Lots of balloons in my life recently – probably from all the fourth birthday parties I’ve been going to.
This shot came out in a surprisingly satisfying way. That’s all for now.
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Balloon thing
Category: Personal
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Buy from the Virtual Show
If you can’t make it to Santa Fe for my show, or you’re reading this and you’ve already been, here’s the chance to buy a high-quality fine art print of one of the images in the show.
All the images in the show (and one more to make a baker’s dozen) are available from my Imagekind store.
You’re all cordially invited to my first photography show. It’s running from February 6th until March 4th at Java Joe’s North Cafe in the De Vargas Shopping Center, and there’s an opening reception on the first night (Feb 6th), from 5pm – 7pm.
I’ll mainly be showing my geometric/architectural images from around Santa Fe, but there’ll be one wall devoted to black and white children’s portraits.
Needless to say I’m really looking forward to it, and hope to see you there (free coffee included).
(details after the jump)
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Winter Morning
Out this morning in my pyjamas to take some shots around the garden as the sun came up on the couple of inches of fresh snow we got overnight.
A good job I was out early, as it’s now 11.20am and most of the snow’s already melted.
Joining me was our dog Corrie, who loves the snow.
Embedding the slick Photoshelter slideshow into the post. Let’s see how it goes.
Early start chez nous, with Finn deciding 6am was a pretty good time to start the day.
Even after stalling her, it was still dark when we made it to the tree.
Merry Christmas to those celebrating today.
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Godspeed, dude
Last week, our much-loved cat Arthur died. He was twenty. It’s hard to describe a cat so cool and revered that messages of condolence came in from four countries.
To say he’ll be missed is to risk being understood by several orders of magnitude, but he lives on in our memories, and fortunately in our photos.
Included here are three we like from the last couple of years, including two that capture something of Arthur’s relationship with our daughter – a blessing we’ll always be glad he lived long enough to bestow on us.
Godspeed, dude.
Alec Soth – the photographer who would have been perfect to accompany me on my ill-fated bike ride down the Mississippi (but that’s another story) – recently had a simple but brilliant blog post over at the Magnum Blog.
He asked 35 of his fellow Magnum photographers 2 questions:
- When did you first get excited about photography?
- What advice would you give young photographers?
The answers are fascinating, but one from Alex Webb really struck home:
Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. . . . Take photography on as a passion, not a career.
This view gets to the heart of the conundrum keen amateurs like me face when we start making some money from our photographs.
While talking to Chuck West, the pro photographer who accompanied us on the cattle drive (shown here – the cowboy photographer at work), he made an interesting point about the choice of lenses he’d made for the trip. (I was on assignment from a magazine to write an article about the trip, so only taking photos in an amateur capacity.)
He uses a Canon 5D
The 24-105mm clearly makes most sense on a full-frame camera, where you could go from genuinely wide to pretty zoomed, and so don’t need an additional wide-angle lens most of the time.
On a crop body like my XT, it’s equivalent to 38-160mm, which might give you some extra reach, but isn’t actually as useful.
If you were trying to cover around the same 24-105mm range on a crop sensor camera, I guess you’d go for the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
So even if you had a swanky new 50D, for this job you’d be carrying two lenses – maybe the pricey but good EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM
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Good morning, world
So I’m sitting in Ecco, my favourite cafe. It’s hard to believe what happened yesterday.
I’m a green card holder, so couldn’t vote, but I knocked on some doors for the Obama campaign, and like millions of people, made some donations.
I have my naturalisation interview next month, and it makes me very happy that I’ll get to become a US citizen under an Obama administration.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. Now the real work begins.
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Scale and silhouette
(still working through some of the cattle drive pictures)
Out on the drive, the scale of the landscape often made it seem abstract. Without big landmarks, there was just land and sky – it felt a little like being out on the ocean. The lack of context made it even harder to judge distance, or to feel comfortable as part of the landscape (rather than just adrift on it).
But if you put some cattle and cowboys in the same landscape, then it all starts to make more sense. It’s still huge, but not you’ve got some gauge of its vastness, and a way into it that feels right. And iconic.