3D Thursday: Darkness

Back in mid-May, before the finishing touches were done on the O-Train pathway, I swung by at night and took some photos. I had my tripod with me and some time, so I thought I'd see if I could get the right shots for some 3D photos. I think they turned out pretty well.

This one is of the stairs leading down to Louisa Street off the pathway. The railing had just been installed: (click on the image to see it larger, you can even make out the depth of the blades of grass!)

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

When you're using one camera to take two exposures for a 3D shot, it's difficult enough in the daytime. The colours or lighting levels don't always match, you need to make sure the subject is stationary, and that the camera location is moved enough to have an effect, but not too much to spoil it. At nighttime, it's even harder. Night photos all but demand a tripod, and my point-and-shoot cameras aren't always consistent in producing the same settings for the same shot.

At the time, they were making rapid progress on installing the ramp in the sidewalk along the Somerset Street viaduct where the pathway comes uphill to meet it, so that cyclists could safely cross the sidewalk. They had left it for the night with the rebar installed and a fence segment laid over it, for safety I guess. This provides a great contrast of depths that works really well in 3D photos.

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

While I wanted to come back to take a 3D photo the next day, I knew that there was a good chance they'd have poured the concrete, so I went ahead and poked my camera through the construction fence, held it still as best as I could, and took a photo. Then I poked it through the next hole over and did it again. And it turned out pretty good!

As it happened, I had to go by there anyway the next day, and they hadn't yet poured the concrete! But it was a good thing I had taken the photo the night before as I was in a hurry and could only snap a quick photo or two from across the street:

I hope you're enjoying the O-Train pathway, especially now that the O-Train is back in service!

[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images. 3D FAQ]

Movie fans visiting World Exchange Theatre tonight

The World Exchange Centre is a shopping centre/office/parking complex that covers the entire block surrounded by Albert, Metcalfe, Queen and O'Connor streets. The complex includes two office towers (TD tower, built in 1991, and 100 Queen, built in 2001), a rooftop clock, a shopping centre (The World Exchange Plaza, also built in 1991, in which is the NCC's infocentre kiosk), a five-storey underground parking garage and a public plaza on the Metcalfe end:

The Plaza also contains Ottawa's last first-run downtown movie theatre, now that the cinemas are closed at the Rideau Centre. With Empire getting out of the cinema business, a new operator is being sought, with uncertain prospects. (More on this further down)

Tonight, people who want to see the theatre stay open are being encouraged to join a Fill The Theatre event to see the 6:30pm screening of the film "The Family" starring Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones and Michelle Pfeiffer. They also have a Facebook group to promote the cause.


Anyhow, back to the building...

3D Thursday: Accessible McNabb

McNabb Park Community Centre has been having some work done on the front of the building (although the "front" is set far back from Percy Street). I believe they're installing an accessibility lift to provide access to the basement and main floor, so you don't have to wheel yourself up the long ramp.

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

Incidentally, there is an ongoing public consultation on the redevelopment of McNabb Park.

I took the above photo on my way home from purchasing my new camera, a waterproof Sony Cybershot the size of a small wallet. It ostensibly has a "3D mode" which uses software to extrapolate depth information from multiple rapid exposures at different focus settings, but the "3D" photo it creates is very shallow, and doesn't beat exposures from two separate points.

I had two cameras of the previous model I used (a Pentax Optio W series) which allowed me to take two simultaneous photos side-by-side. This meant I could take photos of moving objects and people (like so), but so far I only have the one Sony camera, which will limit my 3D photo-taking opportunities. Luckily I have a lot of them banked up.

[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images. 3D FAQ] [Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Wings over North Centretown

Sorry I haven't been posting for a while. In June and July I was busy with Bluesfest, and at the end of July I lost two months' worth of photos to a massive hard disk failure.

So that kind of set me back a bit. Plus: hey, it's summer! But as things return to 'normal' I figured I should try to get my blog schedule back on track. I'll start off easy.

Here's a photo of the north-west sector of Centretown (the first definition here), looking east on Nepean Street from the hill near Bronson Avenue. At the upper-right, you can see the biplane that is another sign of summer:

Straight ahead is Centennial Public School, which had 21 trees planted earlier this summer thanks to the CCCA's Trees & Greenspace Committee, which worked to get the City of Ottawa to plant them.

Beyond that is May Nickson Place, a red-brick Ottawa Community Housing highrise on Gloucester Street, which will be sandwiched by even taller condos under construction on either side (the tower crane is for 224 Lyon).

Beyond that is the steeple of St. Patrick's Basilica, which is flanked by two CCOC towers at 210 Gloucester and the corresponding address on Nepean. The sides of those buildings blend into the Place Bell behemoth at 160 Elgin Street, which also has two highrise developments under construction on either side, although these are across the street.

