Chillies – a new Indian restaurant in Barrhaven – highly recommended …

So Jon and I tried a new restaurant this evening in Barrhaven. It is called Chillies, although there may be more to the name than that. It is located in the Sobey’s strip mall on Greenbank north of Strandherd. The restaurant is near the Quiznos restaurant, about half way down from the grocery store.

This was only their 3rd day open and there was definitely some traffic, not bad for a Monday in a new restaurant. They do take out, but the sit in service is very good and the décor is nice. A kind of modern feel with separators between most tables for a small level or privacy.

I forgot to bring a camera (we did not start out going here, but Jon remembered it at the last minute and we changed direction) so I had to shoot what little I could on the Galaxy S3. It did an adequate job, though, as the décor comes out quite clearly.

I started with a Mango Lasse, which I try in every restaurant. Theirs is quite nice, although the more milk-shake like thickness and stronger flavour at Haveli’s still has that one as the top Lasse for my taste. Still, I drank every drop so it was perfectly tasty.

What really shone, though, was the food. We did not get creative, wanting instead to try two dishes we’ve had in many places to get a good comparison. We had Vindaloo Beef and Butter Chicken. We also asked for two Naan bread and of course the complementary Basmati Rice.

Well, we were blown away.

The Vindaloo is an off menu item, but as soon as we mentioned it he said that they could do it. And I am very glad they did. Thick and rich with a generous portion and a fair bit of “kick” … just how we like it. We like it better than our other local favourite – Karara. The Butter chicken was also a treat, although Jon is not a fan in general. I have always liked butter chicken so long as it was not overwhelmed by cream (as it is sometimes at The Clay Oven in Winnipeg.)

It was tough to get through it all, but we soldiered through

I have to give this place a very high recommendation. Great food, prices are good, service is very good. Unfortunately, I cannot find an online reference so if you did not receive a flyer in your mail box (I don’t recall getting one) then you might just have to drive there to try it. It will be worth it …

Read More..

Fuji XQ1 Review – Part 2 – The Lens CA and distortion and Lightroom’s ability to deal …

I’ve noticed two things about the XQ1’s lens so far: it has a significant amount of uncorrected CA – harkening back to the days of the early F series – and it has significant and partially uncorrectable distortion in raw.

The CA is quite visible, although thankfully it is not as bad as the original F series lenses because it does not devolved into their horrific purple fringing around lights. Still, it is a bit painful.

A great example comes from the Christmas Craft show, which I wrote in part 1 of the series would be the subject of part 2. But I have decided to push it to part 3. The example shows CA quite clearly in the OOC JPEG (downsized here.)

fuji xq1  400iso  f/2  1/60  4.6mm

The CA at 100% looks like this, and you can see that it has the blue-yellow and the red-green forms:

But is can be completely corrected in RAW, as shown here:

While it’s not absolutely perfect, it’s close enough for any practical use.

Here are the settings that I used on the raw conversion … the settings are complete and the CA is specifically handled in the bottom right corner …

As always, click on the image to get the expanded version.

And if that isn’t quite clear enough, then here is an animation of the two juxtaposed. And note the distortion, which I have managed to match with –12 on the distortion slider (adds barrel to counteract severe pincushion.) But Fuji also stretches the sides out slightly, which adds enough complexity so that I cannot handle it in Lightroom.

This is unfortunate, since complex distortions can be easily corrected by adding markup to the raw image. The distortions and CA are then automatically removed by the raw converter. Panasonic does this for all of their cameras and it makes them extremely convenient to shoot in either raw or JPEG. Oh well …

And once more, close up to get the full effect of the CA and the distortion …

Remember to click on these to see them full-sized.

I consider the lens issues minor … the distortion is corrected perfectly in JPEG and adequately in raw using Lightroom. The CA is minor in JPEG and easily eliminated in raw.

I won’t comment in detail on sharpness, but so far I get a good impression.

Read More..