orange. blob. blog.

Photography Masters Cup – Nominee

Tim — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:49:45 +0000

Happy to say that two of my images were positioned as ‘Nominees’ for the 4th Annual Photography Masters Cup. Entered this collection quite a long time ago (they’ve just opened the 5th Annual entry) so it was a pleasant surprise to receive the email…

The two images chosen were both in the ‘Architecture’ nominees, found at this link on the Color Awards Site (click ‘Nominees’ to the right if it shows the Winners view). There’s quite a few nominees listed overall, so you have to scroll down to the ‘T’s… next year I’ll remember to adopt my photographic name. Anyone know any names beginning with multiple A’s?

One was the ‘Flatiron’ Building in New York City, shown above. This was taken as part of a series of photographs, called ‘Manhattan – A Closer Look‘. All the photos were taken with a tilt shift lens, and in this case I intentionally overexposed the background / sky, to make it pure white… almost as if the Flatiron wandered into a studio for a photo-shoot.

The other image nominated in the Masters Cup (again in the Architecture category) was the Reflection of St Paul’s Cathedral, shown above. This one is quite an old image (taken in 2008) on a walk around London in a search for a new angle!

There’s also more info about each photo (and their subjects) on the links above… Also well worth having a look through the rest of the Color Awards website – a lot of great work listed in the different categories, and congratulations to all the winners!

Hang on a sec! Before you dash off somewhere... why not check out the related links above, or if you found this post interesting, please help me out by recommending or liking using the links below:

ICE

Tim — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:35:55 +0000

A view of the ice on the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina. Taken while we were trekking up and down the ice…

For some other views of the Glacier trek (and a lot more text about the Glacier itself), check out the post about Crampons on the Glacier Trek, as well as a view of People Trekking on the Glacier.

Canon EOS-5D Mark II
1/6400 sec at f/2.8
ISO 100
45mm Tilt Shift

Crampons

Tim — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 02:24:20 +0000

Ice Crampons hanging at the preparation point before heading onto the Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina…

To make things easier to clamber over the Perito Moreno Glacier on an Ice-trek, we threw on some crampons for the trek. Ok, technically we sat back while the guides threw on the crampons for us. I guess at least this way everyone avoided that ‘tying shoe laces for the first time’ feeling. The crampons sit on the ground, you put your foot (with your regular hiking boot) onto it, then lash it into place with the straps.

Walking around with the crampons takes a little getting used to – it feels more like ‘stomping’ around the glacier rather than trekking. The technique I settled into was putting each foot down firmly and relatively flatly, so that all the spikes did their bit. Going by the steep hills and valleys that we tackled on the glacier, everyone seemed to get the hang of it.

The ice itself was the main attraction – the deep colour blue of the ice was incredible, and looking down into gulleys where meltwater had carved a deep crevice was mesmerizing. Why blue? The red (longer wavelengths) part of the light spectrum is absorbed by the ice – the further the light travels through the ice, the more blue it appears.

In some places where there were large flat areas of glacier surface, meltwater had pooled, but underneath was still areas of solid ice. From the surface it looked like an infinitely deep pool of water, but you could actually stand with your feet on the ice, a tiny bit below the surface of the meltwater. Totally freaky feeling. And highly recommended. Just make sure there is actually solid ice underneath first!

Even after finishing up a Grouse with fresh glacier ice, everyone made it through the remainder of the trek back to dry land. According to another website, the answer to ‘Does Glacier Ice last longer in drinks’, is actually ‘yes’. Apparently because the ice crystals are larger, which in turn melt more slowly. After an energetic hike though, I’m not sure anyone had a chance to notice the extra ice-melt time.

Canon EOS-5D Mark II
1/3200 sec at f/2.8
ISO 100
45mm

New York Times – A Moment in Time

Tim — Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:33 +0000

The New York Times’ Lens blog built and launched the interactive gallery for all of the different pictures collected for the ‘A Moment in Time’ project…

They launched the interactive gallery over at their ‘The Moment You’ve Waited For’ blog post. Clicking on the graphic launches the gallery where you can click on piles of photos, stashed around the world. It’s an intriguing way of presenting all the photos… and hard to ‘hunt’ for something specific, but it seems like a great way to make sure that people spend time browsing all the different photos and countries that took part.

