/via John Gruber.

/via Jason Kottke.

This is a fantastic image. Not that I’d expect anything less from The Big Picture.

My friend Raymond and I took a quick hike to shoot photos on the top of Elk Mtn.

A great way to kick off this next stage of The Diet.

Last night Sameer Barkawi finally published a few of the photos he shot during our Scranton Photo Walk last month. He’s got a few gems in this set.

Oh, and in case you missed them, here are mine.

Blog posts like this are everywhere. Page through my Photography tag and you’ll see a ton of tips and tricks that I’ve linked to in the past. What separates Kyle’s post from others is that he points out exactly what has helped him, rather than just a laundry list of tips that may help people shoot better.

Oh, and I love what he’s been doing with his photos section. He uploads his photos to Flickr and they are automatically synced with his site in an orderly fashion. Definitely a different approach but one that I think works extremely well.

Meg Pickard shares some helpful tips on getting the best quality iPhone shots.

Source: How to squeeze decent photos out of an iPhone.

Sameer, Chris, Eliza and I were the only people to show up for the Photo walk. This didn’t surprise me considering the fact that it wasn’t until Friday that Sameer and I actively went out to Flickr groups, Facebook, Craig’s List, and a few other places on the Web to promote the Photo walk. That isn’t to say that anyone would have showed up if we had publicized this thing for months – we’re talking about Scranton here. I have hope that one day, perhaps more than a few years into the future, Scranton will really take off on these types of social gatherings. Perhaps we’ll try again in fairer weather (since it did end up raining a little) and see how that goes.

The Photo walk itself was pretty ok. It wasn’t too cold, but it did start to rain. We took that opportunity to grab a beer at Judge & Jury. I think a really warm summer evening might be better for photos of Scranton since lights on buildings, signs, and cars passing by really add some romance to photos. You can see this from our Carbondale Photo walk at night. Or perhaps by adding a specific topic to the Photo walk (as someone suggested) like trains, automobiles, lights, signs, buildings, windows, etc.

All-in-all I had a good time, though shorter than I’d have liked, walking around Scranton shooting photos and I’m looking forward to doing it again. Perhaps in Scranton, or another neighboring city, borough, village, or area – but perhaps when the weather is a bit more suitable and predictable.

Photos of Scranton, PA

Although I took around 200 photos, deleted well over 120 before importing them, I’ve only selected 16 or so to share. Here they are. Click on the thumbnails to get a larger view of the full photograph.

I’m happy with the outcome of the walk. Looking forward to the next one.

Photo: My friend Sameer on a Photo walk of sorts in Carbondale, PA.

Something I’ve wanted to do for some time was to have a Photo walk in Scranton, PA. I would like to have one in Carbondale some time in the near future, but I think we’ll get more support in the Scranton area – and that is where my friend Sameer and I happen to be heading anyway.

What is a Photo walk?

Here is the actual definition from Photowalk.org:

“A Photo Walk is a an opportunity to develop your “photographic eye” by sharing the same opportunities as others. No special equipment is required and there is no need to share the pictures you take with others (though this is probably a good idea).

… …

To participate in a walk, you just need to arrive at the start point at the date and time given with a camera.

After a walk participants are encouraged to share their pictures and discuss their experiences.”

Pretty simple right? Just show up with your camera in tow (doesn’t matter if you only have your cell phone or you have the best professional digital camera available). And, if you feel like it, you can jump online and share your photos with the group.

When/Where?

We’re going to meet at the intersection of Linden Street and Adams Avenue by the statute at 2:30pm on Sunday March 8th. We’ll have a set route that we’ll be walking but we’re completely up for suggestions if there is anywhere in the city you’d like to shoot. We’re hoping for good weather but if that doesn’t happen our backup plan will be to do it anyway and get wet.

How to share photos/experiences?

If you upload your photos to your own personal Web site, or to a photo-sharing site like Flickr or Facebook, you can tag your photos with “ScrantonPhotoWalk”. You can do the same for your blog posts. If you do not know how to do that, you can just paste the URL to your photos and/or blog posts into the comments of this post below.

Who are Colin and Sameer?

