Here’s an orange flower for this week’s PhotoHunt. There’s a bit of green in the photo too, I’ve really been liking the way green has been showing up in my photos.

Anyone know what kind of flower this is? I think I took this by the garden plots behind U of M Dearborn…

You can participate in PhotoHunts too.

A turtle swimming around in a aquarium at the Belle Isle Nature Center. I’m not even sure what kind of turtle it is, it was just a “regular turtle” until I really liked the photo. I’ve really been liking green in my nature photos lately.

And of course you can click for a larger version.

I really do like the way this photo came out, he(?) was kind of fussy and wouldn’t hold still for very long, but I did get a few shots of him, this is just the best one. I’ll have to put together a few of them to share with you…

This is for Photo Friday and this week’s theme is “Symbols”. This is not my favorite picture that I’ve taken of hieroglyphics, but certainly by shear quantity it has the most symbols in it.

Click image for a larger view.

This is taken at the temple of Edfu, near the south end of the Nile on the west side. Most cities/temples were on the east side , I’m sure I was told why but I can’t recall; I want to say “evil” was from the west, but I really aren’t certain.

You can also view a huge 2300 pixels wide version.

This is for Photo Friday and this week’s theme is “The Coast”. This is actually just a series of photos (7 or taken with my iPhone 3gs and stitched together with AutoStitch.

This photo was taken north of St. Pete Beach, FL. Possibly Medina?. Click it for a 1200 pixel wide version. A few stitching problems due to everyone not standing still but still a nice photo considering I was shooting into the sun during the evening.

The second photo is the same photo, but just before cropping.

I had just commented the other day on how much I loved this photograph. And then Friday shows up and I’ve got a chance to use it. This is for Photo Friday and this week’s theme is Sexy.

This photo was taken last summer on Lake Huron on the Canadian side.

PS – Did you notice the conflicting product placement..?

This is the path the shuttle takes when it’s on the massive crawler and has to go from the VAB (vehicle assembly building) to one of the launch pads.

It’s the wide dual dirt/gravel roads (with the grass strip in the middle) towards the back.

The launch pad all the way to the right is 39A and the other (a little to the left) is 39B.

If you click on the photo you now get the huge version which is 3,900 pixels across and 700 pixels down (if it only shows up as wide as your browser, click again, then you can scroll right and left). You can click for a more normal 1024 pixel size too. Sorry, I appear to have problems uploading the huge version of the panorama from my phone. I’ll fix later at hotel.

So I was in southwest Michigan the other day and managed to catch the sunset. I snapped a few photos with my Digital Rebel XT. Actually I snapped a bunch of photos, but I picked these three to share…

These were all taken in a little roadside park in St. Joseph, Michigan.


I really like this one, but I wish the bushes had a bit more detail.

I’ll have to play around with these and see if I can get a little more detail out of the trees and bushes.

Great day outside on Hines Drive today. Lots of great colors as fall approaches. Here’s a panorama I took with my iPhone (and stitched it on my iPhone with AutoStitch on the phone too!).

I think it took eight or nine images to build the whole thing and it came out to 4000×506 pixels. This program works quick: I took the photos with the camera app, ran the AutoStich program, clicked the photos, it built a tiny thumbnail, I clicked the stitch button and few minutes later I’ve got the panorama on the screen!

Click to enlarge panoramic image, if it doesn’t load correctly, here’s a 1024 wide image.

The City of Dearborn was supposed to have fireworks earlier this summer but it got rained out (I think that’s why it was delayed) and tonight was the make up day.

Wow! It was amazing, it was a constant barrage of fireworks for about 25 minutes. Very cool.

I love how red this image came out!

This is a few short clips combined.
Even though the preview is small the video isn’t

This clip is short, but the video came out more focused than the other.

It was an impressive show. I won’t miss another one at Dearborn’s Ford Field if I have a choice about it.

The Lens Day Challenge for this week is Traffic.

People in Costa Rica barely look at the stop signs. Do they really think someone is going to read this one? This is a pretty busy sign, no matter where you are. And just in case you aren’t sure: Alto means Stop.

