Time Immortal

Mark Mercier, in the Nova Scotia Chronicle-Herald, gives a brief historical refresher on Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

It’s…rather shameful to have to admit that Canadians should have seen the present HRC fracas coming almost twenty years ago.

Canadians heard a long time ago, at least as long ago as 1990, that they are not free to speak their minds as they see fit. 1990 was the year the Supreme Court of Canada ruled constitutional Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Section 13 says that it is “a discriminatory practice” to communicate “any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.”

…

A person of sense in 1990 could easily have predicted that s. 13 would soon be used, as it has indeed come to be used, to bully people away from saying what sitting commissioners happen not to want to hear.

The Supreme Court had three people of sense on it in 1990. The Court upheld the constitutionality of s. 13 by a mere 4-3 majority.

The Justices who got their way discounted their colleague’s fears. As long as authorities remember that hatred and contempt are extreme feelings, they said, and keep in mind that the purpose of the Act is to overcome discrimination, and not to censor speech, Canadians have no reason to fear that a chilly climate for opinion will descend on the country or that s. 13 will be used to control the expression of opinion and emotion. These Justices neglected the sage advice never to make a law that requires intelligence or goodwill on the part of those who administer it.

Happily, Keith Martin, the member of parliament for Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, a riding on Vancouver Island, has introduced into the House of Commons a private member’s motion, M-446, to delete s. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Unhappily, the matter of s. 13 hasn’t yet become a political issue. Unless a political party takes it up, M-446 will languish, and unless Canadians make s. 13 a political issue, no party will take up M-446. We need to communicate to politicians our support for M-446.

I don’t think it can be said any clearer than that. If, as Canadians, we value freedom — which means valuing freedom even for those we perhaps find distasteful — then the only option is to support Bill M-446. If we fail to do so, we knowingly abdicate any future claim to be free people.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

As with all good things, our visit to Vancouver Island couldn’t last, and after a couple of days visiting my grandparents Grace and I had to pack up and head back to the mainland.

As the ferry was preparing to depart, I was sprinting all over the deck, trying to get photos of a handful of things before the opportunities slipped away. One such thing was the churning water around the boat, which I think came out best in this shot. In particular, I love the interplay of dark and light water colour tones (blue and aqua); the contrast is also good.

Edit-wise, there wasn’t much I needed to do for this shot; a bit of chromatic aberration correction and some adjustments to the blue saturation complemented the already impressive effects of the calibration/Punch preset. I like a shot like that: quick to edit, and visually pleasing at the end of it.

The stretch of forest located immediately behind my grandparents’ house was evidently supposed to be turned, at one point, into another housing development. Quite a number of people in Qualicum Beach rallied to save the place, and it has since been turned into a forest preserve, with only a handful of walking trails winding their way through it. It’s really quite a tranquil place, and Grace and I made a point of exploring it fairly thoroughly on our second day on Vancouver Island.

This is just one of several spectacular views one could happen upon whilst walking through the forest. There is a small creek that winds through the area, which one can catch glimpses of from the walking paths at various high points. Views like this really, I think, lend an air of mystery and magic to the area, and in walking through places like this it is not hard to imagine Tolkein or Lewis walking through similar stretches of forest in England, emerging with their minds brimming with ideas concerning Middle Earth or Narnia.

Edit-wise, I applied the standard battery of presets to this image, but then re-thought the Clarity setting (+50) that usually accompanies the Punch preset, and instead set it to -50. The slight diffusion effect adds to the aforementioned mystery, I think. I also adjusted the green and yellow saturations quite a bit, and also the hues of each colour. Initially, the greenery had a very strong yellow tint, but Lightroom gives me the option to make my yellows more “greenish.”

It’s a little less effective than Photoshop’s colour replacement tool, but it’s also a little more predictable.

I think it’s high time that I posted another picture of my lovely wife.

It wasn’t the warmest day for a walk along the beach, but Grace and I braved the weather to take a stroll along the lengthy expanse of sand in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. It was just nice to escape the heady pace of Vancouver for a bit and enjoy a bit of “down time” at a slower, more relaxed pace.

And hey, who doesn’t like a walk in the sand with someone they love?

I didn’t take many pictures as we walked (both because I didn’t really want to and because it was raining, but I really liked this one when I came to it in post. Grace and I disagree on this point, but I never think it looks bad when her hair is a bit out of place, as a few locks of it are in this picture thanks to the wind. Also, I love her pose, and the way she’s reaching out to touch the sand (which was quite soft, to be sure). It’s just a good picture of her, I think.

Edit-wise, I had to manipulate the contrast a bit in order to highlight the difference between the ground and the sky (it was a gray day after all). I applied the usual batch of presets, and did a minor bit of retouching in Photoshop as well to modify a few pesky details that I couldn’t quite correct in Lightroom.