You can read about me on my about page if you’d like further information. However, Sameer and I are just two guys that like to go shoot photos and we thought this time we’d see if anyone would like ot keep us company. If you’d like to tag along, we’d love to have you.

Follow us on Twitter: I’m cdevroe and Sameer is SameerBarkawi.

If the camera model and the film type don’t mean too much to you – don’t worry. All you need to know is that my friend Albert Yee has managed to take some fantastic photos with his new toy, the Canon Canonet G-III QL17.

Source: 400TX and QL17.
Photoset: Canonet G-III QL17 + 400TX.

I consider this an opportunity missed.

What reminded me of the fact that I missed this opportunity was a recently published entry from Henry David Thoreau’s journal, a journal I suggested that you subscribe to, about his thoughts on snow covered trees. He makes it all too clear that there is only a very small window in which you can enjoy such things.

“I am afraid I have not described vividly enough the aspect of that Lodging Snow of the 19th and to-day partly. Imagine the innumerable twigs and boughs of the forest (as you stand in its still midst), crossing each other at every conceivable angle on every side from the ground to thirty feet in height, with each its zigzag wall of snow four or five inches high, so innumerable at different distances one behind another that they completely close up the view like a loose-woven downy screen, into which, however, stooping and winding, you ceaselessly advance. The wintriest scene, – which perhaps can only be seen in perfection while the snow is yet falling, before wind and thaw begin. Else you miss, you lose, the delicate touch of the master. A coarse woof and warp of snowy batting, leaving no space for a bird to perch.”

Next time, I’ll be sure to take a photo.

Source: Polaroid, only MOSTLY dead.

In this review Justin describes his experiences with the BlackRapid R-Strap, a shoulder strap tailored for photographers with DSLRs that would like to have quick access to their camera and also enjoy a hands-free experience when they are not shooting with that camera.

As Dan Benjamin points out – be sure to watch the videos. 

Source: BlackRapid R-Strap.
Additional resources: BlackRapid’s Web site.

Vince Laforet is working with some photo-gadget people and has been playing with this bad boy. Just stare at it awhile, let it sink in. Five dollars and twenty-five cents says that by the end of a day shooting with this – you’d have huge guns. And by guns I mean biceps muscles on your arms.

“The Red EOS Mount by Wicked Circuits was created by Andy Lesniak and Richard Wardlow.  It allows you to control both Iris (Aperture) and focus control of any Canon EF Lens mounted to a RED One  (Link to Wicked Circuits to come.)   This will allow us to shoot 4K, 3K and 2K footage at up to 120 fps.  The lens (w/ the crop factor) will be the equivalent of a 1280mm 5.6 and up (depending on the resolution we set.)   Needless to say – I can’t wait to see what this looks like on the beach!”

I’m pretty sure people should have a license to use this thing.

Source: The RED CANON.
More information: RED one cameras.

Everyone and their mother has linked to this, so you’ve probably already seen the photos that Jeff Bridges took when on-set for Iron Man. But, if you haven’t, you can say you heard about it here first.

As I “thumbed” through Bridges’ book I can’t help but think that more people, like Jeff Bridges, should do this sort of thing. Keep a photo log of interesting things that they work on. All too often the only time we see celebrities is when they are on the red carpet or, worse, when they are doing something they’d rather not be public.

Source: Making Iron Man.

City Hall – Carbondale, PA

Last night my friend Sameer Barkawi, mentioned here a few times, and I wanted to take our cameras for a spin around our hometown of Carbondale, Pennsylvania. He recently picked up a Nikon D90 and I was using Eliza’s Canon Digital Rebel XTi.

I put a few of the photos that I took up on Flickr in a set.

When I switched to this theme in April of this year I had created two header images that would display at random on each page refresh. I had aspirations “to some day find the time to have as many as ten random header images”. Later that month I had 10 total header images. As of today I have created about 40 header images for this site, 24 of which are active.

In August of this year, after visiting a Peter Lik gallery in Las Vegas, I had decided to spruce up the random header images on this site by also changing the color of the background, or frame, of the site based on the image being displayed. This added a lot of fun to creating the images for me and I hope that as people found this site they too enjoyed the display of them.