This is on a busy side-street in San Jose, Costa Rica; It’s a block or two east of La Sabana Park. I think it’s this messy intersection off of Calle 40; but if that’s where it is, it’s not even a very good representation of the intersection.

I was at the Detroit Opera House the other night to see Tori Amos in concert (that’s another post) and I really like the building. I’d like to see it in better lighting and take a bunch of pictures with my nice camera to see how good they might really come out.

These were just with my cell hone but I think they came out pretty good.

I really like the above one with the jagged edges since it shows the ceiling so well.

These are actually exactly the same photo but just cropped differently. It’s five or six photos stitched together (but they were stitched together using AutoStitch on my cell phone) to make one big photo.

The banner is an edit from a photo I took in Cardiff, Wales. It is of the Wales Millennium Centre (see photo) with (what they simply call) The Water Tower in front of it.

These are located in Roald Dahl Plass (plaza) dedicated to the Cardiff born author Roald Dahl. This Millennium Centre is beautiful at night, I didn’t have my camera when I wandered down there when I was in town, but that photo will be on my list for the next trip. And hopefully there will be water coming out of The Water Tower next time too! The Plass is lit very pretty too!

I’ve been thinking about Cardiff and also thinking about changing my photo so I choose this. I don’t have a lot of really wide photos that crop well so I looked around and found this one. Plus, I’ve got Torchwood on the the brain this week (month).

On the photo (in this post) if you read the right half of the building you can see it says: “In These Stones Horizons Awen (Awe and?) Sing”. The left half says something in Welsh. I was told the building is built from materials made all in Wales.

So one of the coolest programs I’ve downloaded from the iPhone App Store is AutoStitch. It takes a bunch of photos and stitches them together. Alex Lindsey talked about this on MacBreak Weekly a few weeks ago. He spoke so highly of it, I plopped down my $1.99 and started using it immediately.

You take a bunch of overlapping photos and it stitches them together, it does this completely automatically, there is no user intervention. You can use pictures you’ve taken with the iPhone but you can just as easily use pictures that you’ve synced with the phone. So this can work for the iPod Touch too, just sync some photos and when you’ve got some spare time, stitch them together. It does an amazing job.

I first used some photos that I shot on my Canon SD1100, it that just happened to be synced to the phone and did a great job of stitching them together. So you don’t need an iPhone, an iPod Touch with photos that you’ve synced works great too.

Above you can see a sample screenshot from the program where I chose 22 photos and it stitched them together (click it to enlarge). Remember all I did was pick the photos and a few minutes later it churned these out. All these photos were taken with the iPhone 3gs. If I cropped some of the edges of the photos, it’d look like I took there with a really wide angle lens.

Here are two samples:

I chose this one specifically so you can really see how it pieces these together. It’s got gaps in it, (I think) this is the one I took 22 photos for the image; just the part with the people on the blanket in the middle is 3 or 4 images.
Click the image to enlarge to 2,500 by 800 pixels.

This one is more complete as I took many up and down photos to go with it. That’s the Detroit Fisher Building on the left.
Click the image to enlarge to 2,000 by 1,000 pixels.

These pictures were taken at CityFest in Detroit this summer.

I’ve used it multiple times and only once had a problem; it got confused when I did a 360 panorama when the same type of railing showed up several times, this was because all the condos where I live are similar so it really couldn’t match things up. There are some matching issues with color/contrast and people moving, but this is really great!

This software is well worth the $1.99! I think I got that much fun out of it in the first hour, let alone all the time since then. ZZZ

Last Saturday night I went downtown to see the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Project Bandaloop. Here’s the description (from the web site):

A late-night outdoor concert held on the lawn adjacent to The Ellington parking structure, across from Orchestra Hall. San Francisco’s extraordinary aerial dance troupe, Project Bandaloop, will add their beautiful, gravity-defying vertical choreography, performing to the dulcet sounds of the celebrated hometown orchestra.

