All being well, when this blog post goes live I’ll be trying to waste some time in Vancouver airport after a 14hr flight from Sydney. Hopefully the next flight is on-time-ish or it’ll be a looooong day!
Here is a little chunk from one of the special animated creations for the recent drop on OpenSea.
I’m hardly a cruise expert, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on various cruise line
This Disney cruise was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I was dreading it because I thought the hundreds of kids would drive me nuts, but it wasn’t even a bother. Really! It was just a wonderful all around trip, and we all felt very happy here on the last day as we pulled into Vancouver Port at the end.
I just did this yesterday and decided to record it with Google Glass. I wish I had this for my Ethan when I taught him about five years ago!
I actually liked this photo so much I made it my new background, but I change it out at least a few times per week. How often do you change yours? (your wallpaper, that is)
By the way, you are of course welcome to grab any of my photos and use them as background photos. Just pop through to the SmugMug site and select Download. Enjoy! 🙂
I’ve only taken two Disney cruises, but I’ve developed one good habit. Note it is only one. Anyway, it is getting up around 4 AM on the last day to take photos as we roll into port. I woke up extra early and took out both my cameras (the NEX 7 and 6) to collect as many photos as I could. I took a ton! In fact, I blew through an entire card and had to pop in a backup!
We got to see a ton of whales on this cruise – probably at least 15 or so. I was kind of excited about getting a whale photo until I realized how hard it really is. Man, shooting whales has to be one of the hardest jobs in the world… I think all those great whale photos were made by somebody much more patient than me. Maybe this is why I like landscape photography more than animal photography. I don’t have that waiting-on-animals-patience that others seem to have. Maybe patience is the wrong word… maybe it’s discipline. Or some combination. Either way, objectively, I don’t think I have much of either when it comes to animals.
Here’s another handheld shot from the on board the Disney Cruise I just enjoyed with my family. I’ve never been out on so many shoots in a week without taking my tripod! It forced me to do even more testing of the Photomatix auto-align, and it continued to do an amazing job. Even though my three shots were horribly misaligned with the NEX-7, the final result still came out perfectly sharp.
Haha this made my kids laugh when it appeared in the local paper. So, I now live in a small town of like 30,000 people here in Queenstown. I love it, of course, but I’m just not used to the smallish-town nature of it… that is actually why I like it! So the Mountain Scene, which is the local newspaper, sent a nice guy (Paul Taylor) over to my home to interview me. I guess he found me to be “charismatic”! hehe… anyway… most people that come to the blog a lot already know most of this stuff, but thought you’d like to see and maybe read a bit more… You can download the PDF yourself to catch up on all the local news on the Mountain Scene page — get the August 8, 2013 edition.
Here’s another photo from our family trip to visit the fjords of Alaska. We got in pretty close to this glacier. Any closer can get a bit scarier… but it was lovely sitting in this spot, watching the ice float around in a smooth brownian motion…
After using the NEX-7 during the daytime countless times off the edge of the boat, I’m now less tripod-centric for daytime shots. I don’t shoot a lot during the day, but now when I do, I’m going to not worry so much about whether or not I have a tripod. Auto-align is so good now in Photomatix… it makes me so happy. I still use a tripod a lot in low-light conditions, but it was great to shoot a bunch from the ship so I could become more comfortable with this camera in these conditions.
I stood on the edge of the ship as we weaved in and out of the great Alaskan fjords. This is my first time ever sailing through fjords like this (other than just one fjord in New Zealand), so it was really cool to see not only the landscape, but how the steep mountains moved and pulled the clouds into different shapes.
We had an incredible lunch down below at the restaurant in the Four Seasons. Here is a very silly family video we filmed… we decided to play this fun game called Space Team while waiting on our food… and, well… anyway, now you get to see a little nonsense of the family activity! 🙂
What a view! We spent the whole evening atop the hotel taking photos. Every angle was interesting, but I thought this one was perhaps the most enticing. If you end up getting a room there, be sure to ask for one that has a view of the water so that you can see something like this. I love Vancouver and can’t wait to come back… and I’ll stay here at the Four Seasons next time too… the service was amazing!
I’ve been back into my David Lynch movies lately… what are your favorites? I actually watched all of Twin Peaks too. I wish he would make another TV series… I think the TV world needs him! 🙂
This was one of the many bars on board the Disney Cruise. While this one was the coolest-looking, it was actually the most boring. I went in there one night to read and relax with Tina and something about the place just sucked all the energy out of us! There as a piano player and stuff… but man, this was the most low-key energy blackhole I’ve ever been in. And then, I thought, well, maybe I was just tired anyway. So I walked in there another night, and once again I felt a huge weight on me… I know that sounds like the strangest thing in the world.
I’m seeing a lot of reports of the Google-Android tablets really becoming a lot more popular. I do have one of the new Nexus 7’s — they are truly great. But the rest of the family still has iPads… so I am kind of on the fence right now. If you use a lot of google services and use the major apps, then the Nexus is the way to go. One thing I still like about the iPads is for the kids… there seem to be more/better apps on the iPad, but I think that advantage won’t last long. What do you think?
Wow we got some great sunsets during those late Alaskan nights! When I looked out across the sea, there were so many kinds and temperatures of moisture, so that must have contributed… there was the cold ocean, warm mists, rolling fogs, low and high clouds, plus a mixture of a lot of moisture in the atmosphere. All together, it made for a great cocktail of prisms for the light.
