Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Friday, June 16, 2017
Throwable Camera Creates 360-Degree Panoramic Images
Another old post that has been sitting around, unpublished, for five or six years...
Throwable Camera Creates 360-Degree Panoramic Images:
http://mashable.com/2011/10/25/throwable-ball-camera
'via Blog this'
Monday, May 15, 2017
Tin or Copper? Why Your Camera Does Not Matter!
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| Sun on Camera One Day On Earth: 12.12.12 Folsom, California. December 12, 2012. 4:27 PM http://www.aflitt.com/onedayonearth2012 © A. F. Litt, 2012 |
In a photography group, someone was wondering about gear for an upcoming shoot:
Every time I get a great meal in a great restaurant I demand to know what brand of pots they use, what brand of knives, what brand or type of sharpener they use to sharpen those knives, because I can't enjoy my meal until I know that it has been made with the absolutely best, newest stuff on the market.
And I've been fooled! I, a few times, liked a dinner and then found out they were a small, new restaurant who used sub-par cookware!
Oh, that was humiliating! Tin, not copper! Tin! I felt like, not even an amateur, worse! I felt like a pretender for enjoying those meals. I should have known better!
But it was on them, not me, and boy, I told everyone I knew never to eat there after I got fooled into liking those places' food like that!
And boy howdy, did people know that I knew my stuff after that and I am pretty sure no one ever took those so called chefs, fake chefs, seriously ever again.
Seriously... Gear is nothing but a gatekeeper used by the insecure to keep their egos protected.
If you can't shoot great with the low end, you can't shoot great with the high end.
Get the best you can comfortably get on your budget and shoot your soul out! It will be fantastic!
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
Lower Falls, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
Lower Falls, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
Lookout Point. Yellowstone National Park. July 31, 2014.
Copyright © 2014 A. F. Litt, All Rights Reserved
Photo of the day by A. F. Litt: September 9, 2014
The North Rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was our first stop in the park since we were camping at the Canyon Campground. It was morning and not too crazy busy yet, but still 17 people got this same shot from the same location in the 10 minutes we were there…
This brings up an issue I’ve struggled with on these types of shots, in these types of locations…
The scene is magnificent, the locations from which to shoot are limited, everyone there is taking the same picture, and even a quick look at Google Earth reveals that hundreds and thousands of people are taking essentially the same picture every year, every day even!
So, as a photographer, do you try to go for some crazy, unique angle or just stick with the basic, classic shot? Every day the weather and conditions are different, every few minutes the light changes the scene in subtle ways… We’re really not taking the same pictures over and over and over again, there are minute variations in style, technique and subject, sure, but how many untrained eyes are ever really going to be able to tell the difference?
Another complication in these locations is an issue of basic courtesy. In tourist mode, I am not comfortable setting up in the prime spot for even five minutes, planning out my shot, setting up my stabilization, taking test shots, taking real shots… all the while a line of people is forming up behind me until they are beating me over the head with their dSLRs, point-and-shoots, and smart phone cameras until I cede the position and let them in. I am trying to get in and out, showing 
basic courtesy to my fellow humans, and trying to be out of the spot in less than a minute. Sure, if I was coordinating with the NPS on the shoot, if I was on location in some sort of official capacity, I could take all the time I needed, but that is a different story entirely… Then I’d have access to different locations, which is my usual solution to these dilemmas, so the whole issue would resolve itself.
Living next to the Columbia River Gorge, I have to deal with this issue all most every week. Do I go for the classic shots, or do I go for the “creative” shots? For now, more often then not, I am choosing the classic shots. These are spectacular places and I like to let them speak for themselves.
Later, on my 20th visit to the same locations, by then I am branching out more and reaching for the more creative compositions, positions, and angles, but this is after I’ve got my sharp shot of Multnomah Falls, my slow shot, my icy shot, my summer shot, my fall shot, my long classic shot, my close classic shot, a great landscape orientation on each, a great portrait orientation on each… Then, if I am working for different clients on different projects, then I need to go get a new classic shot like this, a new classic shot like that… Suddenly, all those classic shots are adding up to a lot of work over many different seasons, over several different years. And these are the “classic shot” variations of just one subject in just one location… So how standard and redundant, really, is this basic, classic shot in the first place?
When I was younger, I was more focused on getting the “fancy” shots in these sorts of locations, the unique shots, but quite often I spent so much time trying to force my own small portion of creativity upon some amazing work of God and Nature that, just in its own existence, so far transcends the greatest artistic notions of even the most talented of men, that I ended up not getting the basic shots at all, the ones that succeeded in getting me out of the way and allowing the story of the place to tell itself.