Here’s a photo of them with the garage (the lighting wasn’t the best for photos).

So here’s several clips I shot with my pocket digital camera, my Canon 1100, it worked way better than I thought it would have.

A really short clip of showing the grace of Project Bandaloop as they “dance” on the side of a building accompanied by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Direct link to the HQ version of the clip.

Forgive the quality of the middle of this clip, I zoom in on one of the Project Bandaloop performers as she dances on the side of a building accompanied by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

It’s noisy as the baby plays with it’s rattle (not my baby, but he was adorable).

Direct link to the HQ version of the clip.

A 23 second clip of showing six of the Project Bandaloop crew “dance” on the side of a building accompanied by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. There were probably 12 people going at the same time.

Direct link to the HQ version of the clip.

This is a long clip, almost 2 minutes, but I wanted you to see a chunk of the act instead of the little snippits I posted separately. You can really hear the baby play along with the music, I’d pretty much tuned it out by then.

Direct link to the HQ version of the clip.

After a while you sort of turn everything 90-degrees in your head and can see what they’re doing as if on a dance floor (in low gravity).

Here’s a blurry zoomed in shot of a group of four Project Bandaloop members.

This was great, I wish I could have been on top of the parking garage to have shot straight down at them so it would have looked like they were on a flat surface.

Just some photos and video of the Chicago area while I was rollerblading around the Grant Park area. Just some free time before WordCamp Chicago 2009 starts

We do this in Michigan when Detroit sports teams are in the championships.

Nothing really exciting in the video other than it’s a nice bridge and it’s a nice day. You can see I’m getting pretty tired as I near the top of the hill.

Direct link to the HQ video.

This might be a good test of the new Image Stabablization features in the iMovie ’09…

#wcchicago

So the CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association) has asked people to only text during the inauguration and not overwhelm the cell services with photo images even though they are spending millions temporarily upgrading D.C. I’m not sure how they asked them, but that’s what the NY Times says.

Here’s the fun part! CNN has asked everyone to text them a photo of ‘the moment’. Then they plan to so a PhotoSynth which is to assemble all of the photos to show it from all different angles. The photo synth is a neat option to build a viewable multi-angle “photo” from all the images. If you’re on a PC you can see samples here (actually you can create your own if you have enough photos). Let’s see how that works out. (Found at the Skype Journal.

Here’s a good YouTube explanation of PhotoSynth.

Send your Obama Inauguration photos to CNN.

Follow up articles reporting: FOXnews, PCworld, MS-NBC, CNN, NPR. Sounds like it was spotty but many calls went through first time, but those were PR people from the companies so I’ll wait to see what the attending bloggers say…

So Cobano is a nearby town of Montezuma it’s about 7 km away. It’s kind of the centralized place for the bus transfers, a few more restaurants, way faster Internet and some larger stores. Also it’s the nearest bank, ATM, pharmacy, gas station, hardware store, appliances, bicycles, etc. Even with all that, it’s pretty small. I was waiting for the bus the other day and shot this time lapse footage of the main intersection.

Here’s the direct link to the above video.

I also shot this photo of the sky as the sun was setting. I thought the colors were great!

I wish I had a few more photos from around town…

Haven’t been doing much the last few days. I’ve been experiencing the other Montezuma so I’ve been under the weather. Here’s a few recent photos all from the Montezuma, Costa Rica area.

This was my view from where I sat and had my lunch.

One of the water outlets to the Pacific Ocean.

I always like trying to catch photos of birds flying, but I’m never close enough.

A new canyon that I found

The El Chorro waterfall two hours up the north beach.

You can’t click to enlarge these, larger versions will probably show up in some other album later…

I thought this was funny that someone stuck this sticker on their motorcycle.

 

 

 

So I’d really been looking forward to the fire dancing in Montezuma. I haven’t seen it done as much the last few trips and I knew it was on the schedule as entertainment for the Film Festival. It wasn’t the local group that I’ve seen do street shows before but they were excellent. Most had some kind of costumes or makeup on which added to the whole effect.

