Unlikely Places

Those of you who have been following along for a while know that a little over a year ago my hard drive melted and the things I mourned the most were pictures...well, today Riche brought over a computer that I built for him before I left Alaska in 2005 which he hadn't booted up for 54 Windows updates. Securely saved on the hard drive were a majority of the pictures I lost in the meltdown. I plugged my external drive into the updating box and grabbed said photos. I'll be uploading some to flickr, but I leave you with this gem of the BLB from fall of 05, just weeks before I left.

Portrait Philosophy

I'm a big believer that a portrait photo should capture something significant about its subject. One of the rules that a photography teacher of mine had for portraits was that no matter what the subject's hands needed to be in the photo. I've never been a concrete rule type of guy when it comes to photography, but his words rattle through my head whenever I shoot a portrait.

While this portrait of The Mad Fishicist doesn't prominently show his face, it does portray his fishing face. Like an athlete has a game face, Bolokai has a fishing face.

This shot of Noveau Riche (sic) was, as a lot of my pics from yesterday were, from 30-40 yards away through a zoom (so smiles aren't staged, but merely side effects of a great morning of fishing). I'm not particularly happy with the composition on this photo because of the subject being centered. Cropping could fix that faux pas, but the reason I like this photo so much is because of the blur of the ferns as a backdrop. The colors in Alaska are vibrant this time of year. It's not very often that I get my picture taken with a fish. Generally I'm the one behind the lens. Yesterday Noveau Riche made an extra effort to grab my camera out of my pack, switch out the lens, and shoot a proud me and a proud Rainbow. Incidentally, it wasn't raining as you might deduct based on The Mad Fishicist and Riche wearing raincoats...the hoods work with the polarized glasses in tandem to help see the fish.

Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection

Thomas Hawk is the CEO of Zooomr (a competitor of Flickr, which I've been meaning to spend more time with), but above that, he's a phenomenal photographer. I discovered him through Robert Scoble's photowalking sessions and dropped his feed into my reader. He usually posts 5 pictures to Flickr everyday. His site is definitely a great place to see amazing pictures of San Francisco, but also to learn about shooting at night, inside in the dark, and he also has some interesting commentary on life behind the lens. Here are a few pictures of San Francisco from his collection, but I highly recommend you check out his site. Please click the photos below to see them in their full size.