Landscape, Nature and Travel Photography

The past couple of weeks have been quite busy. This week in particular is proving to be really rough. I’ve been itching to blog more and I’ve really been yearning to get out to take some sunset/evening photos of the San Francisco bay area. Unfortunately I’ve been burning the midnight oil and have been unable to get out to squeeze in some photography.

This evening was particularly heart breaking as Read more… »

The Hawaiian landscape is a pretty incredible sight. One of the more notable locations is the Na Pali coastline on the island of Kauai. Whether looking from a boat or high up on the cliffs, it makes no difference. Odds are when you catch a view of this area you’ll have to close your mouth after your jaw drops. On this particular outing this shot was my last. High surf and looking through my camera with a telephoto lens for a long period of time was the perfect combination for a gigantic headache and a bit of seasickness. Discomfort and all… in my book it was worth the effort to get this shot.

Technorati Tags: landscape, photograph, photography, Hawaii, Kauai, Na Pali, coast, napali, spire, tropical

When the weather clears here in San Francisco the sunsets are truly magnificent. Sometimes the sunsets are so beautiful it’ll stop a die-hard surfer in his tracks.

Surfer on Ocean Beach, San Francisco

Technorati Tags: San Francisco, sunset, photo, photography, surf, surfer, Ocean Beach

If you’ve been enjoying my podcast, EXIF and Beyond, and have subscribed to it via iTunes your feedback (AKA Customer Review) would be much appreciated. As it stands the podcast has yet to receive a single comment, which I’m rather surprised by considering the traffic, size and popularity of the subscriber base.

This week I discovered EXIF and Beyond is among the Top 25 most popular photography related podcasts on iTunes.  So if you have a chance adding your feedback via the “Customer Reviews” would be greatly appreciated and of course don’t hesitate to refer a friend to it.

EXIF and Beyond on iTunes

Thanks for your support!

In the not so distant past I used to shoot slide film exclusively…
One of the last all film trips I took was a winter trip to Yosemite a few years ago. For some reason I’m attracted to the pre-dawn light that adds to the magical nature of Yosemite valley. Long film exposures were always a fun challenge and combined with this pre-dawn light Velvia would really create a beautifully colored scene. As you’d expect with Yosemite you never have to travel far to get a photo. In this particular instance I photographed Half Dome from the Camp Curry parking lot on my way to photograph other subjects.

Half Dome At Dawn, Yosemite National Park

View More Photos of Yosemite National Park …

Technorati Tags: landscape, photo, photograph, photography, Half Dome, Yosemite, California, national park, California

It’s not too often that you come across a new technology that makes your mouth drop open.
Raoul Pop pointed me to a video demonstration of Content-Aware Image Sizing Demo by Dr. Ariel Shamir (YouTube). I highly recommend taking a look at this. In short software has been written that allows for images to be “retargeted” or “resized while adapting image content and layout”. The cool thing is that this can be done with or without preserving the aspect ratio of the image.

It’s still a little rough, but it looks like this will have a lot of useful applications particularly in the photo editing and web world. It’s still unclear to me how much processing power is required to employ this type of dynamic resizing, but the huge step forward is undeniable. As they’re dynamically resizing images in the demo you don’t see the final image for too long. I did catch on one image that not everything lines up cleanly. I would imagine this technology would work better on some subjects than others. Hopefully this is something that is refined, adopted and integrated in to more widely available photo editing applications.

Technorati Tags: photography, digital, Dr. Ariel Shamir, retarget, retargeting, content-aware, image, resizing, demo

The ninth episode of EXIF and Beyond has been released. In this episode (part I of II) professional photographer Gary Crabbe (enlightphoto.com) discusses a variety of topics including his photographic beginnings, working for Galen Rowell, his personal photographic philosophies, mastery of light, and the art of seeing.

Download the latest episode:
Gary Crabbe Interview (Part I)

For the non-iTune listeners a streaming version of this podcast can be accessed here.

Technorati Tags: EXIF and Beyond, podcast, interview, Gary Crabbe, photography, mastery of light, philosophy, art of seeing

This image is a little off the beaten path from what I normally display on my blog, namely landscape and nature photography, but it fit a photo blog project “Blown Away” that is going on at Brian Auer’s blog.

This photo was taken as an early experiment with my, then new, macro lens. Read more… »