The image that I blogged about at ‘A Moment in Time – Grand Central Clock’ appears in the gallery at the link here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/03/blogs/a-moment-in-time.html/#/4bdf87450bca253c3600046e

Also noticed a couple of other photos of the clock – this one included. Out of curiosity, I checked through the photos that I took, and saw one from a couple of frames earlier where the person has his hands up ‘holding’ the clock. It looks like they switch places a couple of frames later, and in the picture above, the photographer is leaning up against the Information booth on the right hand side of the photo.

Moments in Time… almost collided I guess.

There are loads of great pictures in the collection from around the world (I’m not even going to pretend to have looked at even a fraction of them) but there was one from the New York region that grabbed my attention here. Something about the V shapes, and the blown out tree, with the slight blur of the NYPD car.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
3.2 seconds at f/4.5
ISO 100
45mm (tilt shift)

A Moment in Time – Grand Central Clock

Tim — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:04:41 +0000

Part of the project by the New York Times’ Lens blog… “A Timely Global Mosaic, Created by All of Us”. The idea is that all the participants take a photo at 15:00 hours GMT (UTC) on 2nd May, 2010…

People around the world would then submit the photos taken at that ‘moment in time’, to the New York Times Lens blog. NYT then create a mosaic of all the different photos they collect – I think it will be interesting to see how they manage to present so many photos.

The photo above was taken in Grand Central Terminal, at 11am local time, with the aim of capturing the hustle and bustle of moving people, as well as the isolated clock in the centre of the station, showing exactly 11am. I took the photo using a tilt-shift lens (45mm ts-e) which allowed me to create an artificial depth of focus. In this case I wanted the clock to be perfectly in focus, while throwing most of the surroundings out of focus.

As they don’t let people set up tripods without prior permission (I’m not even sure if that’s an easy process or not?), I opted for the balcony which has a thick wall with a slightly curved surface – perfect for angling the camera, with the help of my metro-card holder to wedge one side.

I also added a 3-stop neutral density filter which meant that I could open the shutter for a lot longer – and get the exaggerated blur of everyone moving around. The added bonus was capturing the person in the foreground who just happened to take a photo with her flash!

Check out the link over at the New York Times Lens blog for more about ‘A Moment in Time’ project.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
3.2 seconds at f/4.5
ISO 100
45mm (tilt shift)

Grouse on the Glacier

Tim — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 20:55:02 +0000

According to Wikipedia, In Scotland – 300 drams of the Famous Grouse are drunk every second. In the case above, we had a brisk drink after doing the ice-trek on the Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina…

As we rounded the last ice-corner on the ice-trek, we found a wooden table set up, with a number of cases of Famous Grouse Scotch whisky. Need ice? No problem, turn around and hack a chunk off the glacier and dump it in the ice-bowl. There’s even an ice-clear mini river of glacier water flowing through the ice in the background to wash the glasses.

Taken with a 45mm tilt shift lens which I focussed on the Famous Grouse bottle label. The ‘Est. 1800 Perth’ moulding in the bottle is also visible above the label. In the background, other hikers are also chilling after the ice-trek, still with their crampons on.

I have to admit it was the freshest ice I’ve ever had in a Scotch!

Canon EOS-5D Mark II
1/3200 sec at f/2.8
ISO 100
45mm

Facebook and PhotoShelter

Tim — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 02:24:31 +0000

I’ve been stepping up my activity on PhotoShelter recently – adding custom slideshows for my facebook fan page and allowing buyers to choose prints in a variety of different formats using the ‘self-fulfilled’ option…

My work is mostly travel-related photography focusing on landscapes, architecture and travel scenes. I’m now able to offer signed prints through my website and allow buyers to easily order the prints to their specifications. Recent projects include a look at New York icons and buildings, called ‘Manhattan – A Closer Look’. This series was also featured on PDN’s Photo of the Day. I love to travel and love photography – so it’s been fantastic to combine the two!

There’s a number of reasons I’m glad that I stumbled across the PhotoShelter offering a couple of years ago, and why I’m still making adjustments and changes using their ever-growing list of features. I’ve done a couple of reviews previously – one early PhotoShelter review here, and a PhotoShelter review update here – where I’ve mentioned some of their SEO tools and toolkits specifically for photographers.

Here’s a run-down of why I use PhotoShelter:

Archive

It’s always a good feeling – even if your off-site hard disk backup hasn’t been refreshed in a while (hey, it happens!) – all your most important photos are sitting securely on PhotoShelter’s storage system at their highest resolution. If the worst were to happen, downloading the original archived files to the computer again would be pretty easy.

Website Integration

To me, this is of huge importance; being able to make the ‘archive’ and ‘e-commerce’ components integrate fully with the main website. It means no awkward jump in look-and-feel between components. Consistency. I’m a regular reader of Smashing Magazine, which made me realise that I could take a stab at my own web re-design. The results are what you see on my current website.

After building the ‘front end’ of my newly designed website, I could then apply the exact same look, feel and branding to the PhotoShelter archive component of the site. If you’d like more info about the re-design, I created what was meant to be a short article (but turned out a tad large) about customizing my WordPress blog, my website and the integration with PhotoShelter here.

I think its hugely important nowadays for websites to be seamless and well integrated – PhotoShelter lets me do just that! Now, even if people hit google search results and go straight through to my PhotoShelter site first, they still see the same branding and cohesiveness… (is cohesiveness even a word!?)

Social Media Tools (and Facebook slideshow integration)

There’s a whole bunch of Social media tools and features built into the PhotoShelter system that allow you to easily post galleries and photos to facebook, flickr, or twitter… Take this example below – where people can click a link to buy the image directly from the article, and also get their own embed links for their use – which will link straight back to your portfolio.

Best of all – how many times have I been thankful for this feature? – you don’t have to worry about the watermarking. I normally post pictures at a small resolution to social media sites and I was worried about uploading the ‘full size’ to PhotoShelter. Luckily it’s easy to set up a customized watermark in whatever style or size that you want. The watermark then automatically gets applied to the photos when other people view them. Your original photos are left untouched, and you don’t have to faff with anything fancy in Photoshop.

There’s also a great write-up by David Calvert on the PhotoShelter blog about customizing your facebook fan page with PhotoShelter slideshows. That tutorial inspired me to set up a facebook fan page for my travel photography (long overdue), and to set up a slideshow on the custom ‘welcome’ page with some of my images. Again – the PhotoShelter system makes everything so customizable that it’s easy to set up a gallery of images that you want to appear in the facebook slideshow, but that you might not want to appear in the list of galleries that people see through your website.

‘Soft’ side of PhotoShelter

I touched on this briefly in my updated PhotoShelter review – it’s not all about the ‘product’ at PhotoShelter – I also get great information from their ‘A Picture’s Worth’ blog, as well as attending their free webinar sessions on anything from monetizing your PhotoShelter galleries to setting up Google Analytics for your site. There’s also the free toolkits that they produce, like the SEO Cookbook for Photographers or a guide to designing websites for Photography Buyers, through to the recent Social Media Guide for Photographers.

All in all, it makes you feel like part of a local community!

In summary…

I use PhotoShelter to:

- Sell signed prints to buyers, who can buy online at any time of the day
- Offer coupons and incentives to buyers
- Keep a secure offsite copy of my most valuable photos
- Market my photos through social media and slideshows using the same source photos
- Integrate the e-commerce needs of my site with my ‘front end’ website and wordpress blog
- Use their free resources – like the toolkits and blog posts…

Yep – I’d recommend to a friend!

