Boom-chakalaka!

Today's photo of the day is from Kansas City. This is an old weatherbeaten mural painted on the side of a large apartment building by the Reebok company.

It's only a model

Today's photo of the day is of a fountain statue in front of the Library of Congress, which pretty much confirmed everything I ever suspected about Librarians.

Nostalgia!

I've been plowing sloooowly through scanning all of my negatives. It's mostly a big chore (at my current pace, it will be at least half a year before I'm through), but every now and then I come across fun nostalgic nuggets like these:




























These were all taken a good four years ago. The Addys were doing their family portrait (using a medium format camera that I'm still a bit jealous of), and I was tagging along to try out the roll of infrared film I'd bought off of B&H. My EOS-3 wouldn't do infrared (long story; it's a design flaw) so I had to do it with my parent's old OM-1 and a 50mm lens w/ a red filter. It blows my mind how young Riv & Rav look in these photos -- life blows by waaay too fast.



All of these get much bigger if you click 'em. :)

The NSA

I had a good discussion with a friend the other day about what the big deal is with the NSA collecting a national database of who everyone in America calls. This article seems like a good example of why it's a terrible idea, at least if you're trying to sustain a democracy.



Followup: ABC has dug out more info on this; it seems the FBI has confirmed that this is being done.

Kansas City

Today's picture of the day comes from what I believe to be a World War I memorial in Kansas City. Click to enlarge.

Momma

Today's photo of the day is of my mom bein' silly in the kitchen. For those of you who don't know, I have the coolest mom in the world. Oh, I know what you're thinking. That's not possible because yours is the coolest. What you need to come to grips with is that you're wrong. Just 100% wrong. Sorry.



I LOVE YOU MOM!

The kiss

Today's photo of the day is from Josh's wedding reception -- basically the first time I learned how to 'dance' with people during such social functions. The technique to this kind of thing is pretty simple; use a fill-flash stopped down 2/3 stop or so (to compensate for everyone wearing dark colors), set the camera to shutter priority 1/4 second, then move, baby, move with your subject. I dunno if these two ever worked out as a couple, but they sure looked like they had a good start going.

Look, a bird!

Today's photo of the day (well, more of a photo series, really) is Josh in one of his funnier moments. ;) This is from a long time ago -- back in 2001 or 2002, I think.

HDR Capitol

I'm determined to beat the "HDR shots of the capitol" horse to death, so today I strolled back over the most easily identifyable phallus in Lincoln and took a few more HDR photos. What can I say, it's the easiest thing to shoot that's nearby. :) I think I have it out of my system now, but you never know.











I also found a quick snapshot abstract in the construction.

Rainbow

Today's photo of the day is from waaaay back when Becca graduated. She had her party out at a new park that was being built in Kearney. While I was there, a fairly nice storm rolled through (I found it metaphorically fitting at the time), leaving a rainbow in its wake. Click to enlarge.

More HDR experiments

For some time now I've been experimenting around with a photographic technique known as HDR -- "High Dynamic Range" -- imaging. Essentially, the principle behind HDR is that a digital, and to some extents even a film camera can only capture a very narrow range of dynamic lighting information, especially when compared to the human eye and brain. For example, when you are standing outside in broad daylight and you look at your friend, who is standing in the shadow of a tree, you can see him or her just fine. You can also see the parts of the ground that aren't in shadow just fine, and likely the sky just fine too, even if you're looking right into the sunlight. However, with a camera, it's different. With a camera, you must conciously decide whether or not you want the person in the shadow to be rendered correctly, or the ground that is out of the shadow to be rendered correctly, or the sky to be rendered correctly. If you, for example, choose the sky, then when you get the photographic prints back, the ground will be dark and your friend will be entirely covered in the blackest of shadows. If you choose your friend, then the sky will be white, not blue, and the ground that isn't in shadow will be extremely bright and washed out. This is a limitation of the technology; with film, it's a limitation of chemistry, with digital cameras, it's a limitation of the engineered design of the chip that captures light information. The human eye and brain outperforms all cameras in this aspect by a very significant margin.



