Hover over the photo to see what it looked like straight from the camera.
My final daily photo for Year 4 at a Santa Monica beach
Camera: Nikon D80
Lens: 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR at 18mm
Exposure settings: ISO 200, f/9, 1/40s
Cropped dimensions: 3387 x 2267 pixels
Other stuff: ND grad filter, -2/3 EV Continue reading »
Hover over the photo to see what it looked like straight from the camera.
Daily photo for 1/22/12 - Venice Pier at Dusk
Tripod, Nikon D80, 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 at 18mm, ND grad filter, f/22, ISO 100, 6 second exposure
Timing - Although I arrived before sunset, I waited for a while afterwards to get these colors. The sun set at 5:15; this shot was taken about 5:30. Continue reading »
Hover over the photo to see what it looked like straight from the camera.
Daily photo for 11/4/11 - Pleasure Pier
It rained today, and post-storm photos tend to be quite lovely. For me, the logical thing to do was head down to the beach near the Santa Monica Pier around sunset. I’ve done that many times before, but I can’t say that it ever gets old. Continue reading »
Last year, I wrote The Amazing iPhone Camera Comparison using an iPhone 4, 3GS and 3G. This year, I am doing the same thing with the iPhone 4S and 4. Being able to compare the quality from the two cameras has given me a huge respect for the iPhone 4S – the quality difference is amazing and makes the iPhone 4 feel like a toy.
Yes, I made this image in MS Paint.
For the tech specs below, I included my numbers from last year’s post and added the ones for the 4S. Most of the numbers came from directly observing the EXIF data off of the photos, which included shots of the sun (for max shutter speed, etc) and a dark closet (for highest ISO, etc). Continue reading »
On 9/12/10 I went to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach to attend Photographer’s Night – what a great opportunity!
Obligatory aquarium silhouette photo
If you’ve ever been to an aquarium and tried to take photos, you may have noticed that it’s – well, hard. The reasons include curious children in the way, tripods are prohibited, no lighting equipment, too many people, family/friends don’t want to wait for you… and don’t forget you have to shoot through inches thick, often curved glass*. Oh, and the ambient light varies wildly from tank to tank.
*it’s not actually glass – it’s acrylic, but I’m going to keep calling it glass
Photographer’s night aims to remove as many of these roadblocks as possible – for 4 hours the aquarium was open ONLY to photographers, and we were allowed to bring just about any equipment they wanted! They capped the number of people so it wasn’t too busy. Other than respecting other photographers (ie. don’t linger at a popular exhibit) and not using flashes on light-sensitive animals, we pretty much had full reign of the place. Very cool! Continue reading »
On 8/21/10, my wife and I joined about 30 other Angelenos on a tour of the Los Angeles River. The trip was organized and publicized by Hidden Los Angeles, and led by Jenny Price, an environmental writer/advocate/cool person.
The tour consisted of 5 stops along the 52-mile river, from the channelized drainage system that we all know and love from the movies to areas that have abundant vegetation and wildlife. It was quite eye-opening to see the extremes and to learn the history of the river – Los Angeles wouldn’t exist without it.
See more photos at www.jawsnap.net/misc/lariver2010.
Fishing on the Los Angeles River
Today I participated in Scott Kelby’s 3rd Annual Photo Walk.
Rusty - Photo of the Day for 7/24/10
To learn about it from the source, check out www.worldwidephotowalk.com. Basically, people get together in groups on the same day, all across the world, and take photos as they walk around. If you’re unfamiliar with Scott Kelby, he has a whole digital photo empire, mostly related to Photoshop instruction. Because so many people read his blog and whatnot, his Photo Walk has become quite an event.
The walk I signed up for was in Santa Monica, so I could just walk to it. About 20-30 of us met at the camera obscura, walked the pier, back up to the Promenade, then to the farmer’s market and back to the camera obscura. The walk leaders gave some nice photo tips, but it was pretty loosely organized so we kind of all just wandered around.
Don’t know what a camera obscura is? Wikipedia tells all. Our walk leader described it as “being inside a pinhole camera.” Don’t know what a pinhole camera is? Again, Wikipedia. Continue reading »
Books! - LA Central Library
Ann and I visited the LA Central Library this morning and got a great tour, along with some of my coworkers. We try to take advantage of all that LA has to offer, so we jumped at the opportunity to get a tour like this. Of course, it turns out that anyone can take a tour. It’s a great old building, constructed in 1926 and renovated/expanded after fires in 1986, reopening in 1993. There’s interesting art all around, inside and out, plus the wonderful resources of a great public library. They had cool exhibits of Richard Neutra drawings/sketches and Yousuf Karsh photographs. If you live in the area or are visiting, I can definitely recommend checking it out. Here’s a map of it.
As expected, I took a lot of shots. Many turned out well, although I was pushing some pretty high ISO values indoors. For you non-photo-people, that means it was dark for the camera, so it had to compensate by using a higher sensitivity (ISO), which results in a noisy, grainy images. There were so many meaningful details, it was pretty fun to photograph. Below are my favorite shots of the day.
Continue reading »