And when dealing with some of the most photographed locations in the world, up to thousands of pictures a day for well over a hundred years, am I really going to come up with that one in a million shot that has never been taken before, one that brings a whole new perspective on the location or am I going to get something that feels a little forced, like I 
am trying a little too hard to be unique, and walking away with something that ends up not telling the story of the place at all?
There is a balance to all of this, of course. Sometimes those more unique shots just scream out to be taken, and I shoot them. Still, this summer, in tourist mode, not pro photo mode, for the most part I stuck to the basics. Because if I want to hang a great classic shot of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone on my wall, I’d rather it be one I took, not one someone else took, and to me, that pretty much resolves the debate. At least, it does for myself. I am not going to be back in these locations for quite some time, if ever, and I want to make sure that I am capturing the spectacular beauty of these places and not just trying to prove to myself that I am a unique, out of the box, creative talent.
Sometimes art happens only when you are pushing the envelope, but at other times, it requires us pulling back a bit and letting the scene speak for itself. With some of these places, nature is trying to tell us a story, to show us something, and the reason we see the same shots over and over again is because this is what nature wants us to see over and over again, and I personally do not have a problem with that.
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Friday, August 15, 2014
Re-launching my “photo of the day” with the 2014 vacation photos…
Kennewick 9/11 Memorial
Kennewick, Washington. July 29, 2014
Copyright © 2014 A. F. Litt, All Rights Reserved
I’ve been thinking about starting up the photo of the day again, and since I have over 3,000 new photos from our family vacation this summer, it seems like a good time to start.
I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, since I feel like I am not working on much photography these days. Sure, I’ve spent the summer running through a bunch of event photos, and I’ve been slogging through hundreds of photos for the Recreating the Historic Columbia River Highway documentary project, but these are not really what I would consider artistic, fine arts style photos, which is what I want to focus on a little more with the resumed photo of the day.
I feel like I’ve been neglecting my photography a bit and I think trying to take a few minutes to publish one decent, somewhat artistic photo every day would help keep focused on my photography a bit more than I have been for the last six months or so.
This is not to say that I haven’t been taking lots of pictures, but it is to say that most of the pictures I’ve been taking have been quick and dirty shots from events, or the survey style work on the old highway, and the focus on the art of photography is sacrificed somewhat in those environments.
Today, I am posting two pictures. I decided to start with Yellowstone and threw one up of Riverside Geyser earlier, but then I decided to start with one photo from each day of the trip.
Neither of these are among the best shots from the two week trek across the country, but I like the one below for sentimental reasons and the one above is probably the best shot from the only location I took pictures of on the 29th, which was a travel day.
The monument is built with steel from the WTC. It is partially melted and this memorial is pretty amazing. It’s the first time I’ve seen anything like this in person, and we hit it at a nice time of day, too. I’ll probably throw a picture up later on showing more detail, but I wanted to start with the wide view of the whole thing.
Like I said, not that exciting of a photo, but was an interesting and touching place to start off our trip with…
Riverside Geyser
Upper Geyser Basin. Yellowstone National Park. August 2, 2014
Copyright © 2014 A. F. Litt, All Rights Reserved
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Wednesday, March 12, 2014
The Barbarians at the Gate: In the Digital Age, Is Photography a Trade or an Art?
Yes, the "barbarians" are at the gate! Run, hide, and feel insecure about your craft!
The following was in my email this morning. I didn’t really want to take the time today to write a long post, but I’ve had some thoughts on this subject brewing in my head for a while now and seeing this article this morning brought it all together for me.
So, here we go…
First, a clip from a post on the MCP Actions blog on the terrifying photo below...
MCP Thoughts on editing photography images:
I had posted this image on the MCP Facebook Page in February showcasing our newest Lightroom presets (InFusion and Illuminate). I never expected to hear anything except, “cute kids” or “how did you do that?” or “great save.” No laws were being broken. No kids were harmed. It was an image that was not exposed properly. That’s it!
Instead, I had angry photographers blame me for all kinds of “crimes,” such as:
- Ruining the photography industry
- Teaching people to fix images in Lightroom or Photoshop so they do not need to learn their cameras
- Helping new photographers undercut experienced pros
- Showing images from people who have no business being photographers
And well, the list was longer than that but you get the idea…
Wow. …though anyone with any familiarity at all with the current state of the photography industry will recognize these reactions immediately. Fear is the driving force in the trade right now.
