The Blue Brick

Random word association

October 25, 2012

Here’s something fun I found this morning, an online app that lets you create word clouds. It’s free, and didn’t require a membership. Here’s the site.

I made mine by making a list of words. Words I repeated were bigger in the final word cloud. It was a fun exercise, I started by just listing the things I like, the mediums I like, and then it became a funny sort of random association exercise. Here’s what I came up with! I definitely recommend giving it a try :) If you come up with something fun I’d love to see it!
Thoughts on Time Lapse

October 24, 2012

Lately my mind has been focused on time lapse photography and there’s been no shortage of inspiration. I have this composition, of three photos that I took over the year that I really like:

I’ve decided to take it a step further this year. I’m going to take one photo, every day, of the trees on Toronto island which are visible from my window. I’ll use my phone, which will make it easy to ensure that all the photos are taken from exactly the same spot every time. In 365 days I’ll put up a (hopefully) very cool time lapse!
October 24, 2012

This is not craft related – but this person really impressed and inspired me today and I wanted to share his words.

The World of Special Olympics

The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during last night’s Presidential debate.

Dear Ann Coulter,

Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow. So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?

I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow. I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you. In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.

I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child…

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The CN Tower

October 23, 2012

Yesterday I had to do some photography from the CN Tower as part of a project (it’s a tough gig, I know) and I got to thinking about what an amazing engineering achievement the tower is. My father is fond of telling me about how he and a friend spent April 2nd, 1975 lying on the hood of the car with a few beers and watching the helicopter putting the antennae on. How amazing it must’ve seemed to Torontonians at the time.

Today this tower forms the most distinctive part of our skyline.

In 1995, the CN Tower was designated a Wonder of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers. I’ve shot the CN Tower many times, here are a few of my favourites coupled with some facts about this awesome human achievement!

The CN Tower at 553.33 meters (1,815 ft., 5 inches) was once the tallest building, tower, and freestanding structure, but as of 2010 retains the title of world’s tallest tower. Here is a shot I took from a helicopter, of the iconic tower.

1,537 workers toiled five days a week, 24 hours a day over 40 months to build the CN Tower. Here it is towering over the business core, dwarfing some of our tallest sky scrapers. This shot was taken from the roof of my old apartment.

The CN Tower was built to withstand an earthquake of 8.5 on the Richter scale (the Kobe earthquake in 1995 was 7.2 on the Richter scale). The upper reaches of the CN Tower were built to withstand winds up to 418 km/h (260 mph). It can also bend, apparently in high winds the sky pod can move by as much as a metre! Here the tower is barely visible on a super foggy morning.

Lightning strikes the CN Tower an average of 75 times per year. Long copper strips run down the CN Tower to massive grounding rods buried below ground to prevent damage. I’ve had the good fortune to get a few great shots of this happening.

On a clear day, visitors to the CN Tower’s observation deck can see over 160 kilometers (100 miles) — that’s all the way to Niagara Falls and across Lake Ontario to New York State. Here is a photo of the view of the business core that I took at night.

The foundation of the tower is only 15 metres deep – a small percentage compared to it’s height! This is a graphic I did just for fun once, curving a photo I took of our skyline around to create ‘Planet Toronto’. I took the initial shot from the Toronto islands.

Source
Wearable knitting, but not in the way you think…

October 21, 2012

This is a new experiment I’m trying – what do you guys think? A tiny knitted swatch inserted into a pendant and sealed in with a glass cabochon. I’ve only made 2 so far – I wanted to see if others found the idea as compelling as I do. Knitting is beautiful, why not as jewellery?

For anyone who’s curious – the grey yarn is Viola Viola in Dew Drop, the Blue is Tanis Fiber Arts Silver Label Mulberry Silk in a OOAK colourway that’s very close to Deep Sea.
Flower Petals and Butterfly Wings

October 19, 2012

A few more additions to the Etsy site tonight – still in the resin zone! Last summer we found a monarch butterfly in the grass that had been eaten by a bird. The bird left the wings behind. I know it sounds kinda gross, but I folded the wings into some paper and slipped them into my wallet, knowing I would do something with them later.

I would never hurt a living thing to make art – so I couldn’t pass up the chance to get my hands on perfect monarch wings! I also put in a few floral pieces based on some tulips I preserved last spring. I had taken the summer off working with resin… clearly I missed it!
An Etsy update at last

October 17, 2012

I’ve finally updated my Etsy site with jewellery made from the leaves collected on our road trip. If you followed my travels around North Ontario you might have seen this picture:

During the trip I made sure to be collecting leaves along the way – looking for anything that caught my eye including small ferns, and strips of birch bark. We didn’t hurt any trees though ;) everything I used was collected from the ground. We slowly dried and preserved the leaves over the trip so when I got home I had all kinds of beautiful material to work with.

Every necklace is made with jeweller’s grade resin; it will never yellow and it won’t scratch easily. Little compositions of leaves and bark have been created in each 1″ bezel.

They come in a variety of finishes; copper, bronze, hematite and silver. Each one comes on a matching 18″ball chain.

If you like what you see then head on over to my Etsy site to see more :) These one of a kind pieces are crafted with love and are a great way to celebrate this beautiful time of year.
Venturing into video

October 17, 2012

I’ve got the video bug, mostly driven by the fact that I purchased one of these. An intervalometer, or timed remote release for the 7D. I’ve been aiming the camera out the window at night and at dawn trying out time lapse photography and I’ve got to say that so far I’m really pleased. Here is my 2nd experiment; over 3900 jpegs were used and a time span of 2.5 hours each for both the sunrise and the sunset were covered.

It ends kind of abruptly, but it’s only a short experiment. I definitely see potential!

sunrise-sunset small 2 from Shireen Nadir on Vimeo.
Day 7 – Lake Superior Provincial Park

October 16, 2012
On the 2nd last day or our trip we went south from Wawa through Superior park again. I loved it there so much I thought it was the perfect place to spend the end of our journey. We explored some of the same sites and a few new ones (including seeing the Chippewa river, if you remember the Gordon Lightfoot song ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald).

We made friends!

Just for fun; I read up about this fascinating lake during the drive and thought I’d end off by sharing some Lake Superior facts.
- Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area
- Lake Superior could hold the water from all of the other Great Lakes, along with three more Lake Eries. Because of its great size, Superior has a retention time of 191 years.
- It contains 10% of the world’s fresh surface water
- Thanks to a weather phenomenon known as a ‘noreaster’, Lake Superior is the site of 350 ship wrecks, including the Edmund Fitzgerald
- The water is so clean that the average depth of visibility is 27 feet
- The deepest spot in the lake is 1,332 ft (406 metres)
source

We ended the trip the day after by driving from Sudbury back to Toronto. It was a long and amazing trip, but as always it’s good to be home :)
North Ontario 2012

October 15, 2012

I’ve resisted video for a long time – I always felt that somehow it was not an art form on the level of photography. However, lately I’ve become pretty obsessed with it – to the point where I lugged the video tripod through our road trip and took a shot at making a ‘vacation video’. Here’s my first attempt – let me know what you think!

North Ontario 2012 from Shireen Nadir on Vimeo.