The site took off rather quickly and today is getting somewhere around 22,000 hits (or 3500 page views) each day. I, however, have been neglecting it horribly for a few years so recently decided to sell it so someone still in the business who has a track record of doing good things with similar sites.

All the best, Bjarne – I hope the site is as good to you as it has been to me over the last decade and a bit.

Yesterday’s attendees were:

• Andy M. – ATMTX Photo
• Jim Nix – Nomadic Pursuits
• Alex Suarez – Alex Suarez Photography & Technology Blog
• Pete Talke – Places2Explore
• Mike Tuuk – Michael Tuuk Photography

You will find these guys and many others in my newly revamped blogroll over on the photoblog. By the way, if you’re new here, you may not realise that I post different material here and on the photoblog. The photoblog is strictly for image posting but I tend to include random articles and news here which I don’t have over there. Just to make life really difficult for myself, I also post different pictures to Flickr too so you may also want to take a look over there every now and then.

Lilac Wine from Matthew Landa on Vimeo.

While I’m writing, I should apologise for the complete lack of Flickr and photoblog updates this week. I’m working on a commercial job that’s eating a lot of time and, on top of this, the kids went back to school so I no longer have my summer 30 minutes of uploading time in the morning. I’ll get back in the swing in a week or so once the paying gig is out the way.

Although nothing is finalised yet,I’m keen to gauge the level of interest to get an idea of how feasible this is. Would you be interested and do you feel this price is reasonable? I’m not asking for a commitment just now, merely an idea of how popular such a workshop would be.

If you’ve not seen David’s work, I strongly encourage you to take a look at his blog and portfolio. His post-processing techniques are the stuff of legend in the digital photography community and his use of HDR is superb. He is the author of “Practical HDR” and winner of many international awards.

I was invited to speak by Pete Holland who is the club’s Vice President and, as it happens, one of only two photographers from whom I’ve ever bought an HDR print. Pete is a very accomplished HDR photographer and I feel rather honoured for him to have invited me to speak.

I had a fascinating morning yesterday at the Texas Hill Country Barrel Racing Association competition in Dripping Springs. Neighbour, friend and fellow HDR enthusiast Don Schulte joined me and we spent 3 or 4 hours standing in the sun shooting lots of high-speed sequences of riders and horses tearing around a 3 barrel course, trying not to knock any of the barrels over.

I had never seen a Barrel Race live before but reckoned it would make for some great action shots and I wasn’t disappointed. These folks ride really fast and the horses can whip round the barrels very quickly giving some really dramatic image opportunities.

We set up close to the start line and this offered us three main shooting targets – rounding the barrel opposite us, rounding the second barrel close to us and finally the gallop back to the finish line. The third barrel was further away and offered a background containing the timing and judging stand so didn’t provide an appealing target.

The shots I am most happy with so far were those of the competitors rounding the barrel closest to us. I was shooting with the D700 and 70-200mm close to wide open (typically f/4 or f/3.3) to blur the background. Couple this with a nice, fresh set of NiMH batteries in the battery grip and this let me catch about 4 frames of each rider making the turn (at 8fps). I kept the crop close to the barrel since the best riders stay as close as possible so this meant that I frequently lost at least one hoof (as in this case). I would rather have the whole horse in the image but I loved the overall feel of this shot so decided to post it regardless of the minor amputation.

By the end of our stay, both of us had more than 500 images in the can (about 13 images per rider, in case you are wondering with each rider completing the course in between 17 and 19 seconds). I still have lots of editing to do but I’ll post several more later once I’ve narrowed the field down a bit.

The biggest surprise to me was to see that even with a 50 second exposure and a very wide angle lens, star motion is still very apparent (hence my only posting a low resolution version of this image). I was shooting at 14mm f/2.8 400ISO but next time, I think I’ll try 1600ISO and reduce the shutter speed to 12 seconds or so to try to minimise the effect of the Earth’s rotation. The D700 should handle this fine without the noise being too much of a problem.