Of course, I am sympathetic to those who currently make a living from photography, especially those with families to support who feel their livelihood threatened, but I am also realistic about the changes the digital age is bringing not just to photography, but to all of the arts, and in many ways these changes are creating the sort of conditions in the photography world that have existed in the other artistic trades all along.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
First Nations of the Gorge: Columbia Gorge Discovery Center Photo Archive
Since I will be taking part in a photo shoot with a Native American theme in the Gorge this weekend, I thought I'd share some historical photos...
Columbia Gorge Discovery Center Photo Archive
Columbia Gorge Discovery Center Photo Archive
Catalog Num: 2002.13.28
Condition: Good
Date:
Location: Celilo Falls
Title:
Content: Indian fishing with dipnet in eddy of the Columbia river.
Other Notes: Used as cover photo for 1987 WCHS calendar. Remarks on back. Duplicate measures same size.
Photographer:
Copyright: Published
Many more photos after the break...
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Two opportunities I am excited about…
The plan for this year is to pretty much enter everything… Submit, submit, submit!
In California, I had some issues with one of my email accounts, so I am slogging through three months of old email this morning, and I found two opportunities that I am very interested in.
Of course, I am too busy to actually read all the details right now, and with Snip.it dead, I guess I am stuck posting them here for review later…
While working on this year’s One Day video, I started thinking it would be very nice to start working on some real music videos. Look what washed up this morning… Perfect?
I’ll look into this more later to make sure, but I think I found my next project.
Dead Can Dance | Make the music video for 'Children of the Sun' | Genero.tv:
Dead Can Dance want you to make the music video for their song Children of the Sun off Anastasis their first studio album in 16 years.
They have left the brief wide open feel free to be creative in your interpretation!
Deadline for submissions is 4 March 2013, 23:59 GMT time.
I have looked into this one less, but just off the cuff it looks like something else that is a good match for the type of work I am wanting to focus on right now, playing with abstract-ish images in a more calculated, planned way…
Blue Sky Announces "The Optical" Call for Entries:
We've all had the experience of looking at a photograph and not being able to decipher it right away. We ask ourselves "What am I looking at?" Photographer and collector Allan Chasanoff became a connoisseur of this interval of confusion before the image resolves. He found a visceral pleasure in confronting an image that refused to make visual sense, delighting in its resistance and delighting again when that resistance was overcome - a delicious tension and release.
"To be hit by a dislocation transcends the visual alone, and there is a momentary visceral response. It stuns me. It interrupts the stare and startles me. Thus, a major part of my effort in collecting pictures was to find those that did that. The photograph, the genre, the history and the aura of the picture are secondary to this shock. That is why I collected so-called straight images, for a dislocation in the usual." - Allan Chasanoff
Mr. Chasanoff spent nearly 20 years collecting more than 1,200 of photographs, many of which embodied this optical problem in photography ("the Optical"), and donated that collection to Yale University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Now he has agreed to jury for Blue Sky a show of your (single-exposure, non-photoshop, "straight") photographs that resist immediate visual deciphering.
For examples of the the type of photos Mr. Chasanoff is seeking for this exhibition, follow this link to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and reference these publications: First Doubt - Optical Confusion in Modern Photography: Selections from the Allan Chasanoff Collection and Tradition and the Unpredictable.
For reference…
MFAH | Collections | The Allan Chasanoff Photographic Collection:
Allan Chasanoff relishes pictures that puzzle him, and he wants others to enjoy these surprises. He built his collection of 20th-century photographs by questioning what occurs when the camera “captures” the real world but the resulting image creates confusion rather than clarity, challenging photography's reputation as a dependable document. In 1991, the New York-based collector donated nearly 1,000 works to the MFAH by photographers ranging from Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, and Joel Peter Witkin to relatively unknown artists.
Dead Can Dance: Children of the Sun - Lyrics
Children of the Sun is the album’s 'welcome to the show'. The lyric addresses human evolution and how our genetic code is infused with ancient memory, right up to the present, celebrating nature – the Woodstock generation’s legacy.
