HDR Workshop Update

In less than 24 hours, you can register for the HDR Workshop! At last count, after the announcement a few days ago, we had over 130 responses. There are going to be 12 spots available when registrations open, so you’ll have to be fast! Be sure to check back on the HDR Workshop page just after midnight CST on Friday, November 13th (to be exact, in case you are confused by midnight, the midnight between Thursday and Friday!).

Guest Hosting on This Week in Photography – The technique reveal

I was honored to be invited to guest host TWIP on Monday by Frederick Van. There is a live version of the show where perhaps you saw me in video action! If not, now it is available for audio-download. You can get TWIP Episode 115 here. I had a great time – and I thank Joseph, Ron, and Frederick for humoring me… I think I could talk to those guys all day and geek out on photography!

I revealed that video technique which a clever commenter coined “Stuck In Motion“. I put ALL the information there on that link. It should tell you everything, in addition to what you hear on the show. The original video posting gathered over 240 comments, speculation, and more. I think it’s fantastic how people guessed, poked, and prodded. Experimentation is great!

My friend RC Conception chimed into the chat, and I hijacked his question as an opportunity to talk about HDR not being a fad. Hehe… Anyway, you guys should also check out the great RC on Layers TV if you want to learn some new tricks in the Adobe suite of products.

Daily Photo

I’ve always heard about how wonderful it is to have a ranch near the wine country in Argentina. But not until I was down there did I really find that out in person. The idea of walking across a ranch during the nether hours of the day and seeing something like this… well… it kind of makes me want to just go ahead and retire down there. All I need is broadband and these kind of vistas… that’s the life, eh? I hope I was able to adequately capture the majesty of that place with this photo.

Kiva and Stuck In Customs

Today, I am announcing that a percentage of all book profits for “A World in HDR” will go to Kiva. I have written a little bit about Kiva on the Charity page here on the site. Also, I made this little video to tell you what the heck Kiva is. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s probably not what you expect!

To get started, come join Team Stuck In Customs on Kiva and let me know your experiences! You can either put it here or on the Charity page.

I’d like to thank Sloane, who runs the Causemopolotan.com blog, who I met through Michelle Greer, who runs MichellesBlog.net (that links to a recent article she wrote after getting some notions from my reading list! – cool!)

Live Interview Today, Nov 9, on TWIP (This Week in Photography)

Watch LIVE HERE!

At 11 AM PST (1 PM CST), tune in live to the video at Leo Laporte’s TWIT cottage here on live.twit.tv. I won’t be talking about HDR today… I think that is being saved for a future interview when the book comes out. However, I will be talking about that video method I used to make the “Moments Between” video.

Come tune in Live and send Tweets along the way to @frederickvan! If you miss it, you’ll have to wait for it to be released on Wednesday! Don’t let that happen!

Daily Photo – The River Runs Through the Andes

Our daily photo today comes from deep in the Andes. Getting to this position was not as long a hike as the others around Patagonia, but it was no cakewalk! It was one of those strange river-rock strewn areas where the rocks seemed to be the perfect size for spraining your ankles. I had the tripod extended to act like a walking stick, although it’s not the most handy walking stick with a giant Nikon on one end of it!

The River Runs Through the Andes

Photo Information

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• Date Taken2020-07-10 09:16:10
• CameraNIKON D3X
• Camera MakeNikon
• Exposure Time2
• Aperture22
• ISO50
• Focal Length16.0 mm
• FlashNo Flash
• Exposure ProgramAperture-priority AE
• Exposure Bias+2

This was a hard spot to reach!

It was quite a hike to get up here early in the morning, just as the sky was still in a dawn of deep blue. The two lakes on either side are those pure glacial blue lakes that you sometimes see from airplanes and wonder, “What’s it like to be down there?” I’ll tell ya – AWESOME! I went down there and drank from the lakes like a guanaco on holiday. It was incredible.

Now, a few days ago I started to “Connect the Community“. There are so many clever and interesting people in the community, and I thought you should meet on another! Anyway, it’s really taken off and people from the community are taking it in nice new directions – thanks!

It seems a great many of you are on Twitter, and many of us have created a “Stuck In Customs” group in Tweetdeck or Lists in Twitter. This enables me to sit there and watch/engage in a real-time stream of community activity. It’s cool! I updated that post with a 4-step guide on the creation of this real-time community. It’s very loosey-goosey… as any fun community is! Come in, engage, stay a while… drift off… create… come back and share… drift off… comon back… it’s good and natural!

(and our experiment with a Real-Time Community continues…)

This thing is enormous. In grinds and churns as it follows the sun. The metallic petals flex and bend with the light as the sun sweeps across the sky. I had never seen anything like it in my life.

It sits in a park and public walking area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. I walked around it for a while to get a good angle of the monster. My tripod was stuck in customs, so I had to do this one handheld… and do my best to keep the camera as stead as a T-1000.