It’s hard to capture but I think these turned out pretty good. A few of the ones in the woman in costume I pulled from video I took so the quality might not be so great but I wanted you to see…

I only show a few photos here, the other dozen are here (including larger versions of them all) or click for the fire dancing slideshow (same photos).

This is a problem!!!

Someone else dropped something into the river and I made a grab for it an my camera fell out of my pocket. I meant to only leave it in that pocket for a minute when I thought the water might reach my pants pocket and I forgot to move it back. I’m am so bummed…

The lens was closed, it was under water for just a few seconds, I wiped it off with a dry towel immediately and pulled out the battery. Needless to say I didn’t take any more pictures, I had a few from today of the ocean and monkeys but I bet those are fine. I hope the monkey shots are, I got a monkey (with a baby on it’s back) that managed to snatch a shaker of parmesan from a restaurant and were eating it up in a tree!

Now the camera, the chip and the battery are in a zip lock bag with some dry rice (to soak up the extra moisture). I’ll leave it for a day or so and see how it is. Kitty litter is supposed to work well too, but I didn’t need a 25 pound bag of it in my tiny room.

It’s a great camera, I’d definitely recommend the Canon SD1100 with image stabilization. It’s been in my sights for ages and I recently found a great on-line deal for it from Dell (that’s where I bought my SLR Canon camera too).

I’ll definitely be adding the WP-DC22 Waterproof Case to my wishlist (assuming the camera still works). It’s good for 40 meters underwater (130 feet) and is supposed to also be great for “beach, rain and on the ski slopes”.

Later: Oops, the waterproof case is more expen$ive than the camera was!!!

I thought the tiny UPS truck was interesting.

I haven’t seen any other 3 wheeled vehicles this trip.

 

So if you buy one of these at the airport is there any music on it? Is it even fully charged?

They should come with a sampler? or an audiobook! That’d make for a good impulse buy…

 

‘iPod vending machine…‘ uploaded by garylapointe

Wow!!! I was just looking outside the airplane window and and there in the sky were contrails from another plane that must have flown by recently. It looked very cool and I had never seen any from the air before. I hope the pictures came out okay! Yes, I know it doesn’t take much to excite me

Contrails are the cloudy streaks that an airplane sometimes leaves behind in the sky, right? That’s what I saw, even if I got the name wrong.On a side note – I need a good dictionary for my MacBook that doesn’t need me to be on-line to use it. Just a big PDF would work fine. Anyone know of anything semi-recent in the public domain or something? Or if I can purchase one somewhere? Something old enough to have copyright expired probably would not have “contrails” in it…

So the first thing I head this morning as the alarm went off was all about the icy roads in the Detroit area. Specifically between me and the airport. Not a good sign, especially since I didn’t have that much extra time allocated since it was a morning flight and I didn’t know about the weather before had. But all was fine, a little slow on the roads but I got the airport fine. The airport was dead, I’ve never seen it so quiet there.

Got checked in, got me a morning McSandwich and got to my terminal with just a few minutes to spare. Someone took the seat next to mine so I moved to the back row, no reclining but i’ll live. I’ve got an empty spot next to me, an adorable little 8 month old boy on his Mom’s lap that I was pretty excited about, he had been pretty friendly the few times I had run into him. I thought he was going to be a lot of fun but he passed out a few minutes into the flight (boring!).

It’s beautiful up here in the clouds. We’re just above them and the sun is lighting them up perfectly. Looks like snow, maybe more of how I’d picture it in Antarctica (or some other vast snowy land). My cell phone photos just don’t do it justice at all; should have pulled out the real camera.

Bonus! They just brought us a bowl of cereal (Total) and a banana, don’t know if I’ve ever gotten that for a non-international flight. I’m a much happier flyer if I’m snacking and staying hydrated, it really makes the flight more comfortable for me. On a side note, I can’t believe the number of people drinking mixed drinks already!

So I’ve never noticed one of these signs at a Burger King resturant before.

 

‘Burger King Sign‘ uploaded by garylapointe

 

I noticed it’s hard to see how big the sign actually is, so here’s the other photo I took to give you a frame of reference.