…
We are ancient, as ancient as the sun
We came from the ocean, once our ancestral home
So that one day we could all return
To our birthright, the great celestial domeWe are the children of the sun
Our journey's just begun
Sunflowers in our hair
We are the children of the sun
There's room for everyone
Sunflowers in our hairThroughout the ages of iron, bronze and stone
We marvelled at the night sky and what may lie beyond
We Burned offerings to the elemental ones
made sacrifices for beauty, peace and loveWe are the children of the sun
Our kingdom will come
Sunflowers in our hair
We are the children of the sun
Our carnival's begun
Our songs will fill the airAnd you know it's time
To look for reasons why
Just reach up and Touch the sky
To the heavens we'll ascendWe are the children of the sun
Our journey has begunAll the older children come out at night
Anaemic, soulless, great hunger in their eyes
Unaware of the beauty that sleeps tonight
And All the queen's horses and all the king's men
Will never put these children back together againFaith
Hope
Our charities
Greed
Sloth
Our enemiesWe are the children of the sun
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Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Portfolio Ideas: Videos from wonderfulmachine.com
With the hunt for a new writing contract on hold for another month or so, I have a little more time to work on my portfolio. I still haven’t found a solution that I am in love with, so over the next couple weeks I might throw a few more posts like this up on the blogs.
I like the approach used on these simple and elegant videos. I’ll throw up a couple of favorites.
Wonderful Machine has 159 videos up on YouTube, mostly portfolios like these. The ones I am showing here had the most interesting (to me) thumbnails, mostly ones that resemble either my own work the most, or the type of work I could see myself spending time on in the future.
http://www.youtube.com/user/wonderfulmachine
http://www.wonderfulmachine.com
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Monday, February 13, 2012
First Anniversary of the Photo of the Day by A. F. Litt: February 13, 2012, A long way back towards home…
A long way back towards home... Tiger Mountain from the Volunteer Park Water Tower. Seattle, Washington. June 30, 2011. Photo of the Day, February 13, 2012. First Anniversary of my Photo of the Day.
This is a picture taken on a trip from Gresham to the neighborhood in Seattle where I lived for ten years, looking east towards the town where I grew up. In my original blurb about my photo of the day, I mentioned that some pictures would be chosen for sentimental value over technical value and this would be one of those.
I do like this picture, but I doubt it is the best picture in my files that has yet to be featured as the photo of the day. I have years worth of unedited pictures to go through and I am sure that there are some really spectacular shots in there that I have overlooked so far. This one is merely nice, in my book. But because of way the subject matter intersects with the date, this shot spoke to me as I put together today’s post.
The tallest peak in the background is Tiger Mountain, the dominant geographical feature in the town I lived in from ages four to eighteen.
Larch Mountain seen from Gresham reminds me of Tiger, but it is more distant, not looming over downtown itself as Tiger looms over Issaquah. I find the familiar profile comforting, though. It is one of many things about Gresham that remind me of Issaquah.
Which is strange to me in some ways. During the ten years I lived on or near Capitol Hill in Seattle, if you asked me if I would ever want to return to Issaquah or to live in a town that reminded me of it, I would have laughed you out of the room.
So many years later, with children of my own, I still have little desire to return to Issaquah. That time of my life is behind me now. Beyond that, the town I grew up in has changed so much that it is practically unrecognizable to me. Even if I wanted to go home again, I could not. The town I lived in does not exist anymore, I have no family there any more, and most of my friends have scattered across the country. There is little there for me now.
But raising my kids in a town that reminds me of the town I grew up in is very nice. I had a pretty good time growing up in Issaquah. Though, technically, I grew up in Sammamish, that town did not exist when I lived there. And I did go to high school in Issaquah proper, right at the foot of Tiger Mountain.
It was a good place for me to spend my childhood. I hope Gresham treats my boys as well as Issaquah treated me. If you’ve ever really wondered what the Part Two on my Suburban Eschatology blog represents, well, there it is in a nut shell.
So… This post is supposed to be about the photos of the day, not this particular selection. Well, there is a reason for those sentimental musings, but for now I’ll turn to this on going series of photos…
I’ve been at this photo of the day thing for a year now. It, too, has treated me pretty well. All the goals I mentioned in the original blub about it have been met in spades. It has kept me focused on my photography, it has forced me to become a better photographer, it has gained me a fan or two… All good things.
This anniversary comes at an interesting time in my life. There is a reason why I chose a sentimental picture for this milestone. I find myself at a crossroads where I will soon be returning to work for the first time in a couple years and I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about what directions I would like my career to head in from here.
I must admit that, for the last ten years or more, I have been wandering a bit. I became a tech writer by trade because it was what I had become in practice already. Though it was not my specific title until 2007, it made up a large share of my job description in every position I’ve held since 1999.
