Tall and Skinny

I have a love/hate relationship with Flickr’s Explore.

On the one hand, it’s a flawed metric for quality. It has a pretty strong bias towards flowers, leaves, dogs/cats, sunsets, people’s feet, long exposures shot of the shore and surf, and the occasional cute wild animal for good measure. This is because at its heart it’s community driven, and people, in general, like these subjects. And in fairness, those photos in Explore do tend to be very good on a technical level, and are usually better than just straight-on shots of these subjects.

But they’re photography cliches, and the most interesting, creative, and original stuff, in my own stream and in that of other photographers, rarely seems to get there. And mine that have been in Explore aren’t necessarily the ones I consider my very best. Therefore, getting into Explore isn’t the be all and end all judgment of whether you have a good shot on your hands.

On the other hand though, it’s recognition – it’s kind of nice to be selected among the top 500 considering that the site gets around 3,000 uploads per minute. And so you get a little zing of pride when you check Scout and find another one has been there, even though you know it’s relatively meaningless and random…

This is a wide angle shot of a small tree from a low perspective. For the last couple of days, it’s hovered around #200 in Explore for Feb 22, 2008.

Exposure: 1/400″
Aperture: f/10
Focal Length: 13mm

Wall of Water

Flickr broke today. Mind you, it’s not the whole site that broke, but I think most people see the message and then opt to go do something else, which accounts for why the site seems a little quiet today. At least, that’s the excuse I’m using for why the stuff I uploaded today has views in the single digits (as I write this, anyway).

This, is a pretty cool shot (pun unintended), I think, just because I really like the transition from water to mist to ice. There’s really nothing else special here, though it did take some post processing to bring out the contrasts.

Exposure: 1/320″
Aperture: f/9

Mountain Clouds

I find that I’m constantly going through my whole archive of photos for one reason or another, usually because I’m always changing my mind about how I want to organize the library. One day I’ll learn to leave well enough alone, because as my archive is constantly getting bigger, this task becomes more and more laborious. (On the bright side, finding a particular image keeps getting easier and easier.)

One thing I’ve noticed this time around isn’t just how much my camera and post processing skills have improved over time, but also just how much photos that I thought were good at the time just aren’t. I’m not sure why that is – either my eye has gotten better, or I’ve become more self critical as time has gone on (probably both). I still have some amazing images dating back to my earliest days as a photographer (I call this luck), but these days I kind of cringe looking at most of my older stuff.

So with that in mind I thought I’d return to one of my old ones today, and spare my blog readers from yet another Niagara Falls pic (you can still check out the latest on my Photostream though). This was shot on Prospect Mountain near Lake George one rather rainy Columbus Day weekend – the cloud layer was only about a hundred feet above my head here.

Exposure: 1/160″
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 100mm

Flowing into a frozen river

See? I told you there were some better photos of Niagara Falls in the pipeline. This was shot with my wide angle lens and cropped to make the panoramic. The weather conditions just kind of lend themselves to black and white, owing to the lack of contrast or vivid colors to begin with.

On a completely separate note, I’ve reorganized my “My Faves” sets. Previously I’d given the D300 its own set, but now I’ve split it up by year. I think it works better like this, though it sort of underscores for me that 2008 has sucked so far. More than half of my favorite photos I’ve taken with the D300 were done in December and grouped with 2007, revealing just how little I’ve done in 2008 so far. In any case, you can check them all out as part of my My Best collection.

Exposure: 1/250″
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 20mm

Blue

Those who’ve been following my Flickr Photostream might have noticed that the photos from Niagara Falls that I’ve shared to date are somewhat less than stellar. They’re not especially original, and even on the technical merits they’re lacking (sharpness in particular seems to have eluded me).

I blame the conditions – I was only there for a day really, so it was shoot then or not at all, and share what I have or nothing at all. This first set is primarily from the evening, when I had little real light to work with. It was also cloudy, windy, and as I’ve mentioned before cold, so I wasn’t feeling terribly inspired to stand there and get perfect photos. I was also battling mist that was being kicked up by the falls and being carried downwind, constantly getting my lens wet.

On the bright side though, it’s given me an opportunity to get a little more creative in post processing than I would if the photos were better to begin with. Here, I upped the contrast and adjusted the white balance for a blueish tinge, which I think gives it an extra wintery feel

I do have a couple of really good ones coming though, I promise – I always like to save the best for last.

Exposure:1/100″
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 20mm

View

Given that I’m not a winter person, and in fact that the season is something I rant on fairly frequently, you might be surprised that I opted to take a vacation in February. To Canada.

Well, I have a simple explanation for this: I’m insane. Completely, unequivocably, insane.

The cold was biting. The weather… well, it wasn’t bad for the time of year, but the snow flurries were pretty constant. And it was cold. Did I mention the cold? Yeah.

But, although said, it was a good trip. I do like traveling in the off season and not having to deal with crowds, and the falls are a pretty amazing sight in winter. I didn’t take quite as many photos, or as many creative ones, as I might have had it not been freezing, but I’m still reasonably pleased with the images I’ll be uploading over the next week or so.

This is one of the first shots I took upon getting there, overlooking the American falls from the Canadian side. The effect is split toning to give it an old tyme sort of feel.

Did I mention how f-in cold it was?

Exposure: 1/4″
Aperture: f/25
Focal Length: 12mm

As We Reach the End of the Day

I’m a little busy today, so I don’t have the time to type up anything terribly substantial. I’ll make up for it tomorrow, I promise.

As for this shot, it’s nothing special. It’s a wide angle, and was intentionally underexposed to get the silhouette.

Exposure: 1/1000″
Aperture: f/16
Focal Length: 19mm
Exposure Bias: -2/3 EV

Black and White

It’s snowing.

Again.

I guess that’s to be expected in February, but that doesn’t mean I’m above complaining about it.

Here’s a photo of a small tree with some snow on the ground, cleverly framed such that you can’t tell it’s in the middle of a mall parking lot. I maxed out the contrast in Lightroom in order to achieve the pure black and white effect.

Exposure: 1/800″
Aperture: f/14

Far From Home

So yesterday I returned from a couple of days at Niagara Falls. Pictures from there will come in a few days, but today I want to rant about about the eight hour drive it took to get there.

Yesterday, I passed through some absolutely beautiful landscapes, visible even from the interstates. But because I was driving, I could barely do more than glance at them. I couldn’t even pull over to look at them and take a photo, because you can’t do that on an interstate. And though I was tempted more than once to take side roads for just this purpose, that risked adding hours to an already painfully long drive.

One could almost enjoy a road trip if you could appreciate the land you’re passing through, but from the car this strikes me as almost impossible. Instead, it’s just a long time of sitting on your butt with all the stress that normally comes with driving. Yet there’s no real alternative in this country for this kind of trip. It’s too close to fly, and the US simply doesn’t have a high speed rail network that’s typical of the rest of the world.

Anyway, the above photo has nothing to do with my trip, it’s simply a leaf found in a local park, far from whatever tree it must have fell from.

Exposure: 1/500″
Aperture: f/11
Focal Length: 12mm

Spooky

Although it doesn’t appear in the shot, it was pretty much pouring rain when I took this (I shot it from the relative dryness of my car). It only started when I got there, which kind of put a damper on my photo taking plans. Still – it kicked up a bit of fog and the wet trees absorbed what light there was, making them darker and more distinct.

Exposure: 1/100″
Aperture: f/5