Hello! Welcome to my Picture Of The Week, where you will find a different picture posted every week! Sometimes insightful, sometimes silly, sometimes a complete waste of time, but always having something to do with me! Isn't it great?
RSS Feed: Inspired by a suggestion from Russell, I have added an RSS feed so that those with RSS readers can find out when the picture of the week has been posted. The RSS link is http://www.anttila.ca/michael/potw/rss.pl. Enjoy!
FireFox Live Bookmarks: Also, those of you using FireFox can now click on the little orange button in the bottom right corner of the screen to add this page to your "Live Bookmarks" list! Thanks to Dan Pollock for giving me the code to do that. :)
Another Photo Site: My friend Aravind has given up his Picture Of The Week, but has started Aravind's Photoblog!.
Map Madness: I have added approximate GPS coordinates for all of my pictures, and tied them into Google Maps! Now you can see where almost all of my pictures were taken! On top of that, I have added a new Photo Map that has all the photo locations on one map!
Other Sites Using My Photos: Ontario's Historical Plaques by Alan Brown.
In case you were wondering about practical examples of last week's photo of hot pixels, here is a photo that I have been wanting to take for a while. This is a long exposure photograph of our bedroom being vacuumed by our Roomba, which we affectionately call "The Robot".
Our Roomba is over four years old now. It's holding up OK, aside from losing the bolt that holds the side brush on. Due to iRobot using an extremely unusual bolt size, I haven't been able to find a replacement bolt, so we've just been running it without the side brush. It's also on its second battery, and I'm starting to think that it might need a third battery soon.
Knowing what I know now, would I buy a Roomba again? Maybe. It is quite convenient to have it go off each week and vacuum the floors... but it doesn't get into the corners, and the amount of effort required to keep it clean and functioning sometimes seems like more effort than pulling out the regular vacuum. The battery lifetime seems to be an issue too, and replacements are expensive and not exactly friendly to the environment.
Anyway, I was inspired to take this photo by other Roomba owners who have done similar things. I waited until it was pitch dark outside, turned off all the lights on the second floor, guessed at some camera settings, then opened the shutter, started the robot, and went downstairs to wash the dishes. I used the dishes to determine my shutter speed, so after 20 minutes the dishes were done and I went upstairs and stopped the exposure. I think it turned out pretty well considering it was my first attempt.
By the way: Last week's photo was a 5 minute exposure... this one was 20 minutes, and the amount of noise and number of hotpixels was even more than I feared. Thank goodness for Noise Ninja and the clone tool in Photoshop. If it weren't for them, this photo would have been almost unusable. Oh well... just like my venerable robot, I'm loyal to my camera and will try to keep it operational as long as possible.
Technical details: This photo was taken with my Rebel XT + Peleng 8mm fisheye at 8mm, ISO 100, f/8 for 1213 seconds (20 minutes and 13 seconds), with +1 digital exposure compensation to bring out more detail in the room.
The light on the robot was green while it was on the charger, but as soon as I took it off, it turned yellow. This leads me to believe that the battery might not be holding a full charge anymore. The yellow spiral is how the robot always starts cleaning... spiralling outwards before it starts its random walk of the room. Soon after, the light faded from yellow to red, indicating low batteries. It cleaned the rest of the room with low batteries, it seems. That makes me kind of sad. Oh, and that little blue circle is the "dirt detect" light. Apparently it found some extra dirt on the floor and did a little circle to clean it up.-- Michael at 9:29pm, Friday March 12, 2010 EST
Very cool!-- Aravind at 12:58am, Saturday March 13, 2010 EST
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