Maxime Perron Caissy

Parc national de la Gaspésie

Maxime Perron Caissy — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:02:57 +0000

Back in September 2009, I took a few days off to travel to Gaspésie, Québec, Canada. I used to go there every year with my parents when I was a kid and I wanted to go back and revive some of my good old memories. The autumn colors were absolutely fantastic even if the rainy weather conditions. Here is a photo that I took just north of the parc national de la Gaspésie.

For those who may have missed it, I also took a nice photo of the Restigouche river on that same trip.

Satellite view of Vancouver 2010

Maxime Perron Caissy — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:51:35 +0000

The Vancouver region in British Columbia, Canada has a very mild climate offering rain conditions throughout the year. Winter at the base of the mountains is usually short as the temperature is often above zero Celsius and precipitations fall as rain instead of snow. Unfortunately, this year is even warmer than previous years and very little snow can be found on the ground.

Image courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.
Photo taken on January 22 2010 – Download large size image 3.5MB

Many articles, including one of the New York Times, mentions that the lack of snow in the nearby mountains requires that trucks, snowmobiles and even helicopters carry in snow to the competition areas for the Vancouver winter Olympic Games. Hopefully everything will be in place ready for athletes to compete at their best!

Note that the satellite image was taken from crew 22 on the International Space Station. I enhanced the photo in Photoshop and imitated the photo style of the excellent Earth Observatory website.

Exceptional view of Québec city!

Maxime Perron Caissy — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:09:38 +0000

Last night, a special event called a Tweetup was held in Québec city. Approximately one hundred tweeters were present at the Observatoire de la Capitale (last floor of Québec’s highest building: Édifice Marie-Guyart) to meet people of the Twitter community. The sixth edition of the successful event organized by Nicolas Roberge has been growing in popularity ever since it’s first edition back in April 2009.

In the following photo you can see the irresistible view from the observatory where the event took place. Printed copies of this photograph are also available on demand.

Related article:
Tweetup au sommet de la Capitale-Nationale : un succès (French only)

First pictures – powerful earthquake strikes Haiti

Maxime Perron Caissy — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:26:42 +0000

Edited 23h29 January 12th 2010 – A powerful earthquake of 7 on the Richter scale has struck in Haiti in the region of Port au Prince. The quake was felt just before 5pm and at least six aftershocks followed the events. Latest reports say that there are more damaged buildings than intact ones. With communications down in the affected region, it seems like the situation is chaotic and the death toll will be high. My sympathies to all the people there. Here you can see the first pictures and videos of the disaster:

Robinson 44 wrapping & painting

Maxime Perron Caissy — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 03:28:00 +0000

Helicopters can go just about anywhere (and that’s why I love them so much), this great ability allows them to go in dusty and sandy places. But in those environments, it means that some very small particles are likely to be lifted by the airflow and hit by the leading edge of the blades. This is far from dangerous, but it will slowly strip the paint on the leading edges of each blade.

To prevent corrosion and keep the blades healthy, it’s best to repaint them as the paint goes away and the bare metal starts to be visible. In the following pictures, you will see the preparation of the paint as well as a Robinson 44 wrapped with plastic to prevent the paint and fume from sticking to the fuselage. I have also included a quick time lapse of the helicopter wrapping. The video represents 7 hours of work in approximately one minute and half.

Timelapse video

Let there be light!

Maxime Perron Caissy — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:58:42 +0000

Ok… some of you might wonder where the hell I have been this last month! As some may have guessed, I have been more than busy. Many things have changed in my life.

To make a long story short, I have quit my job as a web designer/developper at EducExpert and I must say that I have spent two great years with this company full of young talent!

The reason for this major change is that I found another great job in a whole new world: The world of helicopters! I will slowly start flying as a helicopter pilot over the next year which I feel extremely privileged. The year 2009 was extremely difficult for this industry and for me to find a job only 6 month after my course is something that I can be proud of.

Another thing that can explain the absence of new posts on my site is the fact that I didn’t carry my camera very much these last 2 months. I find November & December extremely boring months for photography since the trees have lost their colorful leaves and the white fluffy floor has yet to fall from the sky.

