I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

IT'S TIME I STOPPED PROCRASTINATING AND FINISHED MY MONTREAL ENTRY...

...tomorrow.

I don't know if it's the heat or what, but I just haven't been in much of a writing mood this week. I'm still a bit weirded out at the idea that I'm an uncle now. And I've been playing Star Ocean 3 a lot (and some Sega Genesis gamess too, since my brother dragged it out and got all the wires set up).


Actually, one advantage to my procrastination from finishing writing about my trip to Montreal is that I should have the first of the film photos back by this evening. (I'll pick them up from the Shoppers Drug Mart at Merivale Mall on my way to the anime club.)




Anyway, on Wednesday evening, I walked over to Merivale to get a new printer cartridge from Zellers and also to buy some "El Cheapo" type 1:43 scale toy cars to serve as background "traffic" in my pictures of the 1:43 scale Hot Wheels Ferraris.

I bought a 1:43 scale BMW new Mini-Cooper Maisto car from Zellers, and a cheap 8-in-1 pack of 1:43 scale Motor Max cars from Toys R' Us, which includes a Porsche Boxster, a Mercedes-Benz SL500, a Toyota Supra, a Mazda RX-7, a Mini-Cooper, a Toyota Land Chaser, a Jeep Liberty, and a BMW 328CI.





This is kind of a test picture, simulating traffic at an intersection. (Yes, I used Merivale and Meadowlands in Nepean as my mental model.) The cheap cars aren't nearly as detailed as the Ferraris, but they serve the purpose of being background extras adequately.



The advantage of having bought a new printer cartridge is that I can now finally use print out larger backdrops than the simple photos I was using before. After I take the pictures of the toy cars with backdrops, I usually adjust the "levels" of the medium colours, since the photos I take usually end up on the dark side, but, for the computer printout backdrops, I also have to saturate the colours slightly to make them look more "alive".

Here are two new Mini-Cooper toy cars in front of a print out of this photo that I took at London's Piccadilly Circus on July 1^st, 1998.

The one on the left is a Toys R' Us Motor Max toy car that was actually 1:41 scale even though the package of eight cars it was in said that all of the cars were 1:43 scale, while the one on the right is a 1:43 scale Maisto toy car.

The Maisto one has a slightly superior paint job, but the Motor Max one has opening doors.



Here are the three Ferraris, a F-40, a F-512 Modificata Testarossa, and a 360 Modena Spider, in "traffic" at Piccadilly Circus. It looked great to me at first, except I didn't think it out too well and I put the traffic on the wrong side of the street for England. :P



That's better.





I nicked a photo of Shibuya Station Crossing in Tokyo from Flickr and used that as a backdrop (since I love the anime Super Gals!, the second half of which I'm grateful that The Right Stuf International recently announced, by the way, so much).

Since people in Japan also drive on the left hand side of the road, I didn't have to touch the traffic from the last Piccadilly Circus traffic photo... I just changed the backdrop.




The same scene, from a slightly different angle. That's a blurry Toyota Supra in the foreground.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 5:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

I HAVEN'T HAD MUCH TO TOOT MY OWN HORN ABOUT LATELY...

...but this photo of an Ottawa OC Transpo GMC New Look bus (a.k.a. "The Speed bus") picking up passengers at the apostrophe-free Tunneys Pasture Transitway stop is being considered for publication. I won't give any details about the publication yet, in case this doesn't pan out, but it's something fairly respectable and not just a local photocopied 'zine. I'm pretty flattered, considering I'm an amateur photographer who took that picture out of the window of a bus moving in the opposite direction with a non-professional "snapshot"-type camera.

It does seem that some professional publishers are apparently looking more and more towards photographs posted by amateurs at Flickr as an alternative to expensive stock photography.




Also, I did indeed go to Montreal on Friday and I've started a travelogue about my experiences, but I didn't get back from Montreal until 3 a.m. on Saturday morning and, while I usually go to bed after 3 a.m. anyway, I'm almost never "out" at that time of night and it's really thrown my biological clock for a loop and I was just exhausted all weekend.

If you just want to see the photos I took without commentary, all of the digital pictures are in my "All-New Montreal Snapshots, July 2006!" album at Fotopic, though I will add the film photos I took to that album in the coming weeks (whenever I get them developed).

posted by Steve Brandon @ 9:28 AM 0 Comments Links to this post