Just a Photo
One of the advantages of getting to Yellowstone National Park early is to beat the crowds. The other advantage is views like this one:
Yellowstone Sunrise by Bryan Davidson
I came close to deleting this photo several times, but now it’s one of my favorites from the entire trip. I like it because of the reflection in the pond and because it’s a sunrise photo that doesn’t shout at you.
2011 National Geographic Photo Contest
The Colors of Yellowstone by Bryan Davidson
Fans of excellent photography should click here to check out a selection of 45 entries in the 2011 National Geographic Photo Contest. There is a pretty funny comment by Phil Baxter who is either trolling or ignorant:
Some very nice stuff, but I can do without black and white. The world is colour, and shooting in black and white now is just a lazy way to make a subject seem more arty.
Personally I’d disqualify black and white from any photographic competition.
That’s proof positive that you should shoot for yourself and for no one else. I wonder what Phil thinks about Hipstamatic?
Nighttime Dancing in Seattle
Just for grins, I brought my manual focus 50mm f/1.7 lens out for a walk in Seattle to get some practice manual focusing on my K-7. Manual focusing on a DSLR is a lot harder than on a film camera with a giant viewfinder and focusing aids (on an unrelated note, spending too much time around photographers puts you at high risk of contracting focusing aids. Beware). You can use live view and zoom in on the focal point, but that’s incredibly klunky. With practice, I got fairly good at focusing using the viewfinder. The K-7 is already on the small side (however its viewfinder is one of the largest for APS-C cameras) for a DSLR and with the tiny 50mm it was just the right size. Doing without the grinding noise from the autofocus motor was nice too. With no pressure to get results, this was a fun combo.
I wandered around while the light was growing dim and I found some fun stuff going down at Westlake Center. Some kind of dancing club was occupying the space and they even had live music. I can’t imagine wanting to dance for fun, but taking pictures of it was fun.
The event attracted participants of all ages. Most of them seemed to switch partners after every song. As someone with antisocial leanings, I felt like an alien observing and documenting the social behavior of another species.
The event also attracted a homeless man who seemed a bit inebriated. He had a large bandage on his belly and dog tags around his neck. He fed off of the energy of the event and seemed to be enjoying himself.
A few more photos of the dancing:
After the dancing died down and the sun went down further, I explored a little while longer. Below is a picture of one of the Borders stores right before it closed for good.
Walking around with a camera is one of the best ways to connect with a place and best of all, it’s free. To finish off the set, I processed all the photos with a similar “look” and I’m pretty proud of the results. I’ve been shooting a lot lately, but it’s the uploading and blogging that I need to catch up on. I’m not too upset, though. It’s better than being the other way around.
Bite of Seattle
Bite of Seattle is one of my favorite annual festivals in the northwest because it’s all about food. Other festivals have food, but it’s not their main attraction. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate this year, but that had the advantage of keeping the crowds a little thinner. “Thinner” of course referring to the number of people and not their size. This is a food festival after all. For a change, I decided to post-process all the photos in this set to give them all the same “look.” Nothing extreme, I just tried to give all the photos roughly the same tonality and contrast.
Note the umbrellas in the photo above. I think I’ve forgotten what sunlight looks like.
I’m a sucker for a funny sign. Also for burgers.
I like this photo because of the mix of posing and candidness.
Yes, he was balancing a corn dog on his nose. He was very good at it.
Mmmm pastrami.
Is there anything better than grilled meat?
I don’t know why there weren’t more people playing in the fountain. We were already getting rained on.
Bird!
Lots of good food this year with smaller lines due to the rain. Also, I’d like to note that having a weather-resistant camera makes all the difference in this soggy state.
My First 500px Picture
500px.com is a photo-sharing site similar to Flickr and it’s been getting a lot of press lately. Photographers seem to love the site, so I decided to sign up and give it a go. The photo below is my first submission. My first impressions of 500px is that it seems very Flickry, but with a more open ranking system for your photos. Instead of Flickr’s black-box process of choosing photos for Explore, 500px uses a scoring system based on votes, comments, and favorites. You can see the score of every photo on the site and watch your own score go down day by day. The score starts high to get interest in new photos and then drops as time passes in order to keep things fresh. The scoring system probably isn’t all that different from Flickr, but it’s more transparent.
500px offers some nice things that Flickr doesn’t, but it’s pro account is $50/year which is twice what Flickr costs. The free account seems to give quite a few features, so I’m going to give it a try for a while and see how things pan out.