As of today, however, we’re kicking it up a notch.

The first update that I made is that now the link color also changes when the header image and background color do. This small adjustment makes it feel just a little bit more refined then just changing the background color. Some of the background colors I had originally chosen were a little too light to read on white. So I had to make a few small adjustments to the color choices I made. This has two interesting side effects the first being that I now have 4 or 5 brand new “looks” for this site. Just by making a new color choice for each. The other side effect is that I now have to choose colors that are readable on white. For better or worse, I’m not sure yet.

The second update is one I’m really excited to talk about because I have yet to see how it will effect the site overall. The headers are no longer totally random. The way it worked prior to today was that when the page loaded I allowed PHP ((The programming language this site is written in.)) to choose a random number between 1 and 24 – and I’d use that number to determine the header image to show. It was incredibly simple, worked well, and made for each refresh to be a surprise!

In an effort to make the selection of which header image to show a smarter process I’ve added two layers of complexity to how a header image is chosen in addition to the random selection. This might get confusing, if it does, sorry.

If you visit the home page of the site, or any sub-page like the about page, it will figure out what time of day it is ((Here in the eastern United States.)) and display one of many images I’ve designated for that time of day. I have images categorized as morning, day, evening, and night. I’ve split up the hours using the 24-hour clock this way; 6am-12pm = morning, 12pm-5pm = day, 5pm-9pm = evening, 9pm-6am = night.  I may adjust those time slots but that is where they are now. I have several images for each time of day. So on these pages you will still be getting a randomly selected header, but it will be randomly selected based on the current time of day, rather than from the entire pool.

If you visit a note, photo, mobile photo, etc. on this site you will be shown an image contextually. What I mean is that for each header image I have associated a tag to it. The tag may describe what is in the image, where the image was taken, or something the image has to do with. I then compare the tags that are associated to the post you’re currently reading and create a list of matching headers.  If there are one or more matches the site randomly displays one of those matches.  If there are no matches the site reverts to the time of day method.

So what does this all mean? Well, I’m not sure yet as the system still has some randomness to it. But generally speaking, if you are reading a post about my trip to Hawai’i, like this one, or this one, you should see a header related to Hawai’i. If you are reading a post about animals, you’ll see a header that probably has animals in it. If you are watching a video about food, then a header relating to food will most likely be displayed. And, again, if you are reading about New York City or Philadelphia - those headers will show up.

I’m still fine tuning the way that the site decides which header best fits the current post being shown but so far in my testing it has done a pretty good job.

A panoramic view of the 5th Ave. Apple Store in New York City.

The iPhone’s camera has been one of its least regarded features. The built-in camera is only 2.1 megapixels, performs poorly in low-light, and has a very limited field of view.

All of that being said, you can pour through Flickr’s global tag of iPhone and, sort by Most Interesting, and find some photos that you will be amazed that they were taken with an iPhone. I know I have quite a number of photos that I’ve taken with my iPhone that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by.

The three problems I mentioned are not easily fixed. The fact that the iPhone is only 2.1 megapixels is, as far as I know, impossible to change until Apple releases an updated iPhone. The iPhone’s low-light performance can sort of be rectified by, well, changing the level of the light with either a flash, a light, or perhaps positioning your subjects nearer to a light source like the light shining through a window.

The field of view, however, is something that many are trying to rectify.  Heck, my iPhone macro lens (video) is an example of trying to change the field of view on the iPhone. There are also lenses that are being released by real third-party accessory manufacturers.  But, you can also tackle this problem with software.

Pano, from Debacle Software, is an iPhone application that allows you to shoot four consecutive photos which it will then merge together as one large panoramic photo. The best feature of Pano is not just that you can do this but how you do this. As you are shooting Pano shows you the right-most section of the previous photo so that you are able to line up each shot with the last.

The results are pretty amazing. Here are some of mine. Here are some of my friend Justine’s. And here are some of the world’s.

But, immediately after that, while going through my feeds from the last few weeks I ran across the World Animal Day photos on The Big Picture. Instantly humbled.

Source: World Animal Day.

