Color IQ

One of my fellow work shop / photo op participants from last year, Marc Gaudet, posted a link to a site for testing your Color IQ, basically testing your acuity with distinguishing colors as they change hue from one to another. The test is rather simple, yet extremely effective.

Marc scored a 4, with zero being perfect and scores above that being worse and worse …

I scored 54 … no doubt a product of my color deficiency … and the kicker is that the four bands looked pretty smooth to me. But obviously that’s the point … color deficiency is a problem that does not manifest itself until it is tested.

Go try it out … it’s fun and very informative.

Update: On my fairly new Dell U2311H eIPS panel, I scored 39, and my errors were clustered a bit tighter. Definitely an obvious pair of areas where my hue discrimination is atrocious.

FTF – Frivolous Time Frittering – Time for another self-exile for a while …

Well, I allowed myself to get drawn into a long argument with a jerk … the kind of person that would post the following comments (look down at the end and be stunned) …

I’ve been having misgivings about my time on the forum for a while now, and this scene just broke the camel’s back.

I really can’t be associated with people like that so I am taking some time away from heavy participation in the forum. I won’t miss it much … I will probably post a wee bit … some things require a response. But I have no interest in dealing with the likes of this scum bag on a daily basis …

I hope the F300EXR turns people on there back to photography.

A virtual walk inside the circle at Stonehenge!

This blew my mind … I was poking around with Google maps and wanted to paste a lonk showing the stones highly magnified via satellite view. I scrolled right to the end and there I was right inside the stones! Way cool!!!

I’ve walked inside the circle before, on a premium tour to Stonehenge, Lacock and Bath. This was at sunrise and the images I got were fantastic. You will get some of the same feeling from this.

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Perseids 2010 – Second night, 5 more sightings!

Well, after the spectacular 12 sightings on 12 August, I thought maybe it would be an idea to try again on 13 August with the Tamron 28-75 at 28mm. So out I went, back to the same location. And I managed 5 more sightings, including two absolutely spectacular burning meteors. I caught three meteors on film, but I don;t think I saw two of them, so there were a surprising number of meteors out there, considering the time of day (evening is not as good as early morning) and the direction (north east is better than south west.) I sure hope you all got out to have a look …

Unfortunately, on night two the Milky Way was barely visible due to hazy skies and some wispy clouds that show up all too well on film. Processing can mitigate the issues, but the images are not as vivid as night one’s images were.

I also decided to reprocess night one and change the white balance to more of a blue-ish tint, more accurately reflecting the way things looked out there. Remember that I am shooting high ISO and very low exposures, so I don’t exactly get a ton of data on the sensor … I have to spend a lot of time boosting what I get using layers with screen blend and levels and so on. I also have to run noise reduction because even the incredible D700 can generate a great deal of noise if you lift shadows enough.

So I will show you the six images in order of capture … the first three form night one, where the seeing was simply amazing … and the last three from night two, where the haze was depressingly strong …

As always, click on the images to see the 800px versions …

The following streak was very faint and pulled up a lot of stars when processed.

 

Everything on night 2 is fainter … and because of the much wider angle, the streaks are smaller and there is light pollution along the bottom …

The last one was literally my last meteor shot of the night … I don’t even think I saw this one, as it was just above the horizon … my 5 sightings probably did not count two of these three shots!

This one is also a crop, as the light pollution was brutal (bottom left corner.) And watch for the two airplane tracks in the top half of the image … until I examined it very closely, I thought I had a miracle shot with three meteors … but no, the top two have faint images of regularly flashing lights :-)

D700 Shoots the Perseids in 2010

Those who have been reading me for a while will remember my pathetic attempt to shoot the Perseids last year. Not even a sniff of an image. I managed to see two meteor sin half an hour and basically gave up.

Tonight, I looked for a few minutes in Karen’s back yard, which allows a very good view of the dark sky and the Milky Way, being in a small town with minimal light pollution and I saw two meteors within 10 minutes. And these things were bright! Both were in the western sky. We even saw a satellite moving through the North Eastern sky, almost touching the star at the very tip of the ladle in the Big Dipper. Very cool.

