Miami is a pretty cool place to shoot because it’s an interesting-looking city and there is a ton of water around to get all sorts of shots. I set this one up to be a bit of a longer exposure to smooth out the water and give the clouds a bit of a trippy effect. And, then, of course, adding a little HDR makes it even better!
Here’s the first Machine Elf creation where I layer in a beautiful meditation from Mooji, one of my favorites at the art of a good mind-freeing session. Mooji is always quite relaxing and can help you stay zen when life gets a little too much. This is one of the more organic creations that is based on some different hidden symbology I’ve seen here in New Zealand.
A few years ago I decided to walk the Camino with Kevin Kelly and a great group of people. On day one, we assembled here in Portugal right by the bridge that crosses into Spain. We had not even gotten started yet, and then we all decided to take a rest! 🙂 The walk may have had more talking and resting than walking, and that’s okay with me too!
It’s always a treat to be in a helicopter flying over New Zealand. It takes me right back to feeling like a kid, looking out the window of an airplane to see all the big things in the world made tiny. When flying over the Southern Alps here, you come across hundreds of little perfect lakes like this. They’re all totally empty and it makes me want to go camp at all of them.
Every morning we would head out to this beach along the coast of the north island of New Zealand to catch the sunrise. It was always calm and quiet, but the best sunrises seemed to come around after a cool morning rain shower.
Every Sunday you get a new how-to video and today’s is a pretty cool one from China. You can always unlock it if you are a Passport Member and you’ll get access to another 200+ videos as well. Enjoy!
In this video, you’ll see how I HDR the three base shots in Aurora and then how I use Photoshop to make a few final edits to make the bridge look bigger (relatively) and use vignetting to bring focus to the bridge itself.
While I was working on this video for today’s Passport Sunday, I was convinced this bridge was in Chengdu. But now maybe I think it’s in Tianjin. It totally doesn’t matter, but I’m amazed at how so many Chinese cities blend together in my mind. Many of them have cool bridges like this. I don’t know. I guess it is Tianjin. Or maybe even Beijing, but probably not. Who cares, it’s a cool bridge and I think it would be pretty cool to live inside of a bridge.
I don’t know if that is the official name of this building in Beijing, but that’s what everyone calls it. The building is actually incredibly cool and there are no bad photos of it. I’ve never been inside, but I reckon it’s pretty amazing as well. It’s too bad this place is so far from the old city, so you’re basically stuck in a car in traffic for at least an hour each way just to visit it.
Singapore is a fairly miserable city to walk around in during the daytime to take photos, unless you just love getting incredibly sweaty. There’s no “quick” photo actually because you end up getting soaked in about 15 minutes. So, as long as I’ll be getting sweaty, I choose to stay out for a few hours and just get pretty disgusting all around.
We stopped here for a quick re-fuelling before heading off to look over Milford Sound in the falling light. We were quite lucky the weather was so clear because big rains and storms can roll in here any time but in any case, our pilot wasn’t too worried as he told us that his chopper was faster than a storm.
These sorts of situations are perfect for a strong HDR treatment. I am always impressed by the way some interior designers choose to decorate and light their interior spaces. When you really crank up the HDR, it gives it a bit of a “fantasy” feel where you are not sure if it is real or make-believe. I like the tension between what is real and what is not real.
If you’re a Passport Member then today you’ll get to see how I made the daily photo. This is one of my shorter videos, but you can see how easy it is to create a photo with this look.
In today’s video, you’ll see I do a fairly extreme HDR treatment, but I think this photo deserves that. I feel quite lucky that the moon was out and in the right place!
On my first night here, they prepared an amazing dinner for me upon arrival. I was really lucky the moon was out and was so bright. This is one of my favorite situations for HDR where there is a mix of natural and artifical light.
