor to the crowds. I though the level of human congestion did take away from my enjoyment of the place though.
We all marched to the centre of town to meet up and get our bearings. Apparently Uncle Bernhard was doing something that Delaney felt the need to rebel against.
Another of the main attractions is the heavily fresco-ed church in the centre of town. This was pretty impressive and sadly did not allow any photos. Liam even seemed to enjoy looking at all the paintings and Claudia explained what all the bible stories were that he could see up there.

Something must have sunk in with him, since about 3 weeks later in the car, Liam piped up from the back seat with "Mama, when those guys nailed Jesus to the wood, that was not very nice was it."

There is also a big part of the church dedicate to the local saint, Saint Fina. She was apparently a local girl who got ill and then spent five years lying on a board to become more Christ-like. At least that was the depth of the explanation I was given. As I read wikipedia, it seems that she lay on the board so long that her flesh grew into it and she was "food for rats and worms." ouch.

Here is a painting from her chapel, photo not by me.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Montalcino Fortress

One of the main attractions of Montalcino is the fortress, it was also the first thing we saw. It is a very large and empty building.

From the outside it is looking pretty impressive.
We went right in and decided right away to go up to the top and walk around the walls. This was our first outing and I would say it was the beginning of the friendship of Liam and Delaney. I was very happy that the two got on so well given that Delaney is twice as old as Liam. I think she enjoyed taking on a big sister sort of role to Liam the goofball.

Once we went up to the top of the wall, the kids were off like a shot, hand in hand.Of course, seeing a tower like that, Liam had to conquer it.And then a nice view from the top.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Montalcino

The first outing we took was to the town of Montalcino. This was about a 15km drive from the house, along a long windy road to the top of a large hill. It seems like a lot of towns in Tuscany are best described as an old walled city on top of a big hill.
It was of course, scorchingly hot, but there was a mercifully nice breeze blowing. As long as you kept out of the direct sun for too long, it was quite a comfortable day.

This was pretty good weather to walk around the town and enjoy the sites. The big attractions of Montalcino are the Fortress, the Abbey, and a well known local wine.
From all the places we visited, this town was easily my favorite. Despite being at the height of tourist season, it was pretty easy to get around and relatively tourist-free.

Have a look at one of the main streets in the centre of town. This is at around noon, so you would think it would be a little more packed.
While walking around, we wondered if there could be something else to see. If only there was a tourist office we could locate... somehow...
In the centre of town, we found this shop that I thought was also rather amusing.
This was also the place where Liam began to learn that Italy was the country where he was allowed to eat ice cream pretty much every day.
I dont really blame him, I have to say the Italian ice cream really was very very good.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

One last post about the house

OK, here are the last photos of the house I will show. I know there are a lot of posts so far on it, but what the heck, this is how I can manage to have some content more often.

Again, some night time pictures, since I personally like the look of them best. I am still not sure why I like night pictures so much, but I generally find them more aesthetically pleasing. The lights and colours tend to be a little more interesting in my eyes.

at the back of the the house was this nice illuminated walkway. It started at the outdoor dining area, then ran along the back of the house to the pool. It also served as a sort of race track for Liam and Delaney(which I likely just spelled incorrectly)Here is the famous pool area. I spent quite a lot of time in there due to the scorching heat. Liam also loved the pool and with a swim ring and water wings on he would float around yelling "PADDLE PADDLE PADDLE, I AM LIKE A DOLPHIN"
I quite regret that we never actually had an evening swim, that would have been neat. But after the sun went down, the illuminated pool seemed to attract some stingy insects. I received more than enough bites as it was. Of course, this was Italy-buggy, not Canada-buggy. I think the entire week of Italy bugs would have been the equivalent of about 20 seconds in a typical Canadian outdoor summer.

Here is the evening view down the road from the house. Next time I post something, it will be of another location. I promise.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

The nicest times of the day

One of the nicest things i got to enjoy in Italy was the very nice sunsets and sunrises. Since we slept with the window wide open and uncurtained, the morning light often woke me up. At home I am used to sleeping with my many millimetres of steel shutters keeping the world out.

Here is the house just as the sun is going down. It looks pretty nice in my opinion.
The sunrises were pretty spectacular as well. The also gave me a chance to try out some experimenting with high-dynamic range pictures. This is where I take multiple exposures of an image at the same time, then put them together in photoshop afterwards. It lets you see the whole range of colours without losing a lot of detail in extreme shadows or blown out light coulours.

It is something I have not tried much and I am not so good at it yet, but I think this sunrise photo turned out rather nice.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Italy Weather

OK, fast one today. Also it is a terrible photo taken from my phone.

Here is the outside temperature on the car's thermometer. This was on the first day, thankfully we were sealed in the car full of air conditioned goodness.

FORTY ONE DEGREES. For those of you not in the civilized (metric) world, that is 106 degrees Farenheit. It actually climbed to 42.5 Celcius (108.5 F) at the hottest moment. I know that there are lots of places hotter than this, but I am from Canada. It felt like the world was ending.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

My Child is a freak.


Here are some of the things Liam has said this week to me. All completely out of the blue, no context leading up to them.

"Papa, can you spit fire?"

"The Fireman in the truck does not have bare feet, right?"

"I am not Liam. I am a dog, my name is Ollie. woof woof" (this actually lasted for days)

(listing the ice creams he wanted) "Choco ice, vanilla ice, house ice, strawberry ice." then when we asked what house ice tasted like, the answer was "costs money"

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

More of the house... The relaxing area

I really cannot say enough nice things about the house, it was a super find by Claudia and Doris. Here is the living room area, where there were a number of comfy couches to sit on.
And in my continued obsession and practice at taking night time photos, here is what it looked like in the evening. Although we were mostly stitting outside at that time of day.
It was really a larger open space split into three areas by the arches you can see in the photos. The living room was in the middle, then to one side was a sort of empyt entrance area where we would come in from the pool, and on the other side was the indoor eating area. A place we used only for breakfasts since all the dinners were taken outside in the nice evening.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

The Food Area of the house

As a person who likes to eat, I was very pleased that the house had such fine food facilities.

The kitchen was decked out in fine Ikea form, with a nice big stove as well. I am not sure if this image quite gives the scale of the kitchen but it was big. Quite easy to make meals to feed eleven people in here.
We mainly made use of this covered outside eating area since it was over 30 degrees every day. The curtains were closed to make sure no dust from the road wafted in while we were eating.
Our first evening meal, looking quite fancy.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Back from Italy.

Well, the vacation is over. It was a good time, lots of sun and warm weather. I took quite a few photos and I have been thinking I will try to return to having more frequent, shorter posts instead of rare long ones.

We had rented a house in the Tuscany region of Italy, near Sienna. There was a big group of us, 11 people all together staying in a nice big place in the countryside. It was very isolated, quiet and nice. I liked it.

Here is the house at night.
Here is the view in the early evening for an idea of the neighbourhood from the back porch.
Overall very peaceful and relaxing.