Okay, hopefully from here on in there won’t be anymore discontinuities in terms of what time the daily picture was taken at. This shot, for example, was taken once Grace and I got to my grandparents’ place on Vancouver Island. We wanted to get out for a bit of a walk, and my grandpa was more than happy to tour us around a small forest nearby.

I don’t know for sure when this tree fell over, but the way it landed made for an interesting shot, and it was framed nicely by greenery on all sides. This was actually quite a fun shot to edit, because of how rich the colours were, and I think the picture itself captures nicely the beauty and lushness of a typical British Columbia forest.

Edit-wise, I began by applying my usual calibration/Punch preset to this shot, although I reversed my decision with regard to the Clarity setting of said preset. Clarity was instead set to -50 (from +50) to give a slightly diffuse effect to the image. I boosted the green saturation by quite a lot, and also increased the contrast substantially. Finally, because there wasn’t much ambient light in the forest and as a result I’d found it necessary to increase the ISO to 800, I did some noise reduction on the shot. All of that, coupled with a bit of on-export sharpening by Lightroom (apparently that feature has not yet been “optimized” in any way, shape or form; hard to believe given how well it works!) and the result was the image featured above.

Once again, I’m kind of jumping back and forth in time, although this time only by a matter of hours (if that much). This picture is the ferry terminal at Horseshoe Bay, taken perhaps thirty minutes before the ferry departed for Vancouver Island.

The reason this image took a bit longer to arrive is that it is an attempt at a high dynamic range (or simply HDR) image. The concept behind HDR is basically to present an image in which both a darker foreground and a brighter background are in detail, with neither of the two being either washed out and overexposed, or dark and underexposed.

In layman’s terms, I suppose you could say that what HDR is is an attempt to make the camera see what the human eye sees when looking at a scene.

The plain fact of the matter is that the dynamic range (the “space” between the darkest value that a camera can record and the brightest value it can record) of most cameras is substantially less than that of the human eye.

So whereas we might look at a scene with our eyes and see a bright Sun in a blue sky behind a tree on which we can see the colour of the branches and the leaves, in a photo of same we will either see the detail on the tree in front of a washed out, bright white sky, or else we will see the Sun in a blue sky behind a dark, essentially black tree.

HDR photography uses one or more of several techniques to get around this limitation. Some forms of HDR attempt to use bracketing to combine several images, each at a different exposure level, into one cohesive picture that looks “right”. Other workarounds include the use of neutral density filters of proper magnitude at appropriate angles. Lacking both good HDR software and a graduated neutral density filter, I opt for a third method: taking a mid-tone picture and using Lightroom’s surprisingly power curves tool to effectively create a pseudo-HDR image.

Edit-wise, I began by doing a lot of highlight reduction on this shot, using both Lightroom’s built-in Recovery tool and the Tone Curve tool as well; almost all the bright highlights were stripped out of the picture. This was enough to restore detail not only to the sky, but to the clouds as well (note the subtle gradiations of grey amidst the white). I also used the Fill Light tool in Lightroom, which brightens darker tones, and then darkened some of the shadows again to restore contrast detail.

Finally, I applied my calibration/Punch preset, some noise reduction (always a good idea after that many level adjustments), and a bit of chromatic aberration correction to round out the edits. I toyed with the Clarity a bit, and thought briefly about doing this shot “diffusion print” style, but instead settled on a Clarity value of 50 (the default for the Punch preset).

This was a shot that I honestly didn’t think would work out; my past experiments with HDR have only occasionally ended successfully. That said, I was pleasantly surprised with how well this picture did turn out, and I’m going to have to remember everything I did that made this one turn out right, because I know I’ll want to do it again.

I hadn’t been on a BC Ferries vessel in at least a decade, which corresponds both to the length of time it had been since I had last visited Vancouver and the length of time it had been since I had last visited my grandparents out in the town of Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.

Far too long.

I grabbed this shot not long after we left port, and just after Grace and I had grabbed a quick bite to eat in the ferry’s cafeteria. The ferry was already moving at a good clip, and the wind on the deck was pretty extreme, but it was also fairly bright out, and getting a shot off wasn’t any particular kind of challenging.

The cloudiness apparent here stuck with us for most of our time in Vancouver, but even cloudy days can make for a good picture if one is careful. This shot in particular worked out very well, although getting it to the point it was at took a fair bit of editing.

I began by applying the calibration/Punch preset, but didn’t like the look of the shot after doing so. Next, I tried the “Vivid” preset that I sometimes use, and liked that result better, although it brought out the digital noise in the clouds too much for my liking. So I applied some noise reduction and reduced every other saturation level except blue to -100, effectively turning the image into a “blue and grey” photo.

Which worked, given that the only colours of note in the image are…blue and grey.

I also applied some vignetting to darken the water and highlight the sunlight on its surface at the center of the frame. Not wanting the sky to be dark in the upper corners, I use the new retouching tool that Lightroom 2 includes to lighten those areas of the image again. A few shadow adjustments later, and I had the image you see here, O Reader.[tags]BC Ferries, Grace[/tag]