Thanks Christchurch!

I very much enjoyed the photowalk and talk yesterday. Everyone was genuinely nice and engaged. I got a bunch of good questions. People in NZ were even nicer than I expected! I look forward to seeing the Flickr group for the event…and perusing people’s shots! Feel free to post it below!

Daily Photo – The Flying Buttress

I mentioned during the photowalk tonight this effect of the wide-angle lens. Whenever you aim it above the horizon, everything leans in a bit. Now, I occasionally get negative comments that think that this “leaning” looks bad, unprofessional, and unrealistic. I have to disagree! It doesn’t bother me a bit. My eye adjusts, and, well, I think it just looks cool.

The church below is from Dresden, Germany.  I am 98% sure of this… I don’t know why I am having trouble remembering…  I think I am getting old.  I did have to wake up at 5 AM to go to the bathroom last night… a bad sign.

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a place like this? I like these old European streets where great restaurants line edges… Let’s all move there… we can just go out and dine on the streets every night, eat fab food, see street performers, talk about photography, geek out, etc etc. Yes that sounds quite wonderful.

As you can see, I left in the HDR ghosting. Sometimes I quite like it, especially in these scenes where there is motion and feel like that’s part of the gestalt. I think these sorts of words are okay to use, even when not standing on a German street.

I am very appreciative to all the eyes out there scouring the intertubes! I had a nice girl who gave me the heads up on someone using images without permission. Her name is Shannon, and you can see her Flickr stream here. Thanks Shannon 🙂

This is something so many European cities seem to have… a nice cobblestoned area in an old part of the city where people just mill around from wine to dinner to gelato to aimless wandering about. I think these areas are always full of life and excellent for people-watching. Often times, this is why I don’t mind being by myself in these foreign places… it’s very nice to sit back and just analyze people as they come and go.

This was shot in the middle of Dresden when there was just a few degrees of sunlight left behind the old church. Once things get too black in the sky, I usually pack up the tripod and then head to the best looking gelato place I had surveyed earlier in the day.

Thanks again for all the feedback on the newsletter yesterday! We should get all of this cleaned up and ready for the first release sometime within the next two weeks or so… I hope your expectations aren’t TOO high… although I’ll do my best of course. Right now I think we’ll have links to two new reviews that the newsletter crowd can check out for a few days before they are publicly linked.

These old trains in Europe are always cool. I can’t imagine how incredibly heavy they are. All that cast iron just looks like it might create its own gravitational force. I like looking at all the machinery and piping and stuff. I’m the first to admit that I don’t know a dang thing about trains, but I do like looking at them.

I visited a train museum also while I was in Dresden. It was really interesting looking at all the tiny inventions that had been deprecated and forgotten over time. They would have extremely specialized tools that would only do one thing for a technology that only lasted a short time. Some of these things must have weighed several tons, and the only task it could perform is maybe a mounting harness for a cast iron part that only fit one sort of train that was only in service for a few years. It was a cool museum. I guess it is kind of a guy thing… it must have been, since I didn’t even see another woman in the whole place!

For those interested, I was recently interviewed by Jim Goldstein about photography, HDR, and the like on “EXIF and Beyond”. You can hear the podcast here.

Whenever I am Europe, I have more snacks than my 3-year-old in the US every day.  I can’t believe how much my daughter eats.  I don’t know where it all goes.  She is like a tardis and has the metabolism of the entire Chinese gymnastics team.

This was shot in the streets of Dresden.  I had just grabbed a snack to carb up before the upcoming sunset.  These sunsets are supposed to be relaxing, but I had to hot-foot it around from location to location to squeeze it all into the hour.

Dresden had beautiful building after beautiful building!  They were just all lined up, waiting to be photographed.  As blind luck would have it, a storm had just ripped through, leaving this incredible purple sunset.  Well, heck, I guess I don’t have to tell you… since you can just look below and see! 🙂

And any of you in the Austin area that are coming tonight to my talk and tutorial (it’s free and you don’t have to be a mac user – more info here), be sure to come over and say hello! 🙂  Don’t be shy — I’d be happy to meet you in person!

These are the venerated ones! Their grisly visages encased in dark oil paints to keep this part of the inner cloister feeling rather dismal.

I looked and did not see a lot of women up there at all. I also didn’t see any heiro-clergy holding a fluffy white cat like a Bond villain. That would have made my day… but, alas… nothing quite so interesting as all of them solemnly looking across the way at one another, and down at whoever has scuttled in on their knees.

As night was falling in Dresden, I moved from location to location around the city to chronicle the changing light conditions across the old buildings…

This is one of the most famous churches in Dresden that was bombed to bits in WWII. When it was rebuilt just recently, they reused some of the old burned black bricks in the construction. If you look close, you can still see them in there on occasion.

This comes from my photography tutorial, located here!

I never thought East Germany would be such a great place for photography. There were a ton of places for good photos and it was all a bit overwhelming… It was nice to take breaks on occasion for some hearty German snacks to keep my carbs at manageable levels.