But I never really chose it as my profession. It just sort of happened. It is not a bad way to spend my time, it pays my bills, but it is not where I imagined myself when I lived in the shadow of Tiger Mountain, nor when I lived on the hill with the water tower.
Likewise, I never really wanted to be a “Photographer,” though it has always been a hobby of mine. I’ve been taking pictures since I was in the first grade and people have always liked them. My only formal training was a couple of elective classes in middle school where I learned how to work in black and white and where I learned that I love working with enlargers making prints and that I hate the actual process of developing film.
In high school, I was the photo editor for my school’s newspaper for two years, along with wearing some other hats on the paper’s staff. After high school, though, photography faded into the background for the most part. I could not have a dark room in my apartments and in the pre-digital era, it was hard to be a “serious photographer” without access to a darkroom.
In Seattle, by the end of the 1990s, I didn’t even have a decent camera any longer, though in the couple years before I moved to the Portland area, the photography bug would pop up from time to time. Recently I started running through and scanning a shoebox full of pictures I took during those years. Some of the later prints were shot with disposable cameras, but I still managed to get some decent pictures. I am sure these will be trickling out into my photos of the day over the next few weeks.
I was given my first digital camera in 2002. It was a pretty sad little piece of gear, but it was better than nothing, and as I’ve written before, I was happy to have it. But the 2000s were a difficult period for my family and I. It wasn’t until the second half of the decade that I was able, from time to time, to get out and take many photos beyond the obligatory snapshots of the kids.
I didn’t really start taking photography seriously again until I bought myself a somewhat decent point and shoot camera in April 2007. With a decent digital camera and access to some mediocre photo editing software, I found that I didn’t need a darkroom any more for “serious photography.” A clearance priced HP Photosmart, a bundled consumer photo editor, and I was back in the game. Still, I didn’t think of photography as anything more than a minor hobby.
Though that is not entirely true. In my role as a technical writer with ESI, photography actually played as big of a part of my job as writing and editing. In fact, I was hired not because of my writing, but because of my photography skills. The manager who hired me was looking for a photographer more than a writer - a technical writer, for sure, but one who actually had demonstrable photography skills as well, and tech writers such as this were a bit harder to find.
For the duration of that contract, I spent as much time working with cameras and photo editing software as I did actually writing and editing text. For that time, at least, I do feel that it would be acceptable to call myself a professional photographer. As acceptable, at least, as it was to call myself a professional writer during the years where I was writing a lot for work but it had not yet been promoted into my official job title.
Still, in my own mind and in my heart, photography was not my passion, it was merely one of many activities that I enjoyed. As Joseph Campbell would have put it, it was not my bliss.
When it comes to the arts, I’ve always thought of myself as a writer first, a musician second, and a photographer as a distant third. While I did start taking pictures regularly a little before I started writing, first grade versus second grade, and while I didn’t start playing music until the fourth grade, I’ve spent much more of my life working on my writing and music than on my photography.
So, photography rising as my primary creative outlet over the past year has been quite a surprise to me in some ways. Sure, I have been taking a lot of pictures since 2007, but I wasn’t doing anything with them except throwing a few up on Facebook from time to time. I did not consider my pictures to be anything more than a mild hobby and sanity saving distraction, not a serious artistic or professional pursuit.
Over the last year, though, I haven’t had the focus or attention to work on much writing or music. For me, those are solitary pursuits and I have not had more than a very occasional hour or two of solitary time over the last 15 months or so. When I was in California, I did have a lot of time to work on some research and development for a novel I will write eventually, but when I came home and took on the challenge of getting my boys put back together, that project was put on indefinite hold.
But one thing I have been able to do is to take a lot of pictures. Rather than being an artistic pursuit that keeps me away from my children, it is something that I can work on while spending time with my family. I want to go take some pictures? I throw the boys and dog in the car and off we go and everyone has a good time (though there are the occasional complaints that I stop too often on our hikes and walks to take pictures).
And photography has helped to keep me sane through the past year. With so many challenges coming from having two special needs children (not to mention their disabled mother crashing in their room since last June), having to put my entire life on hold for the last year to put them back together, photography has been the one piece of me that I have been able to hold onto, to not set aside for my family, and to find some comfort and refuge in.
So, at risk of being a bit overdramatic, for the last year, photography has been instrumental in keeping me from going bat shit crazy.
Now, a year into my photo of the day, I find myself approaching a crossroads. Where do I go from here with my career, now that it looks like I will be able to resume one?