Earth Hour 2010 – New York Empire State Building

Tim — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 02:36:42 +0000

I can’t believe that another year has gone by, and another Earth Hour has come around. Earth Hour 2010 took place on 27th March 2010 at 8.30pm local time. It’s the time of year where an increasingly large number of people, businesses, buildings and monuments switch off their lights for an hour…

Last year I wrote about the event in my blog post about Earth Hour NYC. This year I headed back up the Top of the Rock building in New York City to try out a couple of different lenses for the view of the switch-off.

You can learn more about Earth Hour at the Official Earth Hour Site. The idea started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia – but it wasn’t really until last year that I picked up on it when over 4000 cities around the world took part. Going from 371 cities taking part in 2008 to 4000 in 2009, things are looking promising for 2010!

I think I still prefer the photo that I took last year below – the cloud cover seems to add a lot more drama and makes the dark Empire State Building really stand out during Earth Hour, against all the light pollution reflecting back off the clouds.

Other landmarks included in the 2009 switch-off were the Las Vegas Strip, NY’s Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building (above), Chrysler Building, UN headquarters, and Broadway theater marquees, Golden Gate Bridge, Seattle’s Space Needle, Sears Tower, Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratory (the birthplace of the light bulb), the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Acropolis and Parthenon in Athens, St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, Big Ben and Houses of Parliament in London, Paris’ Elysee Palace and Eiffel Tower, Beijing’s Birds Nest and Water Cube, Symphony of Lights in Hong Kong, Sydney’s Opera House and Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro…

The photo above shows someone else braving the freezing cold temperatures on the ‘Top of the Rock’ observation deck. The weather forecast says it’s just above freezing, but with the wind-chill, it soon left me with not much feeling in my fingers! It was a huge difference from last year, where the cloud cover provided some much-wanted warmth. The downside of the cloud cover was that last year everyone only had about 10 minutes to take their photos after the lights went out – the whole thing was then shrouded in thick clouds.

Top picture:
Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/3 sec at f/2.8
ISO 800
45mm (Tilt shift)

Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse, Beagle Channel

Tim — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 03:19:49 +0000

Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse, standing near Ushuaia in the Beagle Channel, Tierra del Fuego in Argentina…

Still operational, the lighthouse is about 10 metres tall and uses solar power to beam out flashes every 10 seconds. Said to be the most photographed lighthouse in South America, boats travel out from Ushuaia to reach the lighthouse which Argentines call ‘The Lighthouse at the End of the World’, or ‘Faro del fin del mundo’.

Everyone who was standing on the deck of the boat as it left the town of Ushuaia soon huddled inside as the temperature dropped and we headed out into the expanse of the Beagle Channel. I managed to stake out a spot outside by the railing of the boat, protecting the camera from the spray until the lighthouse came into view. Fired off a number of shots as we circled the small island, and this was the one that caught my eye.

Ushuaia is commonly regarded as the southernmost city in the world and at times it feels like it – one day of lashing rain, the next of warm sun. It’s also the jumping-off point for expeditions to Antarctica – everyone seems to be in a state of transition, about to head out to the ice, just back from the ice, or just enjoying a Beagle beer…

Canon EOS-5D Mark II (wet)
1/4000 sec at f/2.8
ISO 200
45mm

Perito Moreno Glacier Trek

Tim — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:07:59 +0000

The shot above was taken on the same trip as this other shot of a Tree at the side of the Moreno Glacier. We were about to do the ice-trek and this was taken looking towards the supply hut where we picked up the crampons…

Again, the picture was taken slightly underexposed to bring out the blue in the ice, and the clouds in the sky. I used the tilt shift (45mm) lens again too, focussing on the shard like glacier ice.

If you click on the image above to view the image large, you can see the line of small dots snaking away from the hut, and onto the glacier – that’s the ice-trekking tour people. Gives some idea of the size of the glacier, truly enormous and humbling!

With the glacier moving past the hut (which is on the solid ground to the side of the river of ice) at about 2m per day, the tour guides have new scenery outside their base every day, and no doubt have to re-plan their routes through the ice crevices and pools.

Canon EOS-5D Mark II
1/8000 sec at f/2.8
ISO 100
45mm