A foggy night in Toronto

I was sitting at home reading fascinating tales about the Yakuza in preparation for my trip to Japan (exciting news, dear readers. The next blog post will be coming at you from Japan. I’m leaving Thursday) when I saw an update from my friend Emery:

Awesome night for a fogwalk.

Fog? My ears perked up. I’m a sucker for the stuff

I looked outside and sure enough, it was gorgeous. I grabbed my camera and jumped on my bike.

Was it worth going outside at 2am for?

(Oh wait, I’m jumbling the order. Forgive me — I’m just extremely proud of this shot.)

I stepped outside into an eerie version of the Annex.

I sped south on my bike. Read the rest of this entry »

Halloween Team Fortress 2

Last year, my friends from computer science decided to do something geeky for Halloween:

What could be geekier than going to Halloween as video game characters from TF2? (If you don’t know what TF2 is and have a winter break to waste, click here.)

Close enough?

This certainly wasn’t the first time it’s been done. Heck, it’s even been done in Lego.

But none of these other guys had a backdrop quite as video-game-like as the Bahen Centre (computer science HQ) at UofT.

And here are some individual shots of the characters:

Read the rest of this entry »

New Glass

Got my first L lens (albeit used): the 17-40 f/4. I’m usually not someone who swoons over lenses but I’m getting the Canon 5D in a few weeks which will render my EF-S lens useless. Thanks Pat for the great deal. (Let the record be known on the internets: he takes ridiculously good care of his lenses). Twenty minutes after picking it up, I put it to good use by taking this rather boring shot for today’s Varsity front page.

What photography tells us about electricity

A two minute science lesson

While wandering around downtown a few years ago, I snapped a shot of a car in motion by panning my camera to match the car’s speed. I thought it was a pretty boring shot until I noticed a pulsing pattern on all the lights in the background.

My friend John and I put on our science caps and figured out what was going on.

Hypothesis:

Our power grid operates at 60Hz (cycles per second).

Method:

1. Open the full size image and count the number of pulses on the lights. For the lazy, each has 9.
2. Note the shutter speed. Again, for the lazy, the shutter was open for 1/13 of a second.
3. Multiply the 9 by 13 to get the number of pulses there would be in a second given that we know that 9 occurred in 1/13th of a second.

We arrive at ~120.

Discussion

Didn’t we just say that our grid runs at 60? Did we mess something up?

Our power grid runs on an alternating current (much to the disappointment of Tesla edit: Edison). This means that current in our wires has two peaks as it switches between positive and negative voltages once every cycle (-110V and +110V).

Since bulbs shine brightest at voltage peaks, there are two bright spots per cycle. This is why we have double the number of pulses that we might have assumed.

120  / 2 pulses/cycle = 60 cycles per second or 60 Hz.

Which matches what we know about our grid.

Bonus: speed of the car

Eyeballing the image, I’d guess that the streak just to the right of the car is almost 1/3 the width of the Civic’s length which happens to be 176 inches.

We know that the exposure ran for 1/13 of a second so the car is travelling 686 inches =~ 17m/s which is ~60km/h.

Another bonus: car lights

As pointed out by scienceduck, the car’s lights aren’t pulsing. This is because instead of being hooked up to to the grid, they’re running off the car’s direct current battery which does not cycle the same way as AC.

Taking it up another level

Maybe there’s some lessons about the red shift waiting to be teased out… ;)

Wandering around east of downtown

Toronto's less-explored corners

After popping by the Flickr 888 event, we decided to wander around east of downtown. We headed east along King, passing many expensive furniture stores.

Here, we hit the edge of the gentrification

Also in this area is Inglenook Community High School. This is the old girl’s entrance

We wandered a bit north into Corktown. If you think my lens is warped, it’s not - the buildings were just that saggy.

This house seemed to be one large, ad hoc home improvement project. The garage and shed were a haphazard collection of materials.

This street in particular looks like a scene ripped straight out of an industrial town in post-war Britain.

Heading north on Sackville, we passed through one of Toronto’s “ghettos.”

And the Regent Park revitalization project.

After lots of walking, nothing is more appealing than some good Indian food.

Finally, while walking up Church, we joined an impromptu group watching the Olympic opening from the sidewalk. (no good pictures though)