You can head over to Flickr to read the comments and see that several people have favorited the photo.  Yee doesn’t take too much credit for the shot, remarking that “…the sunlight streaming down Locust St. helps too”. Which leads me to believe that sometimes, things just seem to line up.

As I commented, I think this photo is fantastic.

I’m using this photo without permission Albert so, if you want me to remove it, just drop me a line.

Photo credit: Tony Green

My friend-who-I-never-get-to-see Tony Green recently enjoyed a delicious cherry pie.  The title of his post is “First Cherry Pie”, which I thought meant that he made it, but it seems he had help from his significant other.

“I didn’t grow up eating fruit pies (homemade or otherwise) other than the occasional Tastykake. Around 1980, however, I had an epiphany in the form of a transcendent slice of cherry pie at O.G. Dining Room (in Greenwich Village). Since then, cherry pie has been my favorite fruit pie.

[...]

Cherry pies usually sport a lattice crust, which neither of us had ever made. Fortunately, the directions in Baking Illustrated were straightforward. I made the dough, which was a little different from what I usually make. It had more flour and water and less fat (I used a combination of lard and unsalted butter). The dough was easy to roll out and turned out better than it usually does. Anne made the lattice crust as well as the rest of the pie; I just took pictures.”

Emphasis mine.

Either way this pie looks delicious and now I’m wanting Tony to share the recipe and lattice crust instructions with the world instead of just the photos!

Source: First Cherry Pie.

Photo credit: Chase Jarvis.

Here are Chase’s top five reasons that the Nikon D90 is great:

“1. The D-movie. HD720 video in an dSLR is really big news. It’s so cool that we’re seeing the merging of high quality still and video pictures into the same camera. Sure, for us pros, we’ve got the RED camera. But for everybody else? This is the future. People: this is an SLR that shoots killer video! It’s the merging of features that the pros are using and it’s made accessible the the amateur at a price point of $1200+ bucks. Trust me, I played with this feature at length…all of us on location did, for that matter. It’s going to be a powerful tool. You can control your own depth of field so beautifully using the manual focus ring, the audio capture is solid, the high ISO capabilities in video?! Way cool… Long lenses, fisheyes, zoom lenses…versatility. I’m a BIG fan of the D-Movie.

2. Photo J possibilities. This camera will be a great second body for pro photojournalists. Commercial guys like me will be loyal to the D3 and its future, but for any PJ shooter, all the bells and whistles we’ve discussed already– especially video and audio capture–make this a no-brainer as a backup body.

3. Image Quality. The sensor is really top tier for a camera targeted at advanced amateurs. The high ISO capabilities are going to be a welcome addition to cameras in this price point. Want to take images of your kid in the rain at his baseball game at 7pm? This is your camera. It’s the D300 sensor with some juice.

4. The ergonomics of this camera are great. As someone who holds a camera for a living, I think camera ergonomics are waaay underrated. This camera (light at only 1lb. 6oz) is a treat in your hand. The menus are great and everything is right where you want it.

5. Oh ya, did I mention that this thing shoots video?!”

It seems like Nikon is taking a giant leap forward in the “advance amateur” category by giving all of this away for about $1,200 and I hope that other manufacturers quickly follow suit.

Source: Chase Jarvis RAW: Advance Testing the Nikon D90.

The video at the above link is also worth watching.

As I was going through my photos from Las Vegas, which I’m still not done publishing yet, I thought of framing them the way Peter Lik does.  Peter Lik’s framing work is what makes his work so great.  If he has a photo of bamboo from South East Asia, he actually uses bamboo to frame the over-sized photo. If you’ve never been to a Peter Lik gallery, and you’re a photo nut, please do yourself a favor and drop in.

Then I had a thought. If I’m going to turn some of these photos into header images for my site, why not “frame” them the way Peter Lik would.  I can’t, without a lot of work, wrap my site in bamboo shoots. But I can, at the very least, change the background color of my site to “frame” the header.

So that is what I’ve now done.  Refresh this or any page of my site to see some of the color / photo combinations I have so far.  As of this writing there are 15 combinations ((As soon as I can I will create a page for you to be able to view them all without the need of refreshing so often.)).