In less than 24 hours, I will endeavor to introduce a new type of photography to you guys. I don’t have a name for it. It’s experimental. You’ll have to help me come up with a good name for the technique. People that get the Newsletter (it’s free!) will get a sneak peak tomorrow a little early.

While in Argentina, I wish I had more days in Buenos Aires, but I made the most of what i could. This usually involves waking up very early and going to sleep very late. It gets a little hard after a few days, but I get into “content acquisition mode”, and I try not to make excuses for sleep!

Many parts of Buenos Aires are very colorful and fun. I’m not sure how all these individual tenants get together to decide on colors, but they end up looking kinda cool, even with minimal coordination. I guess the guy on the left there just thought, “I’ll paint my wall orange”, and then he did it, and it just looks cool. It kind of reminds me of how rappers can put on the craziest hat in the world and it still looks pretty cool on them. I don’t get it. I only look cool in one kind of hat – a baseball cap (with a mild tone).

Sorry about the long gap in posting! You know my promise to you is a photo every day, 365 days a year. This is a promise I break several times a year, so it’s hardly a promise. But, yesterday just happened to be one of those days.

Whenever I don’t post, it usually means I am traveling somewhere EXTREMELY remote that has no hint of internet. Those places are fewer and farther between nowadays! …but at least I’m getting some good stuff for y’all!

Today’s photo is from a forgotten field in the south of Argentina, not too far from Ushuaia. There was a housing community near here that was built then abandoned when the lake level started to rise. It was full of old husks of structures that were still beautiful in their own way (and doubly so at sunset).

There were 6 of us, which is more or less the optimum number for a good campaign. I was the only Reaganite-capitalist among the five Soviet interlopers. I think, if we broke down people by personality and skillsets, we had a warrior, a shaman, a monk, a bard, and two clerics.

This guy, Vulva, would have been the monk. I’m not sure how to spell his name for sure, but he did respond to the word “Vulva”, if you put a little “w” sound with the “v”. Remember how Chekov was looking for the nuclear wessels? It was something like that. I say that Vulva was the monk of the group because his fingers and wrists were richly festooned with all sorts of Buddhist paraphernalia that he had picked up while in Tibet. He’s the sort of guy that would be really intimidating if it wasn’t for his kindness and zen peace.

Behind him are the Andes on the southern tip of Argentina.

We started the hike before the sun came up. It was really cold, so I was dressed in layers. People always give you very silly advice. Actually, whenever anyone tells me to “dress in layers”, I always find it very condescending! Why is that? I don’t know why that bothers me. I mean, OF COURSE dress in layers. Oh, you mean, if I get too hot, I can just take off a layer? Oh, brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that? Well… This is a concept everyone is already familiar with, so whenever anyone tells you to “dress in layers”, try not to let it annoy you as much as it does me.

Anyway, after removing many layers, since I was burning hot after the first five minutes from carrying 50 lbs of camera equipment over the Andes, we stopped at this mountain lake to relax and have a quick lunch. It was a good chance to drop off the bag, put together my camera and tripod, then break it all down again, repack, and get back on the hike.

Also, we have a fun new features opening today on the site. It’s a great and simple way for you to share photos on Facebook, Twitter, Email, or IM. You can probably see it when you mouseover a photo… I think it will be a good way for regular viewers to easily share the photos with their friends and family! Below is a short video showing how to use it (even though it’s pretty dang simple!). Again, the more you share, the better it is for the site… so thanks again, very much!

There are parts of Buenos Aires that are not too safe to walk around by yourself.  This part was not so bad, but there were several abandoned stores around, including this Harrods.  I was surprised to see such a nice store in a state of disrepair, especially after visiting its Valhalla-like anchor in London.

Out front, there was a man playing the violin alone.  It echoed around in a strange way through the acoustics of the tile, the roof, and the lonely streets.  There was a Argentine rhythm he mixed into his playing that really made me feel like I was in a different place.

I didn’t get enough sunsets in BA, but I tried to make the most of what I had!  This picturesque park was enormous.  And I mean enormous.  We walked for miles before finding our final destination, which we made it to just in the nick of time.  The parks of Buenos Aires were pretty much what I imagined… the Argentineans stroll around parks with a certain sense of style.  It’s hard to explain…but kinda cool.

Also, Jim Austin has written a nice article about HDR for Apogee Photo Magazine entitled “Symphony in a Moment: HDR Nature Photography from Eight Maestros”. Very nice of him to call me a maestro – not sure I deserve that! The photo he included (“A Razor to the Sky”) I have put below… of that amazing mountain range called Fitz Roy. The way to catch that orange-pink morning light was to hike up another mountain in pitch-black conditions. It was certainly worth it, traversing the icy crest, catching that glimpse of the sun coming over the horizon of the Andes.