I had three bottles of apple juice and one bottle of water confiscated at Hamilton airport on Thursday. All four bottles were unopened. The helpful security personnel also emptied the contents of my son's sippy cup. (He's two years old. Two.) Evidently, I was the only one who thought that the fact that he was drinking from it at the time was some indication that the contents were benign. At least they returned the empty sippy cup to him; he stared at it, mystified.

Before you respond with "We can't let the terrorists win!" here's a clue: it's too late. When my little baby boy has to go thirsty, the terrorists have already won.

Am I the only one who thinks we're undertaking crazy, foolish, and unnecessary security "precautions" to protect ourselves from these mythical terrorists just itching to down another jetliner? Wouldn't we be saving a lot more innocent lives by deploying airport security personnel to our highways? It seems to me that drunk drivers, along with people who can't change lanes properly, are a greater threat to our security than "terrorists." Shouldn't they be a higher priority? Just a thought.



Next thing you know, they'll be banning people and luggage from airplanes. "No live humans or cargo allowed," the signs will read. Then we'll all be safe. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy more duct tape. The duct tape will protect me.

I have written before about keeping detail in both the shadow and highlight areas of a picture. This technique involves taking two or more photographs of the same scene, at different exposures, and choosing the best part of each picture for the final result. The idea is that film, as well as the sensors on digital cameras, can only capture a limited range of values from black to white. In high-contrast scenes, such as night shots or bright sunlit landscapes, this means that parts of shadows block up to form pure black, and parts of highlights blow out to form pure white. In both cases, there can be a significant loss of detail. Vividness of colour can also be lost. The result is a picture that is flatter and less visually appealing than what the human eye originally saw.

So far, my approach to combining multiple exposures has been to create layers in Photoshop, one exposure per layer, and either applying a mask based on tonal values, or erasing the areas where detail is lost in order to reveal the layer underneath. This is a difficult and time-consuming process. There must be a better way!

Enter Photomatix by HDRSoft (formerly MultimediaPhoto) of France. This amazing piece of software automatically combines multiple exposures to create an overall image with proper exposure throughout the entire frame. No tricks, no gimmickery, just a better way of representing the original scene as you saw it. The results are simply stunning!

I will not present here an exhaustive analysis of the software or a tutorial on its use; I refer the reader instead to this excellent article by Royce Howland, "The High Dynamic Range (HDR) Landscape Photography Tutorial." What I will show you is my own first experience with the Photomatix software, and encourage you to try it out with your own pictures.

During a trip to Washington, D.C. in October 2003, I took some photographs of the Capitol. I was frustrated by how bright the Capitol dome was compared to the dim landscape surrounding it, because this made it impossible to determine a correct exposure. With the aperture set to f/8, the correct exposure to the dome was just 1.6 seconds, but this short exposure put the rest of the scene into complete darkness. Exposing for as long as 25 seconds brought out tremendous detail in the rest of the scene, but the dome itself went to pure white. The middle exposure, at 6 seconds, was a reasonable balance (and the one recommended by my camera's meter set to "average" mode), but the picture lacked detail overall and there was no "wow" factor. All three exposures were, quite simply put, boring.



I tried merging them using Photoshop, but was never satisfied with the results, and eventually gave up in frustration. (I should point out that I was using layers and masks in Photoshop 6. Newer versions of Photoshop, including CS2, include an HDR function that makes the process much easier.) Last night, three years after originally taking the pictures, I decided to see what Photomatix could do.

The result was amazing! There is plenty of detail and colour in all parts of the image, including the bright dome and the dark landscape and everywhere in between. And there is none of the awful noise that would have resulted from simply brightening the shadows of an underexposed image.



Photomatix gave me several different options, and allowed me to adjust several different settings until I was happy with the result in the preview window, then it merged the three exposures seamlessly, quickly, and automatically. It even aligned the three images first. (I had used a tripod, but was still off by a few pixels.) I still did some tweaking in Photoshop afterward, but all of the heavily lifting was done by Photomatix's Tone Mapping function.

Photomatix is truly the most useful tool for taming high contrast that I have ever used, and I encourage all photographers to try it out for themselves. I hope you find the results as exciting and inspiring as I have.

Have fun!

These are the steps I used to go from Before to After:

1. In Photomatix, I created an HDR image using automatic image alignment, then used Tone Mapping with the following settings:

Method: Tone Compressor
Bit-depth of output image: 16-bit
Brightness: -1
Tonal Range Compression: 6
Contrast Adaptation: 16
White Clip: 0.000%
Black Clip: 0.000%

2. In Photoshop, I used Unsharp Masking (Amount 30%, Radius 2.0 pixels, Threshold 0 levels) to sharpen the result and tweak the "micro-contrast" just a little bit more. Then I used the Clone Stamp to remove the odd stray pixel, a wire, and light streaks from an airplane. I applied a median filter to the area of open sky to reduce noise. I cloned out a one-pixel-thin ghost-outline of the dome, which was the result of either imperfect alignment of the original exposures or JPEG artifacts. I applied a very slight skew and rotate transformation to create perfect 90-degree angles. Finally, I applied a tone curve with nodes at (79,86) and (185,233) to brighten the shadows even more.

Am I the only one who thinks it's strange that I have to restart my computer after installing software or updating Windows?

I know a thing or two about software design and it seems to me that this could have been avoided through better design at the outset.