I’ve posted a photo album of various animals that I’ve taken here and there (Zoo, Costa Rica, London).

Some came out really nice and some are just okay (but I needed a few more to make an album). I uploaded them to my FaceBook photo album section, feel free to add me as a FaceBook Friend while you’re there.So is this photo too big for my blog page? Does it expand out of the center column too much? At all? Just right? It was bigger than I meant to upload but then I thought it looked nice…

It was a beautiful day yesterday! The forecast was supposed to be great so I went to Kensington Metro Park (still only $4 to get in). I think it got up to about 79° F so it was a great day for wandering around the paths. Never did find the one observation platform, must have walked the long way around it.

Can anyone identify the bird in the photo? (Comment below)

Here’s a bunch of photos I took at the park (8 photos).

A lot of my photos from my nice Canon Digital Rebel XT got a little washed out but I can’t figure out why. The best ones came out from my old pocket camera (Minolta Dimage XT).

Park was quiet and lots of stuff was closed (boat rental, etc.) but it is kind of late in the season. But it sure didn’t feel like it I’ve just starting playing with 12Seconds.tv so here’s a test from my phone at the park. It’s abruptly cut off but that’s because videos can only be (you guessed it) 12 seconds long.

Kensington Metro Park on 12seconds.tv

I got my International Driving Permit today. It’s a boring slightly-larger-than passport sized booklet. It’s $15 at AAA (no membership required) bring 2 passport-type photos if you have them, they’ll charge more if they need to take your photo. If you go in they make it up and you take it with you; you can mail in for it also (a list of the 180+ “participating” countries are on the application form). Make sure they check all your endorsements on the form before you leave; they forgot to check my motorcycle endorsement (I noticed before I left).

When you travel you still need to keep your driver’s license with you. This is just an official document with your info copied to a specific page and then the key to that page is translated into 11 different languages so whomever pulls you over can figure it out.

Sorry, the photos are a little blurry, I took them with my webcam, but you should get the idea; besides they’re official documents I shouldn’t be posting hi-res copies, right?

It’s the little things like this that brighten my day

That and the fact it’s still running

 

‘88888‘ uploaded by garylapointe

I did get a chance to pose with Alison Sudol of A Fine Frenzy. I wish I had brought a real camera instead of just the phone

She was so nice to everyone and signed everything that was put in front of here. I was towards the end of the crowd and she was just wonderful to all of us!

I got a CD signed and some kind of booklet they were giving out. I got to shake her hand and of course I got the photo too!

So I got some of the photos from Mom’s Surprise party up. This first one is from in front of the house, my cousin and uncle decorated it during the night. The rest of the photos are from the party.

I posted about 18 and hope some of the others with cameras will send me some. I you missed the post, the surprise party was yesterday.

These are really old school photos of my grandparents kids, my mom is in the lower-right.

So I finally did a 26 things scavenger hunt. I just noticed they were offering one for this month (they only do it every few months) and I thought I had a lot of Egypt photos that fit the plan so I used those (a few I had to stretch the definitions a little).

Here’s the photos of the 26 things that I used…

FYI – this also completes one of my 101 in 1001 items list!!!

Here is the 26 things site (these are not my photos)

So it was a great day so I got a burger and went down to Hines Drive and ate my lunch and took some photos with my new camera. I really like the camera and part of why I like it is why some people won’t like it, it’s got the manual controls. These controls let you make all sorts of adjustments and you can easily get more control over your photos.

Thats the same spot with pretty much no camera movement (although the dog and it’s owner did move). Now I’m not saying you can’t do this with a regular digital, it’s actually pretty easy to do in this sample case, but you kinda have to cheat to do it. The camera just makes it a whole lot easier to do.

Here’s another comparison sample, I saw some buds starting to appear and thought I’d get some pictures of spring really trying to pop her head out. These are the same branch but with the focus set completely different.