For the first time in my life, I really do consider myself to be a Photographer. Not a writer who takes some pictures, not as someone who likes taking pictures, but as an actual, capital P, Photographer. For the first time in many, many years, I would actually consider making a career out of this. And for the first time ever I could see it as not being a subset of my job, but as it being the primary focus of my job.
During the time from middle school through the end of high school, I did see photography as playing a big role in my future career life. Through those years, I wanted to be a journalist and I saw myself eventually working both as a photojournalist and a writer. By the end of high school, I was in a position to have a very successful career as a journalist. However, some experiences during my senior year of high school soured me on those plans. Those are stories probably better saved for Democracy In Distress, though, rather than Rubble.
After the last year, though, for the first time in twenty years I find myself drawn to journalism as a career path because it seems like such a perfect way to combine my writing with my photography, the same draw that profession held for me so long ago. Unlike back then, this time around I actually could see myself working purely as a photographer, though I would still prefer it if there was some writing involved.
To me, for my abilities, I just think it is the best way for me to tell stories, with words and pictures .
Over the next few years, instead of continuing the aimless career drift that I’ve been suffering for the last twelve or thirteen years (this is not entirely true, I had definite career plans while I was back in school from 2004-2008, but my education was completely derailed by the continual health and stability issues that have plagued my family for the past decade and those plans are now indefinitely, if not permanently, unattainable), I really see myself steering towards journalism.
This is not to say that I am going to drop everything and completely start from scratch, just a couple hours ago I submitted a resume for a likely looking tech writing contract, but I will start looking for more opportunities in the journalism field, and I will pursue them when I find them.
Tomorrow I will start this process by applying for a position as a monthly columnist for a national website. A position that would not be full time work with a self-sufficient income if it is offered to me, but one that would be a nice foot in the door with a little supplemental income as a bonus.
I also have a couple of other photography related goals that I will pursue this year as opportunities present themselves, ones that are more artistically oriented.
So, I’ve come full circle. From Gresham, through Seattle, and back to Issaquah. What do I want to be when I grow up? Exactly what I wanted to be when I drove to school in the shadow of Tiger Mountain on the first day of my senior year of high school, a little over twenty-one years ago.
I will admit that I’ve recently been feeling the ache of so many “lost” years. This will be a harder profession for me to break into now. Back then, I had contacts and references from Washington DC elite and cabinet members of the National Press Club. Today? A year’s worth of photos of the day, a few good references from work in semi-related fields, and some blog posts. But that is a lot more than nothing.
I have to remember that I’ve played the hands I’ve been dealt to the best of my ability. Sometimes my ability was lacking and, here and there, I blew some pretty good hands, but there was also some long periods where I was dealt nothing but crap. I blame no one but myself for my mistakes and I have faith that God wanted me to learn a few things from the tougher hands in life, so I try not to be bitter, but sometimes it can be a bit dispiriting.
Sometimes it too easy to look backwards and see so many junctions in life where slightly different choices could have lead to me being in very different places in life today, probably more secure places, as well. A couple different twists and turns in the past, in the days under Tiger Mountain, or on Capitol Hill, or even more recently here in Gresham, and I could very easily have achieved many of the goals that I am just starting off towards today, but where I am in life today is exactly where God meant for me to be in life today. Without that simple truth, I am lost, but with it, I can find a tremendous amount of strength.
It is easy to get lost in the woulda, shoulda, couldas… It is best just to avoid them.
Fortunately, even more than this sad, semi-remorseful and frustrating sentimentality, what I have been feeling recently is a lot of optimism. For the first time in almost two decades, I feel like I am really at a point in my life where I can finally apply all the lessons I’ve been learning and find some success and security for myself and my children. I feel like I am at a junction where all the different experiences of my life are coming together in such a way to really prepare me for some solid successes in the near future.
That is a very good place to be in life. When I look backwards ten years, twenty years, it is easy to feel frustration and regret, but when I look ahead ten years, well… It looks pretty damn good from where I stand right now.
My photography, and my photo of the day series in particular, has a lot to do with this optimism.
So tonight I spend a moment looking backwards towards a home that no longer exists. Tomorrow, though, I turn towards the future and all the promises of hope that greet us as we awake each morning at dawn.
Products featuring photography by A. F. Litt:
deviantArt: Prints, cards, mugs, mouse pads, magnets, puzzles and other products.
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Monday, January 23, 2012
Project Yosemite time lapse video & some notes on time lapse videos in general
Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.
