Today’s Passport Sunday how-to-video is from Chengdu, China. I do a rather aggressive edit today, as you’ll see! Either way, here are some of my other favorite photos from Chengdu.
Here’s a RATHER extreme HDR treatment! I don’t usually go this whole hog, but this place had such a Communist dystopian feel that I decided to go for it anyway! I hope you enjoy 🙂
Here is one of my favorite recent interviews with Leo Laporte!
I stayed in a hotel that was kind of in a “boring” area near Shinjuku. It was all office buildings and kind of dull. But it was only a ten-minute walk over to the more intense part of Shinjuku, which is the most Blade Runner area of Tokyo. On the way, you begin to walk over a bridge and things suddenly start to come alive. This is the first scene I saw each night as my son and I walked into the city.
If you have the new photography tutorial I released a few days ago, then you’ll really love the lessons about People and Street Photography. In those, you get to see how I edited this photo! Here’s a promo of the new tutorial!
Here’s one of my favorite “street” photos from Madagascar. There are all kinds of colorful little shops and interesting people in every nook and cranny. I was particularly taken with this guy who would spend all day fixing the array of mobile phones in front of him.
This is a pretty cool video that shows entropy and order in syncopation.
Osaka is one of the most underrated cities in the world! When people think about going to Japan, they think mostly about Tokyo. Hey, I mean, Tokyo is amazing, but it’s also worth it to jump on the bullet train and get over to Osaka. The nightlife is really quite unique and it’s fun to wander around and go into random restaurants and bars to see what is going on. It’s a good goal to try to visit five different places per night and not get stuck in one spot or another. It’s tough because each place you go into is so fun and interesting that you don’t want to leave!
I recently returned from spending about a month in Africa (Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar) and each country had completely different photography situations. So it’s not just about travel photography, but it touches on pretty much everything in the seven lessons that include packing and equipment, landscape photography, HDR, People and portraits, wildlife, mobile photography, and street photography.
If you get the bonus edition, then you’ll also see how I organize my photos and handle DAM (Digital Asset Management) in addition to getting a copy of all the photos I share in all the lessons.
As well as all the tech talk, there is quite a bit of inspiration and philosophy about travel and life embedded into the story-telling. There seems to be an increasing segment of my audience that is interested in how a creative life can also be a more zen, present, and loving life. Some people get that; others are somewhere on a path of self-discovery through creative arts.
As usual, if you’re not super-thrilled, I’ll give you all your money back! So, there’s nothing to lose and a lot to gain
Grab it now and begin downloading immediately!
Lesson 1 – Welcome! The Game Plan and Mind Vitamins
Lesson 2 – Packing + Equipment and Travel to Botswana
Lesson 3 – Wildlife photography, Lightroom Basics, Processing, Collections
Lesson 4 – People and Portrait Photography
Lesson 5 – Wildlife Photography and Photoshop Basics
Lesson 6 – Landscape and HDR Photography
Lesson 7 – Mobile and Street Photography
This is one of the most incredible resorts in the world! There are several restaurants on property, and this one is out on this beautiful little connection between the main island and a peninsula. They are beautiful from the ground level, but they look even more epic from a quadcopter.
Have you ever checked out Nomad List? It’s a great site for digital nomads that are homeless and like exploring the world… it’s an amazing site. I am using it to possibly find a cool area in Thailand.
Every Winter here in Queenstown, there is a mini-Burning Man. Well, it’s a bit more like a Freezing Man because it’s usually below zero! My friend Duncan is part of the planning committee and he’s a fellow burner like me. It was such a transformative experience in his life that he wanted to bring as much of the experience to Queenstown as possible. There are a lot of art installations, performances, and all sorts of things to entertain.