Theoretically speaking, I should have more time in January 2010 to post articles on a regular basis. Until than, I leave you with this photograph that I have taken in 2007. The two photos featured in this post are some of the best photos I have taken in that year and that very few people have seen.

Peace! Maxime

Textures of the earth

Maxime Perron Caissy — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:07:13 +0000

Here on earth, we see everything from a standing point perspective. This means that if we look straight in front, we are likely to see the horizon. While this perspective can often be astonishingly beautiful, we are missing out on what satellites see of our giant blue planet.

To satisfy your eyes, here are some beautiful looking textures of our home.

Band-e-Amir National Park, Afghanistan

Wilkins Ice Bridge Collapse

Chaiten Volcano, Chile

Thunderstorms on the Brazilian Horizon

Biokovo Range, Croatia

Carajás Mine, Brazil

Glacial Dust off Alaska

Great Blue Hole, Belize

Some of the most interesting satellites are Earth observing satellites which provide us with incredible imagery for many purposes such as weather and environment. They are usually located at an altitude between 600km and 800km above our planet and travel at an approximate speed of 27 000km/hour. While satellite imagery has been around for decades, it was pretty much inaccessible before 2004. It really started to be accessible and popular when Google launched Google Earth in 2005. Everyone was impressed to see their home on the search engine giant. Today Google Maps/Earth is an essential tool whenever people go out to an unfamiliar place.

Curious minds will also enjoy the NASA Earth Observatory site which offers a daily article with a satellite image related to our planet Earth.

Speaking of satellites, there is also tons of space junk orbiting the earth. This so called debris could be very destructive to existing satellites as a centimeter cube particle hitting an object in space could pulverize that object into even more debris. Fortunately, there is so much cubic space up there that the chance of a debris hitting a functional satellite is quite small.

Halloween, Rockets and Typography

Maxime Perron Caissy — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:50:07 +0000

Not so long ago, the excellent designer Jason Santa Maria, and writer Rob Giampietro posted an article mentioning the rocket candies for this upcoming Halloween.

I thought the idea was fantastic and I though that I could use the little round candies for something creative! So I took my camera, stole a few rocket packs and started shooting alphabet shapes. Here is the result:

Mooooooose

Maxime Perron Caissy — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:40:42 +0000

I know that it has been a little while since I posted and I apologize for the delay. I have been extremely busy over the last few weeks which kept me from posting more often.

As you may remember, I posted an article a few weeks ago about the Parc National de la Jacques-Cartier. Well, I liked this park so much that I have returned at least four times since then! As a result, I have been quite lucky to see 3 moose and 3 beavers on October 12th 2009. I have to admit that I was impressed to see those mammals as I rarely see animals out in the wild.

Now the park is slowly starting to be covered in snow, but rest assured that I will prepare my snowshoes to snap some more picture this upcoming winter! Peace.

To tweet or not to tweet?

Maxime Perron Caissy — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:12:18 +0000

Twitter has been the hot buzz over the last few years as far as social networking goes. The free service allows users to post (really) short message of a maximum of 140 characters via it’s website http://twitter.com and via mobile phones.

I have known the service for a long time, but I never had an account until today. Maybe one of the reasons is that I have read studies that suggests that approxmatly 60% of Twitter users quit during the first month and I didn’t want to be part of the statistics. It’s all cool sending little messages, but social networking takes time and time is precious. I have decided to try it out and see if I can make a benefit from the service. Moreover, I want to explore the possibilities behind Twitter as it’s popularity keeps increasing as days goes by. Many companies and organizations have even started using it as a marketing tool.

You may have noticed that my site articles now show a retweet button located at the upper right of my articles. This button allows users to tweet and retweet my articles. The number of tweets are then compiled on the Tweetmeme site which is similar to Digg except it uses tweets. You are all invited to try it out!

All things considered, I believe that Twitter can be useful and fun to use. In the meantime, make sure to checkout my new Twitter account here!

Poll: Do you have a personal or business Twitter account?