Oh, as an aside: By removing that old paper bag background I also slimmed my page load time quite a lot. So there is a double-benefit!  I think the paper bag background was around 214Kb.

Source: Sailfish – Photo Gallery.

Michael Mistretta, easily the youngest author whose blog I’m subscribed to, recently took a trip to Zambia.  In “Going Beyond Automatic: Photography in Africa” he gives the broad strokes of what the “Automatic” setting is on your camera, and how it takes practice to master “Manual” mode. He also talks a lot about why it isn’t important to focus on the gear you have but the way you look at shooting.

In the very first sentence of this piece I see Michael being slightly frustrated by something that ends up happening far too often to me.  He says: “I haven’t had the chance to write down much of what I experienced and accomplished while in Zambia.” I find I often “move on” to the next thing and forget to reflect on where I’ve just been – and writing seems to help me to reflect.  I need do it more.

Michael’s photos from Zambia are striking.  What an excellent opportunity for someone I’m sure will be an incredible photographer for many years to come!

Source: Going Beyond Automatic: Photography in Africa.

Also worth checking out are his photo exhibitions of Garages, Landings, Trains, Factories, and Lobbies.

Source: Branislav Kropilak: Billboards.

The photos are pretty stunning.  The most amazing thing to me is to see how much Moscow has changed when I compare it to the book I read about Moscow that was published in 1978.  Thirty years can make a very big difference in a city.

Source: Moscow from the Bird’s Sight.

“For Benjamin Wilken, it was the chance of a lifetime. He wrote a 300-word essay on how he became a young explorer, attached a photograph he took, put it in the mail and now, months later, he is packing his bags for an all-expense-paid trip down under with National Geographic.”

When I was younger I remember my grandparent’s library holding hundreds of copies of National Geographic Magazine.  They had a subscription to the magazine for, what had to be, decades.  The best part about it was that they shared this subscription with my father, who would take an edition home after my grandfather was done reading it.  I would, in turn, read (or at the very least look at the photos) the editions after he was done.

At the time I didn’t really realize how great an opportunity I had, being exposed to such incredible journalism and information from around the world at my finger-tips, long before I ever signed onto the Internet.

Benjamin Wilken, who started playing with a digital camera around the age of 6, went a step further than I ever did.  He read the magazines and even entered a contest in it.  To be fair, he has a subscription to National Geographic Kids – perhaps the reading is a tad-bit lighter.

His love for photography, the subscription to the magazine, and his attention to the material is now paying dividends. He and his father have an all-expense paid trip to Tazmania. Based on the experience Leo Laporte had (which I loosely linked to in April of this year), I’m sure he’s in for an incredible Australian adventure.

Source: Wayne County Student on Aussie Adventure.

Steve Winter, wildlife photographer, set up some cameras to take photos of Snow Leopards.  The result ends up being a pretty great set of photos that could have never been taken by humans because of the Leopards notorious reclusive nature.

Almost looks fake doesn’t it?  Beautiful.

Source: Out of the Shadows – Photo Gallery, National Geographic Magazine.
Hat tip: Apple, Inc. 

Date taken: May 25, 2008 | Photo credit: Eliza Devroe.

Why, what did you do this weekend?  I doubt it was as fun as this.  Was it?

We tried our best to injure ourselves and I think Chris was by far the most successful.  Maybe if you ask nicely Eliza will post some of the better shots to her blog.  What an incredible weekend to be outside!

This is incredible.  While photographing what seemed like a normal, and beautiful, wedding in Sichuan, China an earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter magnitude scale, shakes the church of the wedding to the ground.

These photos are quite stunning and truly tell how this quake hit with seemingly little or no notice at all.  What I find amazing is that there are any photos taken during this at all.  Perhaps because the camera was already in the hands of the cameramen it made it easier – but I think about myself in that situation and I doubt I’d have the presence of mind to be shooting while the buildings were falling around me.

This couple will perhaps have one of the most memorable weddings of all time?

Source: Photographing a Wedding and then an Earthquake.

A sea lion?

Yesterday I saw my friend Daniel Nicolas twitter; “there was a seal at the beach! yes i got pictures”.  I knew once he published the photos I was going to link to them.

