Montreal In Pictures

March 16 2012

Appears that we needed to suffer through another wet grey day before we get spoiled at the weekend with +17 degrees and sunshine. Should be a great Saint Patrick’s weekend.

Given the wet morning, I was tempted to go shoot another church, but given that I tend to take lots of HDR in churches and then spend twice as long processing, I decided to keep today short and just head down to the Old Port. I was thinking that given the low cloud, it would be interesting to get a shot of the skyline with the mountain covered in cloud. I guess I underestimated the level of the cloud base as the mountain was totally invisible from the Old Port – and most of the buildings for that matter.

Anyway, given that I had walked in the rain to get there I proceeded to the only place I knew that would provide some protection from the rain together with offering a view of downtown – the elevated walkway on the Jacques Cartier Pier. I wasn’t so much worried for myself getting wet – I was already looking like drowned rat – but more for my camera which has a distinct hate for getting the slightest damp.

Montreal Skyline shrouded in mist

A slightly closer view…my apologies, this post doesn’t exactly provide a great variety of shots – the rain washed away my inspiration today.

Montreal Skylines shrouded in mist

Okay, this next one nearly got trashed as the number of rain spots on the lens made me almost wear out the cloning tool in Lightroom – in fact it crashed twice. I’m using the new Lightroom 4 and not sure if it’s a bug (more on Lightroom 4 below) or my computer struggled with processing a gazillion cloning circles…anyway, given all the trouble it gave me, I thought I would include it in the post.

Skyscraper in the clouds

Here’s another image that gave me some issues in processing – so much for having an easy day. This time it was Photomatix that decided to start playing up. This is the result I was expecting.

Misty Montreal skyline

But instead kept getting this as the final output:

Distorted Photomatix result

By default, I have the preference settings in Photomatix set to automatically align and crop the images when it does its final wizard magic, and it normally works like a dream. On this occasion however, something funky kept happening, leading to distortion and excessive cropping. By removing the auto align and crop, the image seemed to process fine…mind you, I actually quite liked the distorted look.

If you’ve been following the blog for the last few weeks, you may have seen a couple of shots of the Cirque du Soleil Big Top in different stages of being erected. The Big Top is now in place ready to greet thousands of spectators for the Amaluna show starting on April 19.

Cirque du Soleil Big Top for the Montreal Amaluna show

Before I forget. I mentioned earlier Lightroom 4. Having had my head in the sand in the build-up to the release of Lightroom 4 I ended up purchasing Lightroom 3 just 2 weeks before the launch of version 4. The fact the latest version had a price drop and was being offered at the same price as what I had paid for version 3 (a 50% discount on normal price), you can imagine I was not too happy. I was not prepared to shell out another 75$ for an upgrade, so I contacted Adobe customer Service and they agreed to a free upgrade – Thank you Adobe!

Now, my issue (and pretty much everyone else who has upgraded or purchased the latest version from what I hear) is that the support for external editors is Kaput. From what I read on forums it’s pretty much any 3rd party editing tool (Nik, Topaz, etc) that produces “Bad argument #1 yadayadayada”. Sounds like Adobe are rushing to fix this (and other bugs) that found their way through to final product release – despite it seems working fine in the Beta test versions. Well, until the fix is shipped, I’m not able to add my little Topaz Adjust tweaks that I am often prone to do (maybe too much)…Okay my little rant over and I’m still a huge fan of Adobe Lightroom, but hoping for a fix soon before the Topaz withdrawal symptoms kick in.

To view images in gallery format, simply click on one of the images below.