I had my first DMT experience a few weeks ago and it was truly awesome! If you don’t know much about this stuff, I recommend a book called “How to Change Your Mind” by Michael Pollan. It’s in my list of books on Kit.com.
Daily Photo – Heading for Dinner on Laucala Island
There are several restaurants at this rather amazing resort. They’re all incredibly beautiful. If you squint a little, you can see a few lights there in the trees just before the islands gets skinny before the peninsula. I took this shot with a drone using that 9-picture panorama Super Zoom option so that it came out to about 10,000 pixels across.
I’m officially adding Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules” to my recommendation list on Kit.com. I first listened to him on a Sam Harris podcast and liked what he had to say. This book is also really good. He makes a few too many Bible references for me, but, even without that, all the stuff he says in there makes a lot of sense. I think I actually may meet this guy one day, and I’m going to ask him why he felt the need to put all these references in the book.
Daily Photo – Amazing Statue in Sanya
Look at the size of this thing! You can see the normal sized Chinese people down at the bottom. I took this with a quad and it was extremely difficult! For one thing, it was extremely windy. Secondly, this was about two miles away from my takeoff location so I was constantly losing the connection with the quad. I had to burn through three batteries before I finally got it out far enough to get this angle that I wanted.
There’s a new podcast kicking about that is made by Derrick Story of Skylum fame. It’s called “The Nimble Photographer” and I was on a recent episode which you can hear here!
In it, we discuss one of my more successful photography based business ideas, including how reading about a stuffed shark led me to working out how a fine art business could succeed.
Daily Photo – Abandoned Ships in the South China Sea
Now I’m not technically sure these are abandoned, but they probably are. This is near Sanya, which is an island off the SE coast of China. I flew my drone over about 50 of these ships and got in close. There was definitely nobody aboard the ships, and they don’t appear to be terribly seaworthy. If anyone else has more info on these, let me know!
Be sure to check out my Kit.com and see the section on books! I wanted to recommend, once again, “How to Change Your Mind” by Michael Pollan. Of all the people I recommend it to, 100% of people come back to me with very interesting thoughts!
Experimenting with a new Photoshop feature…
The 2019 Version of Photoshop has a few new features. I like to play with all this stuff just to keep my brain a bit “plastic” and always trying new things. Most of the features in Photoshop are not that useful to me, but these new content-aware options are pretty slick! Check ’em out!
Here’s one of my new favorite kind of drone photos: a photo of a city where you can’t see the skyline. I like this because you can’t quite work out what city it is. I notice when people look at my portfolio, they are always quite ready to guess (or know) what city it is. Actually, I’d probably be the same way… but now I find it interesting to purposefully confuse people.
It’s about time to update my Burning Man Survival Guide for this year… I just got my tickets and I am so excited!
Daily Photo – Floating Over Wanaka
New Zealand is just covered with all sorts of secret little places like this. You don’t really realize it until you get up with a quad because the trees hide a lot of these cool spots. I’m trying to do a mission where I get the quad up at least once a day to explore some new areas. There’s no excuse with the Mavic 2 because it only takes less than a minute to launch!
I recently visited an amazing place in Fiji called Laucala Island. I’m old friends with the General Manager there and I primarily went there to take photos. But, while there, we decided to add a video to the mix. If you’re a Passport Member, you’ll hear more about the client work agreement that went into this and see how I edit the video. I’ve gone back-and-forth with their marketing team a few times, so I’m trying to make everything perfect for them, being an over-deliver kinda guy like I am!
Quadcopter Tutorial
If you’re a Passport member you also get full access to my all-new Quadcopter tutorial that will hopefully save you countless weeks of trouble, as you learn from all the mistakes I have made! There is a great section at the end about editing video too that I think you’ll enjoy.
I used Screenflow Pro to do all the editing for this video, even though I actually recommend Final Cut or Premiere for more serious videos. Screenflow was just barely strong enough to do all the heavy lifting for this one. Anyway, in this video, you’ll see how I chose to edit and re-organize this video based on client feedback.
I found this place by accident when I was arriving into Venice and trying to find my digs for the Biennale. I now know my way around the confusing town, but it’s really kind of a drain when you are dragging a big bag all around the city with you. Most of the effort is getting up and down over dozens of bridges… and there is always a sinking feeling that you’re going completely the wrong direction and will have to go back over that same bridge again!
Also, don’t forget to check out our epic new quadcopter tutorial that has been extremely popular. I think my favorite part is towards the end where I talk about editing video!
Oh…and for a limited time it is 55% off!
Daily Photo – An Ancient Tea House in Chengdu
Who is tan, chiseled, and pours tea like this? This guy. He had quite a style of pouring tea, I tell ya. I tried to pour tea like this for my kids when I got back home and I made a giant mess while wrenching my back. The kids thought it was really funny, so I guess you can say it had a success of sorts.
We may be having a big contest for Luminar over on Viewbug soon. Stay tuned for details! If you’ve never been over to Viewbug, now is a good time to go sign up and see what they’re up to!
Daily Photo – The Infinity Pool
The only thing missing from this infinity pool is some female with a perfect body in a bikini, right? In a lot of ways, that feels like a very obvious shot, I think. It’s a pretty enough pool on its own I must say. I can also make the case that the scene is more interesting with a person in there. I don’t know… I go back and forth on this. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I both want to put a person in there (male or female), and also I don’t want to because it seems so obvious. This is a nice duality to think about without any conclusion.
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Daily Photo – Sailing into Doubtful Sound
I did a fun overnight trip with Real Journeys into Doubtful Sound. It’s a very difficult fjord to reach because you have to take a series of smaller boats and a bus to actually reach the destination. But, once there, it’s really nice! You’re on a boat with about 30 people or so and you end up eat and sleep on the boat for one evening. The weather was absolutely terrible when we were there, but it did clear up for a few moody shots like this.
Today’s how-to if you’re a Passport Member is how I created this photo out of nine different shots. It was a fun (and relatively easy, actually) one to process. I’m not one of those guys who makes things seem more difficult than they really are! 🙂
Editing a 9-photo panorama with adjustments in LR
In today’s edit, you’ll see how (and why) I took 9 shots from the new Mavic 2 Zoom and made some adjustments in Lightroom before bringing the whole shebang into Aurora. BTW, in case you have a lot of extra money sitting around, you can go check out this resort at Laucala Island.