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Yellow dots are like loopy buttons for cyclists

(It's been a month since my last post; I'm slowly recovering from a long stint volunteering at RBC Royal Bank Bluesfest where I run the bike parking. This year we had record numbers again!)

A topic I'm eager to write about is the yellow dots on the pavement at intersections. You may recall my epic on pedestrian buttons, No Ifs, Ands or Buttons (and the follow-up supplementary post). Well cyclists have a way of activating the signals too, and what better place to describe it than the brand-new traffic control signal at Bronson and Arlington:

To recap the lowdown on ped buttons: when there is a traffic control signal with buttons, and there is a little yellow sign above the button, that means you must press the button if you want the walk signal to activate (though for some such intersections there might be some times of the day or week when the signal changes on a fixed timing whether or not the button is pressed).

3D Thursday: Hydro pole hole

In advance of the upcoming reconstruction of Gladstone Avenue starting this summer, Hydro Ottawa is replacing the hydro poles along Gladstone from Cartier to Bank. Here, five buckets hoisted by three cherry picker trucks are holding workers as they anchor the fixtures for a replacement pole at O'Connor:

It's a tricky job, because they need to put the new pole in right next to the old one, dodging the wires along the way. To do this, they need to dig a hole for the new pole, using a big 'badger' vacuum truck. I took a 3D photo looking down into one of these holes:

Source photos for the 3D images:
Left, Right

In case you're wondering how deep those wooden poles go beneath the ground, here's a pole on Wellington West in Hintonburg where they dug out underneath the sidewalk, leaving the pole and sidewalk in place:

Since I know you're wondering, construction on Gladstone isn't supposed to start until mid-July at the earliest.

[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images. 3D FAQ]

Minto Park Sale tomorrow: BBQ, Plant Sale, e-Waste drop off and more!

The annual Minto Park Sale is tomorrow (Saturday, June 15, 2013) from 8am to 2pm in Minto Park on Elgin Street.

A new record of 75 tables have been booked by people selling their household items, crafts, art, etc.

The CCCA will be renewing its suite of popular activities, including the electronic waste drop-off, where you can bring your broken/unwanted electronics to be safely recycled without charge--also raising funds for the community! A full list of what can be dropped off is on the Recycle Your Electronics website. Let's see if we can collect more old Centretown electronic junk than we did at our last e-waste drop off in October!

The CCCA barbecue will be back again, with yours truly as grillmaster, and I'll be firing up two grills this year! In addition to the hotdogs and veggie dogs of the last four years, we'll also have sausages from the Glebe Meat Market, and there'll be grilled onions this year to top them off! Service starts at 10am.

There will also be two specialized CCCA activities in Minto Park during the sale, the annual plant sale to raise funds for the CCCA Tree Fund...

...and a bake sale to raise funds for the Minto Park Games Tables project.

We'd greatly appreciate your help with any of these initiatives, even if you just show up for an hour or two, to help sell and serve the dogs and to help promote the community association and recruit new members.

If you're not into that, at least come out to the sale to get some great finds!

Note: the annual Minto Park Sale is organized by Councillor Diane Holmes, in whose office I work.

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Google Charles View

Google Street View first launched in Ottawa in October 2009, using photos taken in the spring of that year.

In summer of 2012, they came back to take more photos, and these started to go live this past winter. This time around they used branded cars so you knew they were Google Street view. I saw them a few times myself, like here on Wellington Street in late April 2012:

When you view that location in Street View, it does say that the imagery is from April 2012, but clearly from a different day since the weather and traffic are both different.

However, there were some other spots where I saw (and hastily photographed) the Google Street View car where the corresponding images also captured me. Here's the Google Street View car on Gladstone Avenue at Bell Street:

And here's the corresponding photo of me in Street View, a few seconds before I noticed the Google car was there:

Here's another sighting, on Kent Street around Gloucester and Laurier on a mid-April morning in 2012. I had chased it for a couple blocks, tying to get close enough to photograph it. The only two photos I did manage to get are pretty blurry:

I had to get to work, though, and it caught a photo of me peeling off at the Laurier Segregated Bike Lane:

But by chasing it for a couple blocks, I had inadvertently managed to get my picture taken a number times by Google Street View.

It gets better: because I was chasing the Street View car but never quite catching up to it, when you click on the arrow in the above Street View shot to move the view south, I'm still in the same part of the frame for a number of shots until here:

Fun ;)

While we're on the topic of maps, check out the City's new GeoOttawa Maps. These replace the less-user-friendly eMaps, and have a number of new features, including:

• Click "I want to..." at the top and then "View the historical air photos" to see aerials of Ottawa as far back as 1958! (Some of which were used by the URBSite author for this recent post)
• Click on a property to bring up a property report, including a link to the zoning for the site
• Click the little yellow street view icon on the left above the zoom bar and then click a spot on the map to go straight to that location in Google Street View (although it takes you to a limited-feature version of Google Street View hosted by the City)