This video is a collaboration between Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty. All timelapses were shot on the Canon 5D Mark II with a variety of Canon L and Zeiss CP.2 Lenses.
Project Yosemite Website: projectyose.com
Contact info: info@projectyose.com
For the most part recently, I’ve been trying to focus the RubbleSites on my own content, but this one is really nice and I couldn’t resist posting it here.
I must admit, though, that while all these time lapse videos are very pretty, a part of me is starting to get a real “been there, done that” feel with them. Not that I have done it yet, but they are starting to blur together a bit.
A lot of good photographers all producing work that looks too much alike?
Or a lot of mediocre photographers using proven techniques that will always produce interesting results?
Probably a little from both.
And it probably won’t stop me from trying one myself this summer.
I do like this one. It stands out a bit which is probably why I am going ahead and posting this here. It’s hard to beat Yosemite and I really liked the shot of the tiny climber’s light on the cliff at night.
This is Quite Possibly the Most Beautiful Yosemite Time Lapse Ever | Motherboard:
This is the product of Project Yosemite by Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty, a pair of time lapse enthusiasts who apparently met through Vimeo. What started off as one trip into the park turned into a whole series of excursion in their bid to document Yosemite at its most gorgeous.
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Friday, January 06, 2012
The Final Cut: 2006 (Updated 2012-01-15)
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| From 2006 |
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| From 2006 |
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| From 2006 |
UPDATE: January 15, 2012 - You gain a few, you lose a few...
Going through some old files earlier, I found a whole bunch of 2006 photos that were missing. Luckily, I had posted a lot of them on Rubble before, and they were buried in the old files for the blog.
This does not mean that I have recovered all of those that I suspect that I lost, in fact it actually helps clarify which ones were lost. Fortunately, most of the ones that I liked the best in 2006 were preserved, since they were edited and saved separately to post on the blog (saved on the old Rubblebase.com). Posting photos on Blogger sites was a little more complicated back in those days.
Anyway. Also had a data loss scare this evening, but it was just an oversight when I was finishing up these pictures a while back. A batch got left behind on the lap top. Easily corrected.
However, there may be some duplicates in the slide shows because of this. Not as clean of a final cut as I’d hoped.
Still mostly family photos in this batch.
I return you now to the original post…
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| Birthday scooter. Holly Ridge. Gresham, Oregon. 2006. From 2006 |
Terrible interwebs tonight. I’ve just spent an hour getting a few small chores done. About 10 minutes worth of work on normal bandwidths… I probably should go to bed and put this post off until tomorrow, but I have other things to work on tomorrow…
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| Bonneville Dam, 2006. From 2006 |
This batch is mostly family photos, so I am not going to split them between two different albums, like I usually do.
I seem to be missing a lot of pictures from 2006. I think I had a hard drive die that year and lost a ton of photos from 2004 - 2006. Mostly 2005, I think. There was another, earlier data loss in 2004 that wiped out most of the photos from 2002 to then, but that obviously did not concern these images.
This is why I keep so many pictures on so many computers and on so many photo sharing sites these days… I am a bit paranoid about data loss these days!
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| Horsetail Falls. Columbia River Gorge, Oregon. Summer 2006. From 2006 |
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| Horsetail Falls. Columbia River Gorge, Oregon. Summer 2006. From 2006 |
I actually had to download some of these from the old, retired 2006 Facebook album for re-editing, since they were no longer on my computer. And that is confusing because I didn't think I had any significant data losses SINCE 2006 and the laptop these were stored on has been around since 2008, before I joined FB in the first place... So they should have been on here.
Probably hit cut instead of copy while moving a batch between drives at some point, and there were some minor losses when frankenPC 1.0 died a couple months ago. However, I thought that crash mostly took out a couple batches of edited photos and did not touch any originals. Maybe I am wrong about that.Oh well. Considering the camera I had back then, there is no real loss in quality between the originals and those downloaded from the Facebook album...
Yes. These pictures were all shot on this bad boy!
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| HP Photosmart 318. Summer 2002 - April 2007. January 6, 2012. From 2012-01 (Jan) |
2.31 megapixels, 1901 by 1212 maximum resolution, 38mm focal range (35mm equivalent), f2.8 to f8.0 aperture range, shutter speeds from 2 seconds to 1/750 second, optical and LCD viewfinders, USB connections, 8MB internal media, four AA batteries…
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The Photosmart 318 offers only point-and-shoot photography, lacking even basic exposure compensation. Its three picture-quality settings, the typical flash options, and its self-timer mode account for the full extent of its flexibility. The lens is fixed, capable only of 2X digital zooming (which is less desirable than optical zooming). The camera's pictures looked better on screen than printed. While it reproduced details and colors well in our print shots of a mannequin, the outdoor shot looked dark, and strange color artifacts littered our cropped text shot so thoroughly that words were illegible.