Man, I absolutely love this Sony 24-105mm lens. It absolutely rocks. It only goes down to F/4, and you would think, “Hmmm, that’s not too impressive!” But, hey, look at that bokeh! That out-of-focus zone in the front and back is perfect… I could not ask for anything more. Well done, you crazy-smart optics engineers at Sony! 🙂
Today we have another how-to video for Passport Sunday Members! It joins the hundreds of others that are in there waiting for you to discover them! In today’s video, I work with a panorama of a beautiful vineyard near Picton, New Zealand.
As much as I love Aurora HDR, it still has a few problems that you have to correct with Photoshop. It’s less than 1% of the time, but this is one of those cases!
The FedEx website for Passport Renewal is incredibly deceptive. It APPEARS Fedex does everything for the prices in the photo below BUT:
1) All FedEx does is forward you to a third party where you fill out forms
2) I have to print out everything myself (I would expect my packet to be ready and waiting at FedEx)
3) That $349 does not include the actual cost of the renewal, which is about another $200. I saw that after filling out all the forms on a third party site and was wondering, correctly, “hmmm, well is that included in the $249 I already paid?
4) This third-party site has not gotten back to me in 2 days… either via email (immediately after filling out the forms) or phone. I’ve sent one email and left two phone messages.
5) All FedEx provides is an ENVELOPE. Oh, and Passport photos, which you have to pay extra for.
It’s this kind of stuff that makes me not trust big US businesses. Super shady, FedEx. Now that I have been able to unravel everything and figure out what is going on, it’s too late for me to renew my passport before I go back to New Zealand.
As a customer, when I go to FedEx to use their Passport Renewal service, I expect:
1) FedEx to prepare the entire package for me, including:
2) To pay once. They can sort out splitting that into a cashier’s check for the government.
3) To fill out everything online without signing into a third party website (they use GovWorks).
4) After I fill everything out, they print it out at branch where I will show up with my Passport for renewal.
5) I walk in, hand them my Passport (and if I need Passport photos, they were included in the price), and they pop it in an envelope and say thank you.
I mean, right?
Last, it’s totally unclear who I ask for a refund. FedEx apparently forwarded most of my money to this third party, and they kept the money for the envelopes. Oh man…
I called up and I ended up talking to a lady at “Passport Center.” I said, “Wait, is this FedEx?”
She said, “No, this is Passport Center.”
I said, “What is that? Is this the government?”
She said, “No, is there a problem with your passport sir?”
I was very confused and said, “Wait, you say this is ‘Passport Center’, but I started at the FedEx website, which forwarded me to a website called ‘GovWorks.com’, and then I got an email receipt from ‘RushMyPassport’ – what the heck is going on over there?”
She said, “It’s all very simple. We’re a sister company with FedEx.”
I said, somewhat exasperated, “Are you all sister companies? Oh never mind, I don’t actually care. Anyway, it’s taken you, or one of your sister companies, over 2 days to get back to me. I don’t think I can make my flight anymore, so I need a refund.”
She asked, “Where are you going?”
I said, dumbfounded, “Why does THAT matter? Let’s say the MOON via North Korea.”
Finally, I rushed through this pedantic conversation and she said she would send me another form to fill out for a refund. I was like, omg. I said, maybe you should tell one of your four sister companies to change its name to KindaRushMyPassport.com.
Also, look at how there is a timer up there on the top right to pressure you to buy, as if they are really limited on reservations like a hotel that is running out of rooms. Sketchy, Fedex, really sketchy.
This was my last day in New York, so I was trying to be the absolute last person to leave The Vessel. It was such an amazing structure that I tried to squeeze every last photo out of that place, I tried a bunch of different lenses, but a place like this is really screaming for a super wide-angle lens. I almost wish I had my fish-eye with me… oh well… I’ll have to go back! 🙂
This might be the best guy I’ve ever seen!
This guy has serious talent one of my favorite videos of all time from videos
Rene is definitely a climber and a jumper. In Africa, if a baboon could climb it, then he was pretty sure he could too. It made me quite nervous, actually… I’m not personally scared of heights, but I mostly don’t want to watch other people do that stuff… especially when they are your friends!
