Yes, that’s all I’ve become. I wake up, I go outside, my plants get mad at me, and I spend the morning watering them and looking after them. For those who are just joining the saga, I planted a few tomato plants on my patio at the end of May. I’ve watched them grow, seen them fall down a few times, nursed them back to health, and in return, I’ve been rewarded by the growth of a pile of little tiny tomatoes. One of the challenges with growing fruits and vegetables on your patio is that it’s really hard to get them enough water, especially in this kind of heat. With a normal garden, you ...

I was wondering today just how long my little garden has been growing for. Looking at my Flickr set, it looks like I had moved a few of the tomato seedlings outside on May 22nd. Here’s a shot at the time: I took a few photos today, and wanted to do a little comparison. It’s been roughly five weeks since I started, and here’s what things look like today: As you can see, things are progressing nicely. I had a little mishap about a week ago where I accidentally broke the main stem on one of my roma tomato plants. I actually managed to fix it up such that the wilting disappeared and it started ...

I’m interrupting my photo entries for a quick post about my home garden. As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided the other day that I wanted to try growing a few things on my patio. I used to help my grandma with her garden when I was a kid, and I have fond memories out in the back of her house playing in the dirt. My patio in Chilliwack is about twice the size as my patio was in Vancouver, so I’m definitely sure I have the room now to grow a few vegetables. I swung by the garden center the other day and picked up a few things. First, I picked up some soil, since I don’t really have ...

You know, there was a time when I actually sort of considered my blog a photo blog. Truth is I haven’t really posted many photos lately. Here’s one I took with my little Powershot camera a few days ago: ...

I’ve been messing around a bit more with photoshop in the evenings, and one day soon I’ll read the huge 1000 page book I have on it as well. Here’s something I was messing with a bit last night. It’s a shot from my patio looking easy towards Yaletown. The bridge is the Granville Street Bridge. The whole image involved work on about 5 different layers in photoshop. The rain was a bit trickier than I imagined, and it’s not entirely convincing, but it’s a good start. ...

Did a quick HDR off my patio before bed. And before I drop off, here’s one more bit of info — my dad and step-mom are getting on a plane at 7am to spend a week near Cancun relaxing. They usually spend most vacations every year in the RV camping somewhere, and this is the first trip that they’ve taken to a far-away place (except of course when they came to visit me out in Ottawa). So, I hope they have a really awesome time down there. Also, Jari and Seppo should be stepping off a plane any time soon to spend the week up here in Vancouver. These are the two Finnish guys I got loaded with ...

So as the sun went down over downtown this evening, I thought it might be a neat idea to try and make a HDR panorama. I’ve done this a few times using my PC, but never using my new Macbook Pro. I took a series of 20 shots and merged them together using the Mac panorama software DoubleTake. Afterwards, I created the final HDR using Photomatix. Here’s the end result. The HDR process went smoothly, but DoubleTake did a rather poor job of aligning the images. Part of the reason may have been that it thought the focal length of my lens was 26mm, even though it actually was a 17mm lens. However, ...