The Gardiner Expressway in Toronto is the world's longest elevated freeway. If the city follows through with plans to bury this expressway underground, it would no longer hold that distinction. To many Torontonians, it would be good riddance to an eyesore that has long divided the city from the waterfront. To me, it would be the loss of the closest thing the city has to a downtown bridge -- that architectural span that has defined the skyline of such cities as San Francisco and New York City.



I suppose I wouldn't be devastated to see the Gardiner moved underground, but a part of me would miss it too.

I have always believed that there is life beyond our planet. The simple mathematical explanation for this is simply that the universe is too big for there not to be. Even if there is only a one-in-a-billion chance that a planet in a given star system could produce and support life, the sheer number of star systems in the universe suggest that there are trillions of planets out there with life on them.

Besides, it's kind of, ummm... arrogant to think that we humans are so special that we are the only life in the entire universe.

"Life" does not necessarily have to mean a four-legged furry animal that breathes oxygen and drinks water, or that has a skeleton and a brain. The enormous variety of species within our own planet (on land and underwater) should dispel this notion.

So why is it that whenever NASA finds traces of water on Mars or Enceladus or wherever, the first suggestion is that life could exist on these planets? We assume that life requires water and oxygen. Couldn't lifeforms exist on other planets that are based on ammonia and methane instead?

I finally got a computor. Now I can surf the internets that I keep hearing about!

The cable guy who intsalled my high-speed showed me how to "launch" my "browser" and connect to all the webs, so I decided to give it a try.

Now where do I start? I heard that AOL is good, so I typed AOL -- nothing happened. I pressed the keys again: A, O, L. Still nothing.

I called up my nephew. He's a computor wizard. He can make a computor do anhything! One time, he actually made his play music, and he didn't even have a record player hooked up to it. He's pretty smart!

He seemed kind of frustrated when I called him. "You have to type the URL into the address bar." He sounded like he was in a hurry.

I didn't undertsand a word he said, so I asked him, "I have to type the You Are What? What address bar?"

He was so nice, over the phone he explained to me where the address bar is, and that I have to type WWW.AOL.COM not just AOL. He's such a brainiac! I thanked him and hung up the phone.

Then I went into the address bar and typed WWW.AOL.COM just like he said -- and nothing happened. I sat and waited, and waited, and waited.

Finally, I called him again, and said that nothing happened. Long story short, I had to press the ETNER key after typing in the address. Who knew?

Anyway, now that I'm attached to the internets, I'm surfing. Some of the webs are so helpful too. They'll pop up a warning telling me that my computor may be infected with a virus! Even though it has brand new windows. The warning flashes in different colours and dances around to get my attention. For only $29.99 they were able to fix my computor RIGHT OVER THE INTERNETS. It's amazing! All I had to do was give them my credit card number. I've done this six times already.

My nephew keeps saying I don't really need to do that, but it's worth the peace of mind. Hey, if I can pay $349 for an extended warranty on my new computer, I can pay $29.99 to get rid of a virus, right? Right? He says I don't really have a virus, it's just a banner ad, but he's just a kid, what does he know.

Hey, I may not have gone to computor school, but I'm a graduate of the school of hard knocks, konw what I mean?

I've been giving my email address out to every web site I visit, that way I can enter contests and get free stuff. There's this one place that says I get a free eye-pod just by filling out a survey! They even give referral bonuses, I gav ethem all my friends' emails too. They'll thank me later. :9 Those eye-pods are expensive, there is so much money in computors that they can just buy them and give them away to their web site visitors. I should get a job working with computors too. Then I'd live in a big old mansion and drive one of them fancy cars like Bill Gate.

(Just between you and me, I might come into some real money soon. Ther eis a fellow in Nigeria who found some money and is going to give me a cut of it if I help him transfe rit out of his country. They have a corrupt government you know, so it's like I'm doing my part to help out the odrinary guy. I have some costs to cover up front which is hard right now, but he promised to pay me all back when he gives me my share.)

It's cool too, the more I give out my email address, the more special offers I get in my "inbox" like Rolex watches for $40, discount prescription drugs, and certain other things I probably should'nt write about in a public blogs!

That's all for me, I have to go hack some goggles in the e-bay photo shops now, my computor is waiting!!!1

Here's a suggestion to Jacques Dupuis, the Quebec Public Safety Minister who gave a live interview on CTV Newsnet this morning about the school shooting in Montreal yesterday: stop saying "between you and me" to the news anchor! That's twice now. Look, you're on live national television, anything you say is not going to stay between you and him, there are millions of people watching too. Just a thought.

And earlier in the newscast, Hassan Kadhim, the older brother of a student who was shot, pointed out that the shooter was simply called a "French-Canadian" and a "criminal" even though he committed an act that could be considered terrorism. "I was wondering if there was for one second, if we had thought it was an Arab person, an Indian person, an Asian person, right away they would have labeled him as a terrorist. (...) That's a bit disappointing in a way because I know how the story would have turned if there was an Arab person or whatever, Indian." To which the news anchor replied: "All right. Well interestingly, the alleged shooter is apparently of Indian descent." Zing!

It is my prediction that, although we pronounce the year 2006 today as "two thousand and six," we will, within five years, be pronouncing it as "twenty oh six."

I put in a new bathroom over the Labour Day long weekend. We had been without one on the main floor of our house for about 10 months, so it was long overdue. It was my first attempt at doing any plumbing myself. I did it all myself, start to finish, and it turned out not to be so difficult once I learned what to do. The result turned out rather nice, I think.

But of course my work is never done. The bathroom downstairs in the basement is next!