In the meantime, here’s the Milky Way from our front yard. I had hoped that the image would be crossed by a few Perseid meteors but we only saw 4 or 5 in the 30 minutes we were outside and none of those appeared while the shutter was open. I tried to increase the foreground interest a bit by painting the cedar trees with a flashlight.

Sorry – time for another personal trumpet-blowing post…

After posting my news about the Honorable Mention in the Unified Color HDR competition, I woke up on Saturday morning to discover that I had also had my entry selected as the winner of this year’s Scott Kelby World Wide Photo Walk for Austin’s Palmer Event Center/Lady Bird Lake walk (there were 3 in the city this year). That was a big surprise since I definitely felt that my images from this year’s walk were significantly less inspiring than last year’s entry which ended up in my recent exhibition set.

Unlike many other walks where the winner is chosen by the walk leader, Simi, our leader, opened the competition to votes from the attendees so thanks to everyone who voted for my picture of the First Street Bridge!

I’ve already blogged the winning image so here’s another one I took during the walk showing the jukebox in Threadgill’s Restaurant where we all met to have lunch afterwards.

Having won this event two years running, I think it’s time for me to choose a different walk next year or perhaps even sign up to lead one. We’ll see what happens when the 2011 sign-up starts in May or thereabouts next year.

It’s been ages since I posted any family pictures on the blog so here’s one from our recent trip that I’m pretty happy with. This was taken on our first evening at White Sands National Monument near Alamogordo in New Mexico. The weather was breathtaking that night – thunderstorms all around, rain on the distant mountains and sun rays shining through it while we remained dry in a pocket of dunes in the centre.

The picture was taken with a self timer (obviously) and, since it was getting dark, I popped an on-camera flash to brighten us up a bit while darkening the background somewhat. Amazingly, the exposure is good (I never get more than 2 attempts at this kind of thing before one of the kids runs off) and everyone looks happy and has their eyes open!

Although I post a lot of pictures to Flickr on my “DaveWilsonPhotography” account, I also keep a second account which contains only pictures of the things we’ve been up to as a family. Click through this image to see some others if you are interested.

I found out this evening that my Chevron Tower image was awarded an honorable mention in the second Unified Color HDR Photography competition. The version of the image entered was reprocessed from the original exposures using Unified Color’s HDR Photo Studio 2 software since that was what the competition required. I stuck to the rules and did no retouching afterwards so I’m not particularly happy with the final image (compare it to this one which was processed in Photomatix with retouch in Photoshop and Lightroom to see what I mean). That said, it was obviously good enough for the judges!

This was one of my top 10 images of 2009 and I am looking forward to going back down to Houston to shoot some more architecture some time in the next couple of months. I’ll probably reshoot this image with the new camera and ultra-wide lens since I was never 100% happy with the sharpness of the image taken using the Sigma 10-20mm. Watch this space near the end of the year for an update.

Often it’s worth the interrupted sleep to get up and out before sunrise. On our recent trip, I set the alarm early on three mornings and snuck out of our hotel room for a couple of hours shooting while the rest of the family slept. In Texas, this worked out fine – sunrise was at around 7am so it meant I didn’t have to get up at a completely ungodly hour – but New Mexico, where the clocks run an hour earlier, proved problematic. For Santa Fe, this was fine since the lighting was still rather excellent downtown at 6:45 or so when I arrived. The bigger problem, however, was at White Sands National Monument where the part is gated off until 7am, a full hour after sunrise.

If I return to White Sands, I think I will plan to go during springtime. That should allow the park opening time and sunrise to coincide and, if I’m lucky, may allow me to get there when the yucca plants are blooming.

For summer trips, however, west Texas offers a nicely timed sunrise allowing images such as this one to be captured without having to sacrifice too much sleep.

The June HDR workshop was a great success and I had several people who expressed an interest but couldn’t make it on that particular day. As a result, I’ve arranged to give another workshop at Dragonfly Gallery on Saturday October 16th, 2010. This will follow the same plan as the previous class. If you are interested in learning how to take and process the kind of images I typically post here or on my photoblog, head on over to my workshop page to read about the class.

The workshop is limited to 8 people so please let me know as soon as possible if you would like to take part and I’ll add your name to the list.

