Lighthouse Planet

This is the same lighthouse as in my previous post only I have distorted it into a sphere. It's a fun technique that I recently found on the web. I've been wanting to try it and the lighthouse seemed a good subject. Mostly it's a Photoshop trick using the filter Polar Coordinates to curve the photo around on itself. Then it's just some digital cleanup.

Lighthouses always seem so sad and lonely. I can imagine this lighthouse being far away from every other planet and manned by a lone person dedicated to keeping the skies safe. If you look really closely at it, or in the original, you will see that the person is Linda's sister Sharon. Can you find her?

There are a whole bunch of these on Flickr - although this is my only one.

Pigeon Point Lighthouse

After looking at the elephant seals on Christmas Eve, I stopped at a nearby lighthouse. Since it was such a nice day I was hoping to get some great shots of the lighthouse. The Pigeon Point Lighthouse is no longer in use (probably due to satellites and GPS) and is in serious danger of falling down. Luck for us it looked sturdy enough. An interesting fact is that it is named after a ship and not the obvious assumption of the bird. I guess it is true of many light houses up and down the coast.

It was late afternoon when I shot this so the colors were really starting to pop. It was also neat that there was a observation deck built out on a rock on the ocean side. It offered a great spot to be able to shot back towards the builds and the coast with the sun behind me. I can't think of a better time and place to photograph this landmark. I felt luck to be there.

This is another panorama of 6 photos. The black area at the bottom is where I did not shoot photos. So the bottom curve could be considered the rotation path of the camera. The exposure of the sky across the whole pan was too difficult to match in the stitching software so I ended up masking out the sky and replacing it with a gradient based on colors in the original sky. It's very close to the original, just more even. Click on the image for the larger version.

Elephant Seals

Linda and I are in San Jose, CA for Christmas. We are staying with Linda's sister and her family. On Christmas Eve we spent the day out on the Pacific coast at Ano Nuevo State Park checking out the elephant seals. The seals are there for mating season. It was a bit of luck for us because they are only there for a short time. I guess we were also lucky in that it was unusually sunny and clear. We had reserve tickets for a guided hike out into the park reserve. I was surprised how close we were able to get to all the lounging animals. All of them were mostly just sunning themselves and not doing much. But they were still impressive to see.

Virtual Time Trial

Now Sport in Arden Hills held a virtual time trial contest at their store. It's just down the road from work so some of my work biking buddies go over there at noon for their winter training. For some it's a better option then trying to get on the trainer at home with kids, etc., drawing on their time.

For the TT everyone would bring in there own bike, then the guys at Now would set it up on their computer training system. The system puts a load on the wheel to simulate the ride that we see on the TV. There is a computer bike rider that represents me. So as the computer biker went up a hill I could feel the pedaling get heavier. All I was missing was the wind! Although you can see that they had fans so at least I could stay cool.



The TT was about 5 miles long which amounted to about 12-14 minutes for most people. As you can see in the picture as I was finishing, it really gave me a workout! According to the final results, I finished 4th. Its fun to see that 4 of the top 6th are people I ride with at work including the top 2. Paul at Now Sports plans to do the virtual TT more this winter. I do my own trainer work at home in the basement but it can be boring. Stuff like this is good motivation to keep training.

First Snow Caught with New Camera

Today we are getting our first real snow and it's really whipping around. A good old fashioned Minnesota snow storm.

The video is from my new Canon G9 camera. It's a point and shot but has some nice pro-sumer level features. Most importantly is that it shots RAW photos, something that, right now anyway, you can only find in the Digital SLR cameras. I'm also excited about having some limited video capability. Now that Blogger suports video uploads (hosted by Google Video) I should be able to shot just enough video for blog sort of content.