On our recent Rocky Mtn. road trip, we spent one night in Great Falls, Montana — just to break up the long drive home. I don’t know about you, but I never would have expected to find a scene like this in Great Falls:
This casino’s parking lot display is lined up along the side of the interstate that cuts through town, in the middle of a cluster of cheap hotels. Big hit with the interstate trucking crowd.
Seen at the 2010 Denver Chalk Art Festival.
Another “keeper” from my experimentation with smoke photography:
We just returned from a 10-day family road trip (no ‘net access on most of it) — so I’ll be catching up with everybody’s blogs and tweets over the next few days. Meanwhile, get ready for some cool pictures from Glacier National Park and the Canadian Rocky Mountains!
Another shot from my recent smoke experiments:
I thought this looks somewhat like a ghostly person dancing with red flames, thus the name. As before, this is the smoke off a single incense stick; most of the color comes from tweaks to curves in Aperture.
I’ve seen a lot of good smoke pictures by other photographers, so I thought it was about time that I tried my hand at it as well. Here’s one result of my first go at this:
This image took a LOT of cleanup in post-processing (as will its brethern) — due largely to a physical set-up that I’ll do better with next time. Meanwhile, the image is growing on me…
If you haven’t run across it yet, there’s a good online photo magazine out there called “Seven by Five.” Along with photographer profiles, and helpful how-to articles, they also have weekly and monthly photo contests based on contributions to their Flickr group.
This past week’s theme was “Money” — so I contributed one of my older shots (at the time, I’d had a DSLR for all of 7 months) called “Ka-ching!” In terms of technique, I could do a better job with this shot today — but I still like it a lot.
Anyway, lucky me — this shot was one of the 17 that they picked for their weekly shout out. Thanks, gang!
I saw this weathered old boat at Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats, and since the water was still at the time (early morning), I just had to get this reflection shot:
I’m still a bit puzzled at how the weathering on the paint (looks like vertical streaks on the boat’s hull) is so much more prominent in the reflection than in the direct view itself.
So yesterday, April 25, was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day — I thought I’d contribute a shot using my Lensbaby Composer and its pinhole / zone plate optic:
This is a shot of some flowers on our dining room table — the exposure took forever (OK, 20 seconds) since the pinhole has an effective aperture of f/177. It also needed some serious noise filtering, since sensor artifacts really start showing up on long exposures like this. Still, I like the dreamy, abstract sort of look that it gives the shot.
Just for fun, I also used the zone plate (f/19) function of the optic on the same scene — far dreamier:
So which do you like better?
BTW, once it’s been reviewed by the powers-that-be, my pinhole submission will be on display as part of the WWPD 2010 gallery here.
If you’ve been following my Flickr stream, you’ve likely noticed that I’ve started a habit / tradition of uploading textures on Tuesdays — since I’ve used other peoples’ “free” (Creative Commons Licensed) textures for tinkering with layers in Photoshop, it’s my way of giving back to the community.
Anyway, I normally upload quite a few more shots to Flickr than to this blog — the idea being that blog images are the ones with more interesting stories behind them.
I haven’t really uploaded a texture shot with a good story before, so this is the first time I’ve put texture images on the blog (click on an image in this post to get to the respective full-size version on Flickr if you’d like to download one).
As you’ve likely guessed from the post title, these shots come from Hilo, Hawaii. True enough. You might also recall the old advise that if you’re looking for a different perspective with a shot, or looking for something interesting that might surprise you, you need to look up and down? That’s precisely how I found these. Here:
Look up!
One time we were wandering around in Santa Fe, primarily driven by a little window shopping. What’s a photog to do, but look around?
Luckily I thought to look down, too:
It’s pretty rare to see these sort of prisms / vault lights in New Mexico. Seattle, sure. Europe, definitely. But not in the Southwest…