Yesterday, July 24th 2010, was the day of the third annual World Wide Photo Walk organised by author and photography guru Scott Kelby. Over 33000 photographers in 1100 locations got together in groups of 50 to shoot pictures of parts of their local town or city and generally have three or four hours of camaraderie and photo-geekery.

Austin this year had 3 photo walks to choose from. Fellow HDR aficionado Pete Talke led a walk in the evening around the State Capitol and most of the local HDR types joined him. I was keen to shoot somewhere different, however, so teamed up with the group led by Simi Shonowo which started at 8am and walked south of the lake around the Palmer Events Center, Long Center and Auditorium Shores area. A third walk was also organised for the area of the Oasis Restaurant on Lake Travis.

Each walk ends at a restaurant to give people a chance to socialise and discuss the event. Our ending venue was Threadgill’s on Barton Springs Road – an excellent venue which had no trouble accomodating the 30 or so people who stayed for lunch at the end of the walk.

Once again, the walk was great fun. Our group had locals and also people who had travelled into the area to shoot somewhere different – several from San Antonio and one from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Although I enjoyed the walk, again, the experience was valuable more socially than photographically – I had a hard time getting particularly inspired and came away with only 3 or 4 pictures that I’m really happy with. No prizes this year but the event itself is definitely a winner and I would encourage any photographer who has not taken part to sign up when next year’s event is announced.

Things have been a bit quiet here recently since I’m currently on a trip to New Mexico and am relying on hotel WiFi which, unfortunately, is not universal. AT&T are living up to the standard I have come to expect by having no effective data coverage anywhere in the state as far as I can see – even downtown in Santa Fe, I am completely unable to get any kind of usable data connection. That is, however, a story for another blog posting.

Today, we spent the morning in downtown Santa Fe soaking up artistic inspiration. Not only is the city centre absolutely beautiful with fabulous adobe buildings everywhere, it’s also home to more excellent art galleries and museums than just about anywhere I’ve ever visited. After the must-be-visited Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the highlights for me were three photography galleries.

The Lisa Kristine Gallery contained some of the most beautiful images I have ever seen – large format prints of people and scenes shot mostly in Asia. Amazing portraits and landscapes with absolutely perfect light.

Since the demise of the last dedicated fine art photography gallery in Austin (by which I mean a gallery selling prints by internationally acclaimed and famous photographers) couple of years ago, I was also delighted to get a fix of superlative print quality at the Andrew Smith Gallery which features original prints by masters Ansel Adams, Yousuf Karsh amd Henri Cartier Bresson among others. You may think these photographers’ images are superb in books of their work but until you have seen original prints, you really don’t have any idea of just how amazing these images are. The tonal range in the prints is something to weep over.

In addition to these masters, I was also delighted to see more of the luminous landscape work of Christopher Burkett whose large format images blew me away when I first saw them four or five years ago. His large prints are, sadly, rather outside my budget but I came really close to signing a four figure check a few years ago when I saw one if his pictures of an aspen forest in autumn. You could see every vein on every leaf in a 30″x40″ print. Truly breathtaking.

The final gallery I visited was Photogenesis which featured the work of several photographers, most of whom were new to me. One that really caught my eye was Nicholas Trofimuk whose black and white landscapes are wonderful.

While I didn’t walk away with any large prints (unfortunately), I did treat myself to a copy of “The Portfolios of Ansel Adams” and several greeting cards to remind me of the day.

A great skill for a photographer to acquire (and which Jim Goldstein talks about in his blog post today) is the ability to see pictures in areas that may otherwise have been overlooked and to do this you must remove those blinkers and consider all possibilities in the location you find yourself rather than merely the view straight ahead or the original plan.

Look up, look down and look behind you!

I love wildlife photography and am in awe of the work done by people like Matt & Will Burrard-Lucas and Moose Peterson but it’s not something I ever reckon I’ll be particularly successful at since (a) the most interesting wildlife always seems to be an expensive airline ride away and (b) I can’t afford the kind of lenses that you need to take that really great picture of a lion without running the significant risk of ending up as its breakfast.

