donnadupuis.ca

Inviting steamy swirls, crisp reflective patterns, and perfect starry glints, spotted at a nearby table, captured my imagination at Cafe Zucchero yesterday morning.

8-second nighttime exposure of this backyard character using a fixed 50mm Nikkor lens on my Nikon D60. 

It’s a Wacom Intuos 4.

Zomg. Best. Present. Ever.

I’ve been using the tablet in Corel Painter 11, which has opened up a world of infinite artistic possibilities. I’ve also, consequently, lost all desire to ever paint realism again with real media – the results using Painter to convert photos to paintings are too good.

Messin' around with new tablet using Corel Painter 11.

More random tablet-messin'.

The result of converting a photo I took at Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to an "oil painting" using Corel Painter 11 + tablet.

The result of converting a photo of me in Waikiki to a "watercolour painting". In addition to being able to select brush type and medium from a wide variety, in Painter you can also select paper type (i.e., watercolour paper). It still looks too photo-like, but I also did a rush job. Corel Painter will emulate wet and dry paint characteristics, brush angle, and smudging/blending/mixing of media. Tres bon!!

Once upon a Sunday in December, three girls drank a pot of spicy mulled wine, listened to cheesy Christmas music, and baked gingerbread, almond biscotti (recipe given below), Italian ‘pizzelle’, and shortbread.

I’m a big fan of Sunday brunch. And there is, happily, no shortage of brunch nooks in this city – thus inspiring my mission to check out as many of them as I can, and be bloggy about them after.

So this past weekend, a few friends and I headed to the Revel Room in Gastown, after seeing the long lineup outside of Medina – a popular brunch spot a few blocks away, and our originally-planned destination. Any feelings of disappointment at not getting into Medina were soon replaced by warm fuzzies upon entering the  cozy redbrick interior of the Revel Room, filled with the sounds of live jazz.

Yup, every Sunday, free live jazz. And GOOD jazz, too. Totally awesome!!! It wasn’t even crowded or noisy in there either. We had front row seats. Happy discovery!

As for the food, everyone was more or less in agreement – tasty, satisfying, good (but not overwhelming) portion sizes, plated and presented with care…definitely a class above ‘greasy spoon’, but nothing spectacular or outstanding.  But then , at around $10 a plate including live music and lovely ambiance, you’re getting some solid value.

The drip coffee was quite good too (and free refills).

Overall, a charming experience.

What M and I each ordered. Two poached eggs on cooked spinach and chorizo sausage, home fries on the side. Wasn't bad, but definitely not memorable. Could have used more chorizo. A little underseasoned / unfocused / bland.

Smoked salmon and cream cheese on an english muffin, home fries on the side. B was pretty happy with it, said the salmon was good quality, but the dish arrived a little cold.

Tal's order FTW. Her quote: "excellent burger, fantastic salad!".

Complete with strawberries and whipped cream, 'cept a little too shy on the berries. Ty was a bit disappointed.

Spuds on the side. Not bad.

High Dynamic Range, or HDR, photography has become quite popular in recent years, and for good reason; check out these gorgeously wonderfully stunningly inspiring examples.

If you don’t have an HDR monitor to display a true HDR image, you can create a 32-bit-per-channel HDR image in Photoshop from two or more identical photos taken at varying exposures (File > Automate > Merge to HDR).

However, if you’re like me and don’t own a tripod, then you can also fake the HDR effect in Photoshop using a single image; I stumbled across this online tutorial, and the results inspired me to try it for myself. I didn’t follow the tutorial exactly, experimenting with different layer opacities and layer blending parameters. The key step in this approach is based on Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight command, which allows the user to lighten underexposed regions and  similarly darken overexposed regions. It does this based on the surrounding pixels (local neighborhood) in the shadows or highlights.

Here’s my result. ‘Cute Bear’ becomes ‘Cute HDR Bear’:

Kay, so it’s a far cry from real HDR, and HDR from merging multiple images, but it’s still a pretty cool effect. Photoshop love!

I found it in Hawaii.

“La Cantinetta di Rignana”.

Chianti region, Tuscany, Italy.

Dining al fresca, overlooking the rolling hills of vineyards and olive groves glowing in legendary, late-afternoon Tuscan light. Like stepping into a fairytale.

The food, so simple. All made from fresh, local ingredients. Shown here is home-made caprini cheese and wild-boar carpaccio. We also enjoyed gooey oven-baked tomino cheese, and mushroom linguine. The pasta was almost stark in its simplicity – homemade noodles, local porcini mushrooms, and a drizzle of good olive oil. I still recall its fresh, earthy smell.

The experience reinforced something I heard once:  good quality ingredients speak for themselves and hardly require any preparation, but even the best chef can’t make poor quality ingredients taste good.

Love, love, love.

Common knowledge, soup fights the Sick wonderfully.

This one in particular will really rev up your immune system. Your basic chicken soup stock, plus lots of garlic and tomatoes and peppers and chillis and cayenne. All blended up so your body readily absorbs all the goodness.

Yesterday I found out I had Swine flu, and my temp was nearly 40C. Had this soup earlier today, and not only has my fever broken, I feel so, so much better.