But then I got to thinking – did he really mean seal or did he mean sea lion?

Once he had the photos up I began doing a little digging to jog my memory about the differences between a seal and a sea lion, both of which are Pinnipeds, or “fin-footed mammals”.  It is a pretty simple classification really.  If you have a fin as a foot, you give birth to live young, feed your young with milk, are warm blooded, and have hair on your body – you’re a Pinniped.  However, the main difference between a sea lion and a seal is that sea lions have ears and can walk on all fours.

But, you might be saying, but so can fur seals.  This is where things start to get a little muddy.  The number of species of seal are actually quite numerous.  California sea lions, for example, are the most common species used in circuses and the like, but there are suborders of both seal and sea lion ranging in the hundreds.  Australian, Japanese, Galapagos, and Stellar are just a few suborders of sea lion.  New Zealand, Antarctic, Subantarctic, Northern Fur, and Cape Fur are just a few suborders of seals.

So what did Danny shoot?  I’m sticking with sea lion – partially because of my close examination of the photos, and partially because I know that Danny is from somewhere near San Diego.

What do you think it is?

Source: Flickr: Photo uploads from May 20, 2008 by djloche.

I was wrong about the marsh, but I was able to get a few good photographs anyway.

But, that’s ok.  I fully expect to be wrong now and then.  I spent maybe only about 30 minutes pushing through some thick brush in order to get to the place I wanted to be to find nothing but a small trickle of a stream.  I’ll get over it.

Hmmm, where to shoot next?  Maybe it will be a good spot, maybe not – but I’ll keep trying regardless.

I think the most important ones, for me, are perspective, framing, intentional empty space, and the horizontal line.  Everything else seems to fall into place once you follow those few things and really begin to see your photographs before you snap.

Source: 21 Ways to Shoot Better Photographs | 10e20 Blog
Via: Jason Kottke.

Finally taking the time to go through each page in the manual. Eliza and I have had this camera since last fall and although I’ve been using it, I’m just now getting a chance to really kick the setting’s tires.

I’m not sure how long I’ll keep this set, but I do have some goals in mind with the random header images.  Eventually I want at least one for each of my interests: basketball, wine, food, family, technology, star wars?, and anything else I’m interested in at the time.  I also have a few favorites from my photo collection, which will also find their way into the rotation.

Refresh a few times and let me know which one is your favorite, I hope you like them.

Ansel Adams, considered one of the best American West photographers, had a studio which is still owned by his family and is named The Ansel Adams Gallery, now has a blog.  Still very fresh, this blog is cataloging some of the activities of the studio, its members, and fans of Ansel Adams.

I am of the opinion that pretty much every projects deserves a blog to help catalog experiences, but I definitely feel that photography and blogging are really a great match.  Subscribed!

Source: The Ansel Adams Gallery Blog.
Via: Robert Scoble: Kodak Moment: Following Ansel Adams [sic] footsteps.
Additional info: Ansel Adams on Wikipedia.

“Depth of field is the range of distance around the focal plane which is acceptably sharp.  The depth of field varies depending on camera type, aperture and focusing distance, although print size and viewing distance can influence our perception of it.”

To better fully understand, and calculate the depth of field, for your camera – take a look at this tutorial from Cambridge in Colour.

Source: Understanding Depth of Field in Photography.
Via: Dan Rubin on Ma.gnolia. 

Leo Laporte recently went to Tasmania on a photography adventure. Sponsored by O’Reilly and Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Adventure on the Australian island seemed to be a blast (and you can consider me jealous).

Recently Leo went through his bag and showed off his photo kit that he brought with him to Tasmania, why he chose to bring what he did, and how it uses each of the things in his bag. Leo is sporting a Canon 5D with a three or four lenses. Watch the the video for more, or click through to his blog and watch it.

Source: Packing My Kit : LOL: The Life of Leo.

“Good afternoon, I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I’ll be back later this evening to pick it up. Love, Jay / The Plug”

Source: The Plug – Stranger Photos Have Happened.

They also integrate with Flickr and are running a photo book contest where you could win $25,000.

(Source: Blurb)