Copanhagen/Amsterdam

Copenhagen
I absolutely LOVED Copenhagen. I was only there for a day but I will be back in the city on Tuesday. It is extremely clean, (much cleaner than SF), there are few cars, tons of beautiful squares, extremely interesting people, etc. -basically it epitomizes the ideal European city.

Here are a few photos from Copenhagen ( I have much more I will upload later)


Nyhvan-very colorful place

(This photo actually was not taken in Copenhagen, but it was shot nearby. It is of Fredericksburg castle, which housed the Dutch royalty)




The last picture is not a HDR by the way, for those who may suspect it. It did go through some post-processing to reveal the detail in the tires etc. but not too much. The 2nd to last photo also went through some extra post-processing to create the dominant green tone.


Amsterdam
I loved Amsterdam as much as Copenhagen! Walking through the Red Light District and feeling uncomfortable looking at the prostitutes selling themselves in the window was a bit much, but it is still a very interesting city. Seeing tons of people do weed casually while eating outside was also quite interesting and different. I haven't uploaded/looked at a lot of my photos from Amsterdam yet, but here are 3 from the 20 or so I did look at.

Reguliersdwarsstraat

Going to Europe...

tomorrow. Flight is at 6 AM so I have to wake up at 330 AM. Fail.

London 2012

WHOA!

I LOVE MY NEW NIFTY FIFTY!

Creation

From www.smashingmagazine.com August Desktop backgrounds.

Speaking of desktop backgrounds, www.desktopography.net just released their new 2009 exhibition, go check it out!

Graphic Design is about...

I made this

Simple & Quick, pero i like it!

Colorama

There are so many

good photographers in the world :)

I want

This shirt.

Red One, Canon 5D Mk II, and Panasonic Lumix GH1 Footage Comparison from marty meyer on Vimeo.

Text taken from www.pdnpulse.com

"Marty Meyer has posted a video on Vimeo comparing footage shot with the Red One vs. the Canon 5D Mark II and the Panasonic GH1. Of course, all three cameras shoot varying degrees of high-def and a different lens is used with each model so it's not a true side-by-side-by-side but who cares??? Like we said already, you gotta see this!

The footage was shot by Byron Shah and Jason Ensler. More info at birnsandsawyer.com (via Imaging Insider)

UPDATE: If you want to find out more about how this was shot, here are Byron Shah's notes on the footage."

Daft Punk

Justice + Photo News

Justice has some good new-ish tracks on their myspace.

http://www.myspace.com/etjusticepourtous

New Gear I bought!

New Lenses: 10-22mm f/3.5-4, 50mm f/1.4

Filter: 77mm C-Pol, 77mm ND, 77mm UV, 58mm to 77mm step up ring, 67mm to 77mm step up ring. Thinking of possibly getting a Cokin Grad ND filter. Also got a 77mm UV filter for the 10-22mm and a 58mm UV filter. I'm excited because most of the filters I bought are B+W!

Hoods: Recently I realized just how important lens hoods are in increasing contrast/avoiding flare, so I bought the lens hoods to my current 17-85mm f/4-5.6 (didn't get the hood with it because it's not a L lens...damn you Canon), and my two new lenses.

I got the 10-22mm, step up rings, and hoods at adorama.com, and all of the filters at hvstar.net.

I actually haven't gone to purchase the 50mm f/1.4 yet-I'm going this week to a local shop because they have the best price I could find.

Riding my bike

Sin musica

Earth's Core

Believe

I have not been shooting enough photos lately

Amazing star photo which I envy.

and finally, the inspiration for my blog title is revealed.

This map is made out of flight patterns.

Why the hell

isn't anyone hiring ! :(

My first HDR

(The blog crops the photo halfway randomly..to see it fully just click on it)
On my Mac the contrast of the photo is way worse than what shows up on my Dell....weird.

Anyways, this is my first HDR photo, nothing too amazing, a bit blurry in some places (gotta be more careful with that tripod), but I like it.

HDR

Yesterday I went to Big Sur and took a whole bunch of photos of the scenery etc. which I intended to use to make my very first HDR image. I used auto-bracketing (AEB) to get a total of 9 exposures for whichever picture/scene I wanted to turn into a HDR photo. When I got home I  did some work on photoshop to merge the photos into a HDR image. After the final product came out (took a long time as I was working with 9 RAW images each about 50MB each), I was disappointed. This did not look at all like the surreal HDR images I had seen in the past-what gives? So, I did a little research and found that Photoshop CS3 (or PS CS2 and onward) only merges the photos together, what creates the cool effects is something called "tone-mapping." To have your image tone-mapped, you need to get some software, like Photomatix. I downloaded the free trial of Photomatix, just to see how it would work, and lo and behold the photo was much better. However, since I was using the free-trial, the image had  water-marks all over it.  I tried another program I found called "Essential HDR Community." The problem with that software is that it only lets you output files that are 1MB in size-that's their "Free-trial catch." It also puts a watermark but it is on the very bottom corner and easy to crop out. So, I'm still on the journey to find a very good software to tone-map my images in.  Once I do find a good software (hopefully) I will upload my newly created HDR images to my blog.

Tone mapping, just by the way, is also another thing I need to learn. Just to see how it looks I was using the default settings, but I intend to learn more about manually tone-mapping an image so I can customize it myself. 

On another note, Big Sur is absolutely breathtaking. 

Red Cross

Explorer of the World

Canon EOS 5D Mark II

The canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon's top of the line camera right now with 22.1 megapixels and HD video recording, can do some amazing stuff. At first I was skeptical about the introduction of HD Video to DSLRs, as I thought that they would eat up memory, performance, and for some reason, I thought it felt too tacky, too point and shoot-esque, to be on a DSLR. Boy, was I wrong. Check out "'REVERIE' an independently-produced video by Explorer of Light Vincent Laforet." It was all shot on the 5D Mark II and "the files used to create this video were not manipulated in any way..."

In some scenes you can definitely tell that it is not being filed by a top of the line video camera, but other scenes, mainly the opening and the helicopter scene, are probably impressive enough to fool the average viewer into believing that it was shot by a top of the line video camera.

http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=2326&productID=249&articleTypeID=225&WT.mc_id=C125863

What Goes Around, Comes Around

AP Spanish

So cruel, yet so cute

The Titanic