I spotted this critter on a photowalk through downtown Victoria, Canada:
It’s hard to say what thoughts are going through his (her?) little reptilian head, but pride of “ownership” is likely one of them!
The watcher
Temple XII, Palenque
A.K.A. the Temple of the Skull, from the stucco carving of a rabbit’s skull at the base of one of the temple’s pillars.
In the 1990s, archaeologists found a passageway leading from the temple to a burial chamber for a person of some importance (likely local royalty) and his attendants. This is one of the first structures you see when you enter the ruins of Palenque.
How people *really* use their smart phone cameras
A hysterical parody of smart phone photography (and to some extent, social media):
Presiding
Another shot of Mt. Rainier — this one from the southeast:
It was so hazy on this particular day that I had to use 5 images and heavy use of HDR in order to get any separation between the sky and mountain. I’m fairly happy with the results — at least it doesn’t seem as unnatural as HDR images can sometimes turn out.
Crown of thorns
It’s ‘Roid Week on Flickr, so I thought it would be a good time to post this shot I made in Wichita a few weeks back:
This is part of what used to be a roller coaster at an abandoned amusement park called Joyland. The place was closed, then sold, then re-opened, then closed again, and finally abandoned. Now it’s slowly decaying while the rides and other structures gradually (occasionally…) get dismantled and torn down. Apparently it’s quite the magnet for urban explorers in town, but I didn’t really want to deal with the legal issues involved with hopping the park’s fence, so did my photography from outside the barriers.
I made this shot with a Polaroid OneStep Express camera and Impossible Project PX 600 Silver Shade film — a combination I’m really warming up to. It seems to be particularly good for street and decay shots (although, at $3 per exposure, a bit pricey for everyday use). Given how far this place has fallen from its heyday, the black border on this film seemed appropriate, a way of both commemorating and mourning this decay.
eBook review — Craft and Vision’s “Finding Focus”
Every month, the folks at Craft & Vision release another title in their fine series of photography eBooks. This month’s contribution was just released today — it’s Finding Focus: Understanding the Camera’s Eye, by Nicole S. Young. As you might expect from the title, this eBook is a top-to-bottom discussion of the use of focus in photography. It’s comprehensive, and doesn’t assume you know very much of the subject (which has its pros and cons, obviously, depending on where you’re at photographically-speaking).
Finding Focus costs $5 for a PDF with 36 (double-width) pages, full of explanatory text and plenty of helpful example images. It covers the following topics:
- Aperture
- Depth of field
- Lens compression (of the subject’s apparent depth)
- Tilt-shift lenses
- Related camera functions (pre-focus, DOF preview, etc.)
- How to focus (for portraits, landscapes, etc.)
- Focus & storytelling
- Software (focus stacking, adding blur, etc.)
- Common mistakes
The eBook’s coverage of focus is technical and comprehensive, but given the nature of its subject, may be a bit basic for some people. From my perspective, Finding Focus will likely be more useful for a beginner or beginner / intermediate photographer than for a more advanced shooter. That being said, it’s a well put-together eBook if it answers a need for you. I have only one complaint about this title: example images are labeled with their EXIF data, but many of the labels don’t include the focal length used (for shots taken with a zoom lens). This is an odd oversight, given that telephoto compression of a scene is part of the ground this title covers.
The “Goodland Van Gogh”
Here’s a bit of artistic Americana, captured just off I-70 in Goodland, Kansas:
Why, you might ask, did I wander here? Like many (I’d guess most) visitors, I was driving home from an out-of-town trip via I-70. I needed to stop for some gas (not a lot of gas stations in the middle of Kansas), and happened to drive by this on my way into the heart of Goodland.
Granted, a 24′ by 32′ reproduction of a van Gogh painting isn’t what you’d expect to see in the middle of the prairie, so I did a bit of research on it. It turns out that this artwork was put up in 2001, at a cost of $150,000. Part of a project of Canadian painter Cameron Cross, it was intended to be one of seven similar works spread across the globe, all based on van Gogh’s sunflower paintings from the late 1880s — so far, only three have been erected (the other two are in Altona, Canada and Emerald, Australia).
As it turns out, my accidental timing was perfect — this summer, the painting was taken down from its easel and repainted. It was put back where it belongs a bit over a week before I passed through. So the new paint job should be good until 2023 or so — swing by if you’re passing through (as you can see, parking is no problem!).
Want to read more about this structure? Check out Roadside America, the Goodland Star-News, or the painting’s Facebook page.
A wary eye
From a recent road trip into Kansas:
I met this gent at the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita. I got the definite impression that he wasn’t terribly happy about my presence…
The sleeping giant
A view of Mt. Rainier from the east, along the White River:
I brought this image together using HDR Efex Pro 2 from four raw photographs. It was a bit of a salvage effort, since the sky was particularly hazy the day we visited. I was impressed at the software’s ability to pull detail out of the sky, avoiding a flat white backdrop for the snow-shrouded peaks.
Wild weather
Not having spent much (really, any) of my life near an ocean, I’m not used to just how rough water can get when there’s a storm nearby. Our recent Puget Sound trip gave us a little reminder of that on a day when we drove along the west coast of Vancouver Island:
Normally, Long Beach in the Pacific Rim National Park Preserve is a serene place. As you can see, it was a bit more… boisterous when we visited.