The 2008 Encinitas Street Faire this past weekend (4/26 & 4/27) was very successful.  We’ve added note cards to our product line and they sold really well.  But more importantly we were able to talk with hundreds of wonderful people who enjoyed our photographs.  We got some very fine complements.

While over 21 different photographs sold in one form or another, two were the most popular – Spirit Bear and Bristlecone Pine.  Here they are.

Spirit Bear, Upper Antelope Canyon, Arizona (2008)

Can you see the bear in this photograph.  Here’s a hint.  He’s standing up on his hind legs.

Bristlecone Pine, White Mountains, California (2006)

It’s exciting to discover a new photographer who opens your eyes with a wonderful way of seeing the world.  I’ve done just that with a new friend – Johan Dermaut.  You don’t need to speak or read Dutch to appreciate his beautiful photographs.  They convey a warmth that is inspiring.  Please do yourself a favor and check out his Galeriejen at http://www.photodj.be/galerijen.html. 

I vividly recall avidly reading Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, savoring every idea, every concept, every technique they discussed.  I guess I’m a zone system kind of guy at heart.

One thing they both said that baffled me were their comments on previsualization.  Seeing the final image in one’s mind’s eye before snapping the shutter was beyond my ability.  Boy, was that ever intimidating.

Well, umpteen years and thousands of photographs later I still feel challenged by the notion of previsualization.  But I think I may be getting a glimmer of a hint.

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As a follow-up to How to Shoot Panoramas, here’s a checklist of things to remember.

• Level your tripod
• Switch to manual exposure
• Switch to manual focus
• Switch to a preset white balance such as Daylight
• Select an f/stop that gives the necessary depth of field
• Select an ISO setting that gives reasonable exposure times
• Don’t use a focal length wider than 50 mm (on a 35 mm camera)
• Remove the lens hood
• Don’t use your polarizer filter and be careful with graduated neutral density filters too
• Start your panorama in the part of the scene that will have the least exposure change if you’re shooting during the bookends of the day.

Have fun out there but also, be careful.

This is not so much a comment on Genuine Fractals as it is on the workflow end game, namely, resizing (Genuine Fractals) and output sharpening (Photokit).  Here’s the test.

• Resize a 6 M pixel image using Genuine Fractals to 16″X24″.
• Create output files at three resolutions – 180 ppi, 240 ppi and 360 ppi
• Sharpen the image using Photokit output sharpener for 180 Matte, 240 Matte and 360 Matte respectively.
• Examine the resulting images on the monitor for image quality.

And quickly, here are the results.

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I was listening tonight to a conversation between Jim Svejda and the amazing Hilary Hahn on Classical KUSC, my favorite radio station here in Southern California.  For those who don’t now, Jim Svejda is the most knowledgeable person on classical music probably on the planet and hosts several absolutely fascinating programs on KUSC.  And Hilary Hahn, at the age of 28, is one of the most phenomenal violinist on the current scene and certainly destined to be one of the great violinists of all time if not already so.

Their conversation delved into two dimensions of classical music performance – technique and interpretation.  It went something along these lines – composers don’t write compositions that are difficult to perform to give the performer a chance to display their technique.  Composers write compositions, difficult or easy, because they have something to say.  And performers haven’t mastered the composition when they’ve mastered the challenges of technique.  It is only when they also master the interpretation that they create music.

Hilary Hahn used a phrase that caught my attention – ‘Interpretive decisions.’  It was delivered in the context of discussing a very abstract, technical, even mathematical violin concerto by Arnold Schoenberg, a piece that’s a challenge to listen to not to mention the challenge it is to perform.  Hahn said that there were ‘interpretive decisions’ that added meaning to or subtracted it from the piece.  That makes a lot of sense.  A poorly interpreted piece, no matter how great, is boring whereas a richly interpreted piece, while being very simple, can be captivating.

What does all this have to do with a photographer’s personal style.  Well, in a word, everything.

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I’m doing an interesting project – shoot 360 degree panoramas in the desert during sunrise and sunset.  And I’ve learned a lot about panos that you don’t readily find when you research this subject.

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Upcoming workshop – Eastern Sierra, July 11-16, 2009  Improve your photography skills, stimulate your creativity and have a fantastic time.

I picked up Genuine Fractals by onOne software this weekend.  What does it do?  It allows you to upscale your digital images.    And just what is upscaling?  It comes down to adding pixels to your image to make it larger.  Whenever you add pixels you have a problem.  What color and intensity should the new pixels be?

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