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Autumn Colours

Between the cooler temperatures, the steeper angles of sunlight and the changing colours, Autumn ushers in a blast of colour that you can’t find in the sun bleached heat of summer.  Golden hour starts mid-afternoon and lasts for 2-3 hours and the weather tends to have more moisture in it for spectacular sunsets and dewey mornings.  Fall has always been my favourite season.  Even fourteen years of teaching hasn’t beaten it out of me (teachers are supposed to prefer summer).


On a cool Saturday afternoon I took a 90km loop southeast to a part of the Niagara Escarpment I don’t usually ride as it’s too perilously close to the GTA.  I found a few curves and enjoyed the Niagara biosphere green space before blundering too close to the cidiots lined up to get into the only apple farm they’ve hear of.  Once clear of the madness of lining up to buy apples, I found myself heading back home as the sun was setting into a wall of clouds hinting at the days of rain to come.

On bike photos were taken with the Ricoh Theta 360 camera attached to the windshield with Lammcou GoPro Phone flexible tripod.  The camera was set via my smartphone to take a photo every 10 seconds.  I then set and forgot about it and enjoyed the ride.  If you’re curious about 360° on-bike shots, there are more details here.


Closeups were taken with the Canon T6i digital SLR using the Canon 50mm prime lens in the garden.  The gourds at Dar’s Delights (good coffee, excellent donuts!) were taken with the OnePlus5 smartphone (which also remotely controlled the Ricoh).  Editing was done in Adobe’s Lightroom which did well to pull details out of the darker riding photos.


There are two sets below.  The riding photos and the off-bike photos:





Off-bike photography:















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Canadian/Ontario Summer Nature Photography

Photography from around Ontario, Canada over the past ten years. Includes wildlife in Algonquin Park, time at the family cottage near Bobcaygeon and photos everywhere from Tobermory to Ottawa.

Older photos taken with the long gone Fujifilm 9100s superzoom camera, the up until early 2017 Olympus Pen mini-SLR and most recent photos with the latest Canon T6i (I have no preference for cameras. A good photographer can take a good picture with just about any camera, especially any higher quality SLR. Any underwater shots were taken with an ancient but still working Fujifilm waterproof point and shoot.

Algonquin Park moose.

Garter snake in the Haliburton woods.

Freezing the wings on a hummingbird.
Bass in Bass Lake near Bobcaygeon, ON.

Flowerpot Island boat trips off the tip of the Bruce Peninsula near Tobermory, ON.

Summer time camp fire on Bass Lake.

A Canadian childhood.

The ferry in Tobermory.

Belted kingfisher over Bass Lake, ON.

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Motorcycle Digital Art

I’ve been collecting together motorcycle related art that varies from photographs to original drawings and heavily abstracted images.  An online tool put the photos together into a shareable album:




Early graphics are often lifted from TV (Doctor Who has a long and storied history with motorbikes) and abstracted photos eventually based on 360 photos too.

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Summer/Fall 2020 Imaging

 A wide range of imaging from the summer of 2020 into the autumn stretches out beneath you.  On-bike photos usually taken with a Ricoh ThetaV firing automatically and attached to the bike with a tripod.  Close-up/macros usually done with a Canon T6i DSLR with a macro lens.  Drone shots taken with a DJI Phantom4Pro drone.  Other shots taken with a OnePlus5 smartphone when I had no other choice (the best camera is the one you have with you).  Most are touched up in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom depending on where I am and how much time I’ve go for post processing.  Some of them are very post processing heavy verging on digital illustration rather than photography.

 The stop motion video was hundreds of photos taken with the 360 camera on bike and then composited into a stop-motion film in Premier Pro.  It’s a tricky process you can learn more about here if curious.  The SMART Adventures videos are using a waterproof/shockproof action camera from Ricoh.

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2017 Solar Eclipse Astrophotography

The August 21st, 2017 solar eclipse as seen from Elora, Ontario, Canada.  All taken with the P610 superzoom Nikon camera.  The welder’s lens I was using as a dimmer fell and broke, so the eclipse got filmed through a shard.  I think it came out better that way.






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It’s Editing All The Way Down: Creating a 360 Little Planet Stop Motion Video

This is one of those things that is probably more trouble than it’s worth, but since I have some time on my hands, why not give it a go?


Creating a ‘Little Planet‘ wrapped image out of a panorama or 360 photograph is something you can do directly in Ricoh’s online editing tool…






This is the image embedded in the online uploading tool that you can use with all Ricoh Theta 360 cameras:

https://theta360.com/s/dNyfH8RrBTIGWWf5WGXS8OYzo



Post from RICOH THETA. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA



The problem with this process is that it’s quite clunky.  You have to upload each photo to the site, then set it to Little Planet, then, if you want to keep photo editing, screen grab it and bring it back down to the desktop.  If I’m trying to make a stop motion film out of over 300 photos, making Little Planets this way isn’t going to scale.


The solution was to find a way to create similar appearance in Adobe Photoshop and then batch process all the photos into a little planet format.  Instructables has a just such a tutorial.  The long and the short of the process is: stretch the photos into a square, flip them and the use a polar coordinates distortion tool to ‘wrap’ the square photo around the centre of the image.  The end result isn’t quite as nuanced as Ricoh’s online little planet geometry, which is specifically designed for the details of the Theta camera.  It’d be nice if Ricoh shared that geometry so people could duplicate the process in other software.



Lots of batch processed little planets!


I recorded those Instructable actions using the Photoshop script recording tool and then ran the batch ran the script on 384 photos auto-taken on a recent motorcycle ride (the 360 camera is attached to the windscreen).  The end result was 384 modified photos outputted to another directory.  I then took the photos and dropped them into Adobe Premier Pro, where I set the intro and outro pictures to slightly longer times and the main body to 0.02 seconds per photo, creating the stop motion video effect.


I threw in the intro to Rush’s Red Barchetta as some dystopian future background music (we’re in the middle of social distancing due to COVID19).  I fear it’s just a matter of time until travel itself becomes illegal, as it is in the song.


Here is the end result, a 26 second video containing over 380 individual photos batch processed in Photoshop and then edited into a short stop motion video:






The original footage was shrunk from 5376 x 5376 pixels (the ThetaV takes 5376 pixel wide panoramas and I made them square, remember?) to 1000×1000 pixels.  My logic there was a 1080p video is 1920×1080 pixels, so 1000×1000 pixels is almost 1080 wide.


Related Posts:

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Spring Photography

 Macro shots taken with a Canon T6i DSLR with the Canon macro lens.

Rainbows taken with the same camera and a the kit lens:

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