Yes. 2.31 MP, 1901x1212 resolution… About what my phone does today. The sad thing is that the memory was so poor on it that I was forced to shoot most of the pictures at less than half that resolution.
One plus, though, is that it had an old school optical viewfinder. I still think these should be required equipment on cameras even today.
I am not complaining. It was better than no camera at all and I was more than happy to have it.
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| Cape Horn. Highway 14. Columbia River Gorge, Washington. 2006. From 2006 |
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| Bonneville Dam, 2006. From 2006 |
Anyway, here are the links… As usual, pick your poison.
As mentioned earlier, unlike the later batches, I will not be separating these sets between family photos and non-family photos. There just aren’t enough survivors left to make it worth it.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2138128751768.79006.1802638453&type=1&l=29611760b0
Photobucket:
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| Bonneville Dam, 2006. From 2006 |
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Friday, December 16, 2011
A year’s worth of interviews with artists from MotherBoard
Trying a new method with this post. Click on Miranda July until you get to the content... (Don’t think I like this method already!)
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Listen to the first recording of human voices… (And the first daguerreotype of a human)
Note: Cross posted from Retrovirus Lab.
Spotted by William on Facebook (http://willigula.tumblr.com/), translation by Google…
The first record of voices in the world in 1860 - Anecdote of the Day:
It is generally accepted that Edison was the first to reproduce recorded sound, with the invention of the phonograph in 1877. The first sound recording has kept him took place in 1860 and we owe it to a French scholar, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville . Scott invented the phonautograph , a device to translate sound waves on a roll of paper coated with soot. The special feature of the device is that it could record the sounds but not to reproduce . Scott filed a patent in 1857 for the phonautograph.
Follow the link to hear the recordings… http://www.anecdote-du-jour.com/le-premier-enregistrement-de-voix-au-monde-date-de-1860/
A bonus for Rubble….
I’ll let William explain…
I guess this [recording] was discovered in 2008 but it was the first time I heard, or heard of it. Thirty years before Edison... a year before Lincoln was president! It's as haunting as Daguerre's first picture of a human (a fuzzy fellow standing on the corner in the lower left foreground), taken in 1838.
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Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Timescapes by Tom Lowe
Some videos on editing this film and some preview clips. Yes. This is why I am very excited about the possibility of getting a better camera for Christmas. I’d like to start putting together some video projects like this.
Maybe not quite at this level, but just for fun, for me.
I’ve been stalling on my One Day On Earth video all day. Partially, it is because I am frustrated with the image resolution of the video clips (mostly, I am sick of the song I am using)…
I am not looking at moving all the way up into the 4K and 5K range that Lowe is working in, but it would / will be nice to hit the full 1080 HD mark.
Anyway… Here’s the clips. I posted one of them earlier, but I thought they deserved their own post.
4K EDIT in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.
Timescapes: "Death is the Road to Awe" from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.
TimeScapes 4K from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.
This is production footage from my forthcoming debut film, "TimeScapes," a portrait of the American Southwest. This video was filmed and edited at 4K (4096x2304) resolution, four times greater than regular 1080p HD. A 4K DCP file is available upon request. Shot on Red Epic and Canon RAW still cameras.
You can pre-order the movie "TimeScapes" here: timescapes.org/pre_order.asp
Follow the film here:
1) twitter.com/timescapes
2) facebook.com/TimeScapes
3) gplus.to/tomlowe
If you have a 30" monitor and fast computer you can download a 2560x1440 copy of this video here: red.cachefly.net/TimeScapes4K2560p.mp4
4K version only if you have a 4K monitor or projector: coming soon.
Here is a 4K version on youtube: youtu.be/e-GYrbecb88
Thank you to Terrence Malick and Godfrey Reggio for their support and inspiration. Also thanks to Eric Kessler, Curt Morgan, Jim Jannard, Vincent Laforet, Bruce Allen, Phil Plait, Dave Finley, and to Helio Collective for the beautiful title logo. My most sincere and humble respect to Mark Magidson and Ron Fricke.
TimeScapes: Rapture from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.
Timelapse Crane Unleashed from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.
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