You actually get some pretty good detail with the camera. Here’s close up of the same buds (the second one from the top) and it looks pretty good. I still need to learn more about the resolutions and playing with the other adjustments.

Here’s the full photo or at least it’s one of the sequence. With this one you can see by the stem of the buds on the right and the left you have enough control to get one of them in focus and not one of the others even when they are really close together.

So far, I really love my new camera! (That’s the Digital Rebel XT for those of you just tuning in.)

So Anna was great!!! She was at the Soaring Eagle in Mt. Pleasant, pretty small theatre, mostly good seats everywhere (try and stay away from the sides). We were pretty close up front (but to the side) and I snuck up closer to catch a few of the songs. She only played for about 40 minutes so that was a little disappointing but it was a great 40 minutes. No new songs either. I took a few shots but as usual the low light just didn’t come out very well. At some point she realized she didn’t have a set list and didn’t know what was next, she was pretty funny about it. She was very excited about her new boots and mentioned them a few times. And she was really cute in person too.

So afterwards (after Rob Thomas) she was at the souvenir stand doing autographs. Got over there pretty quick so there were only a few people in line before me. As she was signing my CD (I bought another one) she happened to look back and saw how many people were in line now and there were hundreds, she really seemed surprised there were that many, I’m not sure what happens when she plays in a larger venue. She seemed pretty normal with the stuff she talked about and they way she acting about things, that was really nice…

I didn’t really know much of Rob Thomas’ songs (they seemed to think he was the headline act). I knew a few and a few of the Matchbox 20 songs that he played. And towards the end he did Let’s Dance by David Bowie and it was excellent. He also did a song with Anna at the end but I was way up front waiting in line to get my autograph.

As I decided that yesterday was officially the first day of Winter. And I found this cool fall flickr photo of mimbrava’s. I thought I’d blog it as I’m probably going to retire this fall background theme for the season.

 

so very orange Originally uploaded by mimbrava.

 

I found these lovely plants with their lovely reds and purples and greens. The were in a spot either welcoming me to Evanston or Northwestern’s Campus (or maybe the downtown Evanston area). They were just really bright and cheerful so I took a few photos

The photos didn’t come out as well as I’d like but you still get to see them since I liked them. The two that didn’t get thumbnailed are here and here

Can anyone tell me what these are? (Perennials?)

Totally off topic: So sometimes when it’s late and I can’t sleep I’ll occasionally take a sleeping pill, I don’t do this too often but my schedule is a little off so I needed to get to sleep. The point of this is that it makes me a little loopy and when I opened the draft of this post this morning this is how it read, “I found these lovely plantsa wwith their lovely reds and purple and green. The were in aspot that made me think they cow accopmplisment and would you survive.” So it has some typing and grammar issues but those last four or five words really confuse me. Fortunately they must have been enough for me to not hit post

So the other day I saw this cRaZy car. It’s got these wild colors and weird junk stuff glued all over the car, like shells, pencils, dolls, painted bottle-caps and more than I can list here. So of course I took some pictures (click for larger versions), but when I got home they didn’t come out at all (it looked like the lens cover didn’t open all the way). I was pretty disappointed since I was trying to show someone the photos when I discovered they were duds…

Fast-forward to a week later. Guess what I saw!?!?! You got it, the cRaZy car! If you look hard at the enlarged version you can see the back wiper blade is a baby doll’s arm. It’s just completely bizzaro and I saw it twice in a week in different areas of the metro-Detroit area…

So it was a great day today, the forecast kept getting better and better this week and so did the day! I was down at one of the parks on Hines Drive today and the colors were excellent! This photo does not do it justice…

I thought the little kids at work (in the daycare) would think it was funny to see Mr. Gary with Miss. Hello Kitty. I just spotted this while digging through my CES photos and decided to share with you all too!

Hmmm… Actually it’s Hello Kitty… Does the kitty have a name? (Sanrio?)

26 Things is a fun photographic game – no winners list, no prizes handed out. 26 items are posted on the website and participants set out to photograph each item in their own interpretation. On August 1st you can post a like to your page with the photographic answers.