Wildlife, however, need not only involve wildebeest roaming the savannah or grizzly bears in Alaska. If you look around you, there are likely to be lots of exciting examples of wildlife to photograph as long as you think smaller. Bugs and insects are everywhere and as long as you have a lens with the ability to focus close (or close-up filters or extension tubes) and a flash you most likely can get some great wildlife shots within feet of your front door.

Take this shot, for example. I was finishing cleaning out our chicken coop (a highly nasty job requiring a face mask in the summer) and went to get some hay for their nesting box only to find a large (by Texas standards) scorpion having lunch on a piece of wood next to the hay bale. I raced inside to get the camera, macro lens and flash and shot a few images before he decided to hide from me. The lighting isn’t perfect but the shot definitely captured the moment. I took several more after this using a reflector to reduce the shadows and generally make the image look more natural but, by that time, the scorpion had moved and the composition wasn’t as good.

Next time you decide that you couldn’t possibly be a wildlife photographer, think small and see what you can find.

June 26th has been declared “International HDR Day” by well-known HDR photographers Rick Sammon and Trey Ratcliff so, in the spirit of the celebration, I had to take an HDR shot today and post it on all 3 of the sites I post photos to (here, Flickr and my photoblog).

This rather odd shot was taken at the Barsana Dham Hindu temple in Austin. The boys and I headed over there this morning to pick peaches in their orchard and took a wander around the temple afterwards. I didn’t have a lot of time since we were all thirsty after our fruit picking but got one image that I feel is worthy of posting.

If you haven’t tried shooting HDR and like “arty pictures,” give it a shot. It’s really pretty straighforward to do and you’ll have a lot of fun playing with the enormous number of possible variations you can create with each picture. You’ll find my HDR tutorial over on the photoblog and, if you prefer hands-on instruction, I’ll be giving another offering of my HDR workshop on a Saturday in either September or October this year.

By the way, in case anyone clicks through to the “About” page on DPExperience, I’m not that Dave Wilson. I appear to have an evil twin on Rick Sammon’s staff

The Barn Swallow nest in our garage is creaking from the weight of this summer’s new brood. I strongly suspect they will be taking flight some time in the next few days since they’ve definitely outgrown the available space!

This year’s experience with the swallows has been rather confusing. A pair arrived pretty early and hatched a brood of 3 chicks. Shortly thereafter, the male disappeared but the female kept feeding the young. Unfortunately one fell out the nest very early and didn’t survive and a second broke a wing presumably when trying to take flight for the first time. Around this time, however, another pair of swallows appears and were extremely agitated to find the next occupied.

We’re not sure, obviously, but our guess is that this as the original pair that build the nest and the first pair this year were interlopers. Regardless, the remaining check from the first brood took flight and the second pair took up residence and raised this fine group of chicks.

Some people complain about the mess a swallow’s nest generates and, yes, they do create quite a pile of guano to deal with but I consider that a minor inconvenience compared to the joy of watching these master aviators up close and the excitement of seeing the chicks grow up and take their initial flights.

My fingers are crossed for these guys this week!

Sean Galbraith is from Toronto and specialises in urban decay photography. He is also co-presenter of the TV show “PhotoXplorers” which covers the exploits of Sean and his colleagues hunting for shots in abandoned buildings. I’ve included a short documentary about his “DK Photogroup” at the end of this post. You can also watch the first PhotoXplorers episode on YouTube.

The second guest is Achim Runnebaum, a photographer now based in Nagoya, Japan and editor of RAN magazine.

Yesterday was the long-awaited HDR Workshop. This had been organised to coincide with the show and was held in the classroom at the gallery. We spent an hour or so discussing HDR background and how to shoot for HDR then headed down to the Capitol for a couple of hours of taking pictures. After lunch, we returned to the gallery and spent the rest of the day processing and looking at the results.

The folks who took part (click through the image for the list) did great work and produced some super images, some of which you will no doubt find on Flickr fairly soon.

After this class, I already have enough people interested to justify doing another so I’m planning on holding a second workshop some time in September or October. If you are interested, use the contact page and drop me a line.