I left around 11pm and stopped on the way back at a spot with a wide open field facing south and west with a nice view of the Milky Way, although not as contrasty as Karen’s view because it was much closer to the city. I looked at the sky for a while and decided to take a shot … I set up the D700 to catch part of the Milky Way (which looks terrific on film) and set exposures around 10 seconds at 1600 ISO and f/2.8. The 50mm 1.8 was used, although I realize as I am typing this that the Tamron 28-75 is wider and would have been a better choice … DUH!

Anyway, I caught 3 meteors on film tonight! And that’s out of 12 that I saw! Amazing evening. The Perseids are just going nuts tonight.

Here is my first and best image. This was one incredibly bright meteor … enough that I was able to add a lot of contrast and get everything to stand out. What I found weird is that, with the sky set to black using the ACR white balance tool, the streaks were all yellow. And so was the Milky Way. I’m not really sure what color it all should be, but it looks fine this way … to me at least :-)

Remember to click on the images to see the 800px versions. Much clearer view of the meteor.

The second image barely caught the meteor and it was much fainter, hence the lower contrast to keep the meteor streak visible.

And the third is the faintest of all. In fact, I’m not actually sure that I saw this one live. It is very, very faint. I pulled it up along with about 2.3 billion stars :-)

This was an immensely successful evening … 12 meteors, 3 on film and a satellite to top it off.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce – Updated: Excellent Customer Service!

CIBC originally handled a fraud situation beautifully for me by reversing $2300 in fraud charges by some scum bags that stole my identity and charged $500.00 to a place called the Maple Truck Stop in Maple, Ontario (presumably a cash transaction and it boggles the mind to think that whoever gave the cash was not complicit) … as well as three charges in April, May and June with Bell Mobility.

Then CIBC called me on Thursday, 12 August and dropped the bomb that they were charging me the $800 for April and May because it is my responsibility to check my bills thoroughly and call within 30 days else I eat the costs. Now, since I push all my expenses through the card every month, that’s a big job. And I don’t always see small charges (which is how they started) …

So here is the update: CIBC called me today on Friday, 13 August to say that they spotted my blog and reviewed the fraud situation again and have accepted the two charges from April as fraud. My credit will appear in a week or two. This is superb news, and I must say a very impressive bit of customer service. The speed of reaction for a large corporation is mind-boggling.

My real grouch in all this was their analytics. Both RBC and MBNA have responded instantly to fraud on my accounts in the past by running analytics in their back office systems. CIBC, on the other hand, never gave a peep.

I still think that CIBC needs to look at how their analytics missed the strange maple Truck Stop transaction for a large, yet even number ... and even more importantly how they failed to note the Bell Mobility charges with an account that did not have my name on it anywhere (I called Bell Mobility myself to check.) The representative did say that their fraud group was going to look this over a bit more and I hope that means examining it to see if it could have been caught.

When first contacted, I had pushed back a bit asking if these were illegal charges? The first woman who contacted me danced around that but there was no way for her to say that these charges were legitimate. All she could do was repeat over and over … “you did not call us within 30 days.”

I am toning down this post considerably, since CIBC has made good on the fraud and do not deserve the lambasting I gave them. There is also apparently an escalation process that I could have used, but I figured that fraud unit would be the last word. That's a lesson we can all take from this -- check to see if there is a higher authority. Of course, I would wonder if the response could have been any quicker than it was in this instance.



In yesterday's original post I mocked their catch phrase -- for what matters. Today I have to say that the CIBC is showing what does matter, which is responsiveness and an appropriate solution to an obvious problem. I can only thank them for moving to right what felt like a wrong to me.

And that, I think, is how customer loyalty is built.

I should mention here that I was not asked by the CIBC to update this blog. Not even to tone down the rhetoric. I have made these changes myself out of a sense of fair play for a company that is obviously trying to do some good.