However, HDR attempts to try to compensate for this. Essentially the photographer takes several photographs of the same scene and blends them together using a computer algorithm. Now, for example, the photographer would take picture in which your friend is rendered correctly, then take a picture in which the sky is rendered correctly, then finally take a photo in which the ground is rendered correctly. He would feed these digital photos into a computer algorithm, and after a lot of manual tweaking of the image, the computer will spit out an image in which all three -- ground, sky, and friend -- are correctly rendered. It's not magic, but it's damned close.



My last batch of HDR images were of the Nebraska Capitol building exterior at night. Today, I decided to walk over to the capitol and try this technique on the interior. I got some pretty cool (in my opinion!) results. Click the photos below to make them larger.




























No, I haven't given up on normal photography. ;) Here's a couple from today that aren't HDR:

Ms. Papaya

Maya stopped over at my apartment last week as she made her great exodus back west to California (and hooray for that! :)). The price of admission to my apartment, of course, is that you become my photography model for a little while. Today's pics of the day are of Ms. Papaya.

Napping

Today's photo of the day is of a woman napping on a park bench in Washington, D.C. Click to enlarge.

Guardian or Authority of Law

Today's photo of the day is a statue at the Supreme Court, with the moon in the background. Click to enlarge.

Joy

Today's photo of the day is from my trip to DC a few years back -- the pre-digital days. This was shot on Reala, I think. Anyhow, I was walking by some construction near the White House and this guy in front of me stopped & looked through the hole. Given the word that was written on the truck that he was looking at, this was one of those photos I just had to take. Click to enlarge in a new window.

Lincoln

Today's photo of the day is ol' honest Abe, or at least the statue of him at the Lincoln Memorial.

A fun retone

I was playing around with some storm photos today under the guise of "nothing is offlimits" -- i.e., toning for art, not for an attempt at being photojournalistic. I am continually amazed at the latitude afforded by RAW digital shots.



Original tone:







fairly easily becomes:

Ryan's Hood

Today's photo of the day is from Lanette. Lanette sent me a slew of cool photos about a week ago, and I've been a derelict and haven't even replied to her yet. Still, I thought I'd share the news that I now apparently have a hood! My hood is open to all of my friends, though I do ask that you extinguish any trashcan fires before you leave. Oh, and no knife-fights. This isn't that kind of hood.

Storm7 photo for sale

Man, I got a lotta inquiries on my April 23rd storm chase! I wasn't planning on selling anything when I posted this, but I've had a lot of people asking if they can buy prints. After a quick 8x10 quality control check (I had one printed at a local lab today to ensure that it was sharp and looked good as a print), I can sell the "storm7" photo (the vertical one with the lightning bolt that looks like this:







to anyone interested. The prices are as follows:



8x12 or 8x10 (your pick): $35

10x15 or 11x14 (your pick) : $50

16x24 or 16x20 (your pick): $100


The photos will be printed on metallic pearlecent paper, which, in past experience, has made colors look incredible. Note that 8x10, 11x14, and 16x20 will have borders on them (white lines on the left and right hand sides of the photo), whereas 8x12, 10x15, and 16x24 will not. However it's harder to find frames and mattes for 8x12, 10x15, and 16x24 prints. I can't gauruntee that the 16x24 prints will be super sharp -- the resolution gets down to around 160dpi at that size. However, what makes the photo cool is more the colors anyway, so it'll probably look really good even if it's a bit soft.



Hit me with an email at digicana at gmail dot com if you're interested; I'll be going through Paypal for this.

A few more HDR experiments

Earlier last week I mentioned a new photographic process known as HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. Essentially, it involves taking multiple exposures of a scene spanning the entire dynamic range and then using a program to smash them all together. Here are a few more HDR experiments. As you can see, the effect is striking, though more than a touch unrealistic. I'm still trying to find the magic way to make this look "real". It does seem to have a lot of potential, though.



Click to enlarge in a new window.







Nebraska state Capitol







Another capitol shot.







Nebraska state governor's mansion.







Here's my experiment with using HDR for weather photos. If you can get the sky to sit still, it can do some very interesting things. HDR photos kinda seem like impossibly exposed Velvia photos on crack, which can be good or bad, depending on if having your photos as saturated as a Disney cartoon is to your liking or not.



Lastly, here's a comparison of a "normal" photo I took while attempting to expose for the sky and the brightly reflective car versus the same shot using the HDR process: