On our second full day in Calgary, we went on a family trip out to Kananskis.  The day started off overcast and foggy, but cleared up somewhat by the time we made it into the mountains.  We each took a bunch of pictures.  This is the story of one of the pictures that I posted on Instagram.

One of the pictures that I took was of the Upper Kananaskis Lake, with Lori and some of the kids on the shoreline at the bottom of the picture.  Here is the picture in question.

Trying to do something slightly different, I cropped it into a short but wide picture.

Unfortunately, when displaying it on Instagram it was readjusted to a standard picture format, cutting out the people on the edges of the picture.   Instagram has an associated app called LayOut which allows you to combine multiple pictures into one image.  My first attempt was to combine the footer (cropped image as above) with part of the original picture.  Here is the result.

I wasn’t quite happy with that picture, so I took a look at some of the other ones taken on the trip.  Here is the one that I ended up using.

I then cropped the mountain fog photo and dropped it into the top photo frame, resulting in the following picture.  It struck me that the resulting picture actually looked like one picture rather than a conglomerate of two different pictures.  Since most people likely use Instagram on a smartphone, they likely wouldn’t notice the really flat far lake shore, nor notice that the trees at the waters edge appear rather suddenly.  I decided to go ahead and post it.  I’m not sure that anyone noticed, not surprising given the large numbers of pictures on Instagram that people flip through on a regular basis.  Well, it makes an interesting hubcrate post, anyway.

Back in mid-September, we had a family mini-vacation (3 days, 2 nights) down the coast in Corpus Christi. I am working on a post about that trip which might make it up before this post, but maybe not. In the rental home we were in, there were a I couple of games, one of which was “Telestrations”, labelled as “the visual equivalent of the party game telephone”. Based on my past experiences with Telephone, my immediate response was to decline, but I overcame that emotion and we went ahead with it. It turned out to be a lot of fun and we’ll probably be picking up a copy – although likely the 8 or 12 person edition.

By way of explanation, each person gets a flip page pad (with pages which alternate between drawing a picture based on a description and writing a description of a picture) and a random word. The starting player on each pad writes down the original word, flips the page and then draws a picture. The pad is then handed to the next person who looks at the picture and writes a description of what they think it is. Then the page gets flipped and passed to the next player who can only read the description and has to draw a picture. Once three iterations have been completed, we were done – and then shared the iterations that each word had gone through.

While the odd word (like the word “book”) made it through intact, most got quickly garbled. The garble effect was likely enhanced by Brock (and Davison somewhat) who don’t have quite the drawing skills and breadth of experience of others. Probably my favourite Telestrations (which I didn’t get pictures of) started off as “president” which then morphed to “Abraham Lincoln”, then to “hobo”, and then Brock had no
idea of what exactly a hobo was and thought it was a crazy man. Hmm, come to think of it in light of the upcoming US elections, perhaps a more appropriate starting place for such a conclusion should have been “Republican presidential candidate”.

Anyhow, here are some compilations of some of the end results. The original word is in the caption at the top. Then read through the picture-description-picture-des… iterations left to right, wrapping down the page. Bottom right is the final description arrived at.

With my children I have a reputation for occasionally picking up weird and wonderful items, usually because they are on sale and being unloaded cheaply. Some of these purchases end up being winners, but others not so much. So, I thought I would throw together a post with some of the more recent winners and losers for your enjoyment.

I’m probably a bit of a sucker for gadgets (specifically ones that are not too expensive), so when I saw a set of specialty lens that could be used with iPhones and iPads (and more specifically that the set was less than $20), I did some research (as there was a bunch of options) and then committed. The set that we get has a clip that you use to hold the lens over the lens on the device. There are three different lenses, one a fish eye lens, the other two providing a couple of other options including close-in macro shooting.