My, what tall buildings you have!

New York City, midtown. There’s simply no other city like it.

Photoshop Express

Title: The Wall

Yesterday Adobe launched a Photoshop Express (beta, apparently for Web 2.0 street cred), its first into the world of web based image editing.

The name is a bit misleading; it offers but a tiny sliver of the features and functionality Photoshop offers or even those of the watered down Photoshop Elements (though I’ll note that the correction tools that are present are excellent). It’s basically a fun sort of toy – a way to apply a bunch of neat special effects to photos, but it’s nothing that’s about to supplant Adobe’s desktop applications. I won’t attempt a full review here – instead I’ll just suggest you go play with the test drive to see what it can do.

I’ve begun playing with a little, it’s certainly a slick application – not surprising, since part of Adobe’s goal is no doubt to showcase their Flash and Flex technologies. In that vein, there’s no doubt there’s an Air version in the pipeline too.

It’ll be interesting to see when and how Adobe integrates this into their existing suite of desktop products. Integration with Lightroom, for example, could make this into a killer product (for me, anyway), depending on how they do it. For the moment though, there there’s nothing here to steal me away from Picnik, which I’ve recently become quite enamored with.

Spring!

Title: Spring has Arrived

I shot this as I walked out of my office building yesterday. It wasn’t there when I walked in in the morning. Which in my mind is pretty amazing, and one reason that I stand in humbling awe of nature. More importantly though, it means that Spring has officially, definitively, inarguably arrived – and for me it couldn’t have come soon enough.

I shot it with a macro lens, holding the branch steady with my other hand as the breeze was shaking it a bit too much.

I guess at the end of the day, I’m a pretty dull person

Title: Barbed

Two days in a row I really don’t have much to say… and I really can’t think of much to say about the photo either. It’s a macro shot of a barbed wire fence. Kind of neat, but there weren’t really any tricks to taking it.

Here’s to hoping  I’ll have more to say tomorrow.

An Awesome Post Title

Title: Pine Needles Against the Sun

I’m short on time as I type this, so there won’t be anything substantial here. The above is a shot of the sun through the some pine needles. Strangely, it’s not one I regard as particularly fantastic, but it did make explore when I first posted it.

Weekends

Title: But a Whisper by Me.

I’ve decided that I rather like taking weekends off from blogging, and in that vein I took this past weekend off again (in case anyone noticed the lack of posts on Saturday and Sunday). Weekdays are pretty easy for me; I usually write these posts either when I’m at my desk in the morning or at lunchtime at work (on rare occasions, I’ll even write them the night before). But on weekends… well, I just don’t feel like doing anything when I get up in the morning, and remembering to do it otherwise on a Saturday just seems like a PITA sometimes. So for the moment, I’m just going to take weekends off – five posts a week should be more than enough.

The photo effect above is a simple warming of the white balance to get the orangish color tone.

Marketing

Title: To Meditate by Me

I’ve gone through and replaced everything for sale in my Imagekind Gallery with uncompressed TIFF images. I doubt that there’s the slightest discernible difference from the JPG’s that were there, but I figure I owe it to anyone who does buy a print to get the very highest quality image that I can possibly offer.

Which brings me  to my question of the day, in case any of my few readers have some good ideas – how can I better market my work? And by that, I don’t necessarily mean “make money”, but rather how can I bring more traffic to my Flickr stream and/or this blog? I’m about as active as I can possibly be in terms of commenting and such, and getting reciprocal traffic (appreciating others’ work is something that I happen to immensely enjoy doing anyway), and consequently the traffic I get is pretty flat. Does anyone have any good tips or thoughts as to how I might actually grow my traffic? It would be much appreciated.

The photo, unbelievably, was shot in between a shopping mall and a highway.  It’s a little slice of something beautiful in the suburban landscape.

All the Colors of the Rainbow

Title: All the Colors of the Rainbow by Me

One of the aims here was to give some insight into how the photos I post were taken; as it turns out that’s something I rarely do. But with this post, I’ll fix that.

The crayons were arranged on a white piece of paper and arranged, of course, according to the rainbow. I used natural sunlight coming through a window, which in my mind gives the reddest reds, yellowest yellows, etc. Most importantly, it gave plenty of light to essentially wash out the white paper (it did take a little further highlight tweaking in post). I used my macro lens with a nice small aperture to get a decent depth of field. I actually do have an alternate version where the entirety of the crayons are in focus, but all in all I like this one better.

And that’s how it was taken.

One Million Photos

Title: White Duck 1 by Me.

No, I don’t have a million photos. Not even close. But it’s the goal of blogger Thomas Hawk. And I think that’s a pretty awesome goal. There’s some interesting thoughts about copyright in that post as well, but mostly it’s the goal that struck me.

The photo is of a white duck, who was especially kind to pose for me. Mostly because he thought I had food.

Last photo of the winter

Title: End of Winter by Me.

I’m probably jinxing myself by saying so, but I believe this will be the last photo with any snow in it that I’ll be sharing from this winter.

Good riddance.