Category: Photography
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A panoramic of home amidst the pandemic
The pandemic has slowed and shrunk my life in pretty significant ways. It’s been months since I’ve left the county which is a stark contrast to my prior routine. One of the most profound effects of slowing down is that you see less, more. The resolution of the life around me has increased significantly. I…
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Three approaches to panoramas for the iPhone
Starting off in print photography, I learned that the standard photograph here in the States is 4″ x 6″. Just about every film camera takes images in that aspect ratio. The prevalence of digital cameras and digital media changed all that. Photographers are less bound by fixed print sizes and thus can be significantly more…
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Speed shooting for photographers
My employer has campuses all over the world. While on an extended trip to Sydney, I met up with a group of photographers there called the “Shutterbugs.” The Shutterbugs every so often explore the area around the office over lunch practicing their photography skills. When I came back to San Francisco, I wanted to start that…
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Bronte Pools: 5 tips for long exposure photography
The photographer’s day really begins well before sunrise. The early morning hours are critical in getting great photos as the most color change happens the hours around sunrise and sunset. One of the Meetup groups, Not Only Black and White, had a sunrise shoot out at Bronte pools. The photographer’s day really begins well before…
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5 tips from a newbie in the studio
One of the pleasant surprises here in Sydney is that it has a very vibrant culture of Meetup groups. I thought Meetup, being a New York corporation would have very limited presence here. The opposite couldn’t have been more true. I’ve found groups that do photography, PHP development, WordPress, and more. It’s been easy to…
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Australians love their fireworks
It was an exceptionally good sunset tonight seeing the warm colors across the sky from our balcony. I think I’ve seen more fireworks here in three weeks than I have the last 10 years living in the United States. Fireworks seem to be an every other day occurrence here in the land of Oz. I…
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Atlassian Photo Walk at 16mm
Atlassian’s corporate headquarters is right in the heart of Sydney. It’s a beautiful location in the old Bank of New South Wales. As one could expect, we make extensive use of HipChat, our group chat platform. HipChat supports persistent rooms were groups of people can gather around a particular topic. Sydney has a group for…
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Ride On, Bob
Today was one of the first days I felt really far from home. From California, it’s a chunk of flying to get home. From Australia, it’s literally halfway around the world. It takes 24 hours of continuous flying to get to home from here to see family. I got news today that my uncle had…
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Chinese New Year: Fireworks
Chinese New Year is a huge deal here. Celebrations are going on over the next two weeks including parades, food fairs, fireworks, and even coloring the Sydney Opera House with red light (as fleeting as it was). I’d never really photographed fireworks well before. Much like children, they are a fleeting art form that needs…
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Sydney Trains: under ground
It’s amazing sometimes how the cadence of your day can change so quickly. I was walking home across the Sydney Harbor Bridge and saw that the Sydney Opera House was lit in bright red for Chinese New Year. I came back to the house and grabbed my camera gear. I was ready for the first…
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Treasure Island: viewed with a wide angle and a telephoto lens
Treasure Island speaks to me. I love the view peering back into San Francisco from the island. I stopped with a buddy of mine several years ago to show him the view. He remarked, “this is the second most romantic view in the Bay Area!” I wondered… what was the most romantic spot in the…
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Kings Canyon through HDR Photography
I came over the pass at Grant Grove at about 4 o’clock. Why is that significant? I’m well within “crappy afternoon light” part of the day. What is “crappy afternoon light?” By no means is this a standard industry term, I just find photos taken in the late afternoon before the golden hour surrounding sunset…
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Spot Metering: Dealing with Noise
Removing Noise with Adobe Lightroom One of the benefits of spot metering is that you can dial in the metering to a specific area of the photograph. Sometimes, when using spot metering there are large areas of the photograph that are dark. I found this to be true with concert photography. Since the light was…
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Understanding Exposure: Spot Metering
Moving up from a point-and-shoot camera to an SLR camera has opened up many amazing doors yet is teaching me the fundamentals of photography all over again. The SLR camera gets great results, but it takes more work to get a better photo than out of the typical point-and-shoot camera. It’s not so much that…
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Portrait Photography: My First Studio Shoot
I decided it was time to update to a full SLR camera. My camera has been great for the past seven years. It had a full manual mode which gave a lot of creative control to me. It was also small and easy to take along on the motorcycle. The lens was fairly flexible for…
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Adobe Creative Cloud?
Many years ago I was very much against the idea of “renting” software. When you buy a product, it’s nice to know that you have “purchased” something so that that item can continually return value for it’s useful life. As software versions have become more and more blurry with the ease of updates, the fundamental…
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California’s Seven Federal Highways
This is a blog post that’s taken 7 years to write. I started taking photos in 2005 for this one. In the United States we have two major sets of federally funded highway systems that connect cities across this land. I remember coming back from Seattle on my first long trip. The day I crossed…
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Automate Everything
I’m preparing a set of images for upload for a future blog post and started to make the edits in Photoshop but quickly became frustrated with the work required. For each image I had to: The problem was not everything was clean when I expanded the images in step 2 so getting a smooth edge…
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Panoramic Software
A number of years ago I did a post on panoramic photography back in 2007. Stiching software has come a long way in the past 5 years. It used to be that packages were free/easy and limited in features or expensive and complex. Free solutions that had lots of features were buggy and complex. It…
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Batch Scanning Photos the Fast Way
Recently I had to take a set of slides exported out of PowerPoint and turn them into slides again. While the process was totally backwards, it generally worked for the purposes of the meeting. When PowerPoint exports slides, it puts 6 slides on a page in PDF form. So to get them back into slides, …
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Project 365: Trying it Again!
For those of you who don’t know what Project 365 is, the below link is a good site to learn about it: http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/project-365-take-a-photo-a-day/ I discovered a lot about myself in the year I did Project 365 the first time in 2007. I started November 1st and finished on Halloween of 2008. In the end, I…
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Another Year, another project
One of the things I really enjoyed about 2008 was looking back over all of the photos captured in my Project365. I could look back and see something from each day and remember what happened that day. As I get older (and time passes faster) it’s nice to have some record of what happens in…
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Project365 commencement
I’ve started a new project in November called Project365. The idea behind it is taking a photo a day for one year. Being a leap year, it’s more like Project366, but 365 works better for me. Some folks do a theme each month or something of similar sorts to keep the project interesting to keep…
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My Replacement Friend is in
Thanks to the miracle known as eBay my replacement friend arrived about a week ago. What is it do you ask? A gently used Powershot S50. I paid $90 for the camera and $30 for an extended battery so I’ve got an essentially new camera for about 1/2 the cost of a new one. Yeah…
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Why can’t I just get the next Powershot S50?
It’s been a great camera. We’ve taken a lot of pictures together and have been a lot of places, but it’s time to move onto bigger and better things. The camera almost always comes with when I’m on the bike, so being compact is really important. An SLR is too big. I’ve looked for it’s…
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Panoramic Photography
Being one that likes to take landscape shots, at times you just cannot convey the depth of the scene in a 4×6 shot. You can’t really get a good sense for the skyline or how for instance the mountains fit into the mountain range…. The great thing about digital photography is that you can do…