In the CVG airport terminal, waiting to board my CVG-NYC flight. After almost a year of constant travel, this is my final flight before starting a new job pinning me to NYC for a while.
Category: Photography
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Frozen Tide in Amsterdam
As the waves come to shore, they freeze, and leave a large area of frozen chards. Beautiful biking north of Amsterdam.
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Train Station, Amsterdam
Another panorama made with Autostitch on iOS.
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La Defense Wasteland
A glimpse into the future as I explored the 4D Hypercube arch at La Defense in Paris, France..
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Trip Summary – NOLS WOE Tetons Ski Mountaineering Expedition, January 2012
I’ve returned safely from the backountry after completing the National Outdoor Leadership Schools Winter Outdoor Educator course. Overall it was a great trip, filled with adventure. Here’s course leader Roger Yim’s summary, links to my photos and videos from the course, and my daily summaries.
Course Summary, by Course Leader Roger Yim:Instructors: Roger Yim, Emily Ledingham, Lindsay Yost
The Winter Outdoor Educator course was held in the Arizona Creek area outside of Grand Teton National Park. This was a 15 day self-sufficient expedition with 2 days of resort skiing at Grand Targhe Resort, a one day terrain tour and 2 days of classes and preparation. There were 13 students initially and 3 instructors. One student was evacuated in the first several days of the expedition due to an illness. The course was challenged with 120 cm of new snowfall, wet snow conditions and down to -18 C air temperatures. The curriculum focused on ski touring skills, winter camping, avalanche assessment/rescue and leave no trace. Students taught minin classes to improve their teaching skills and worked on self-leadership, peet leadership and some limited designated roles. Some of course highlights were improvement in skiing, avalanche and the impressive scenery of the Tetons. The students have developed a good foundation of backcountry ski skills.
Daily Summaries:- Day 1 – Food Rationing and Gear Selection
- Day 2 – Telemarking at Grand Targhee
- Day 3 – Backcountry Film Festival
- Day 4 – Avalanche Rescue Training
- Day 5 – Skinning and Field Gear Evaluation
- Day 6 – Into The Backcountry
- Day 7 – Snow Shelter
- Day 8 – Ski Touring
- Day 9 – Blizzard Evacuation Attempt
- Day 10 – Jake Deserts The Group
- Day 11 – Rescuing the Evacuation Team
- Day 12 – Avalanche Science
- Day 13 – Redemption From The Storm
- Day 14 – Climbing to High Camp
- Day 15 – Touring
- Day 16 – Avalanche Rescue Training in a Blizzard
- Day 17 – Whiteout
- Day 18 – Test Pits
- Day 19 – Touring
- Day 20 – Kick Wax
- Day 21 – Transferrence
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A Year in Photos: 3492 Photos On Flickr
This year, like many years before it, was certainly a year of photos for me. I try to keep all of my online photo postings consolodated into my Flickr photo stream. It’s a great place to keep all of my photos, and easily share them around. Currently, I’m adding photos to Flickr through a couple channels:
- Flickr Uploadr on my laptop
- Flickr iOS app on my iPhone4
- Instagram iOS App
- Camera+ iOS App
- Foursquare via FlickrSquare
So it’s no surprise that I have a lot of photos posted. For this year, the final number is 3492. In upcoming days I’ll try to analyze them a bit more, but for now, here’s the daily breakdown of photos posted throughout the entire year…
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Shooting with the Lytro Lightfield Camera
Me and Dave, pictured in the original Lytro Lightfield Camera
This past weekend friend Dave Surgan and I visited the Wired Holiday Store to demo the new Lytro lightfield camera. Although the workflow process for importing and manipulating images was a little buggy, the camera worked great. Form factor is very first generation, but apparently is necessary to accomodate the complex lens design. The square images are fun to shoot, and the control layout is simple – shutter button and touch sensitive zoom slider on the top, and power button on the bottom. Shooting pictures feels very “scientific”, on account of the long box form factor – kinda like looking through a toilet paper tube. -
Telluride Blitz: First Powder Turns Of The Season
This past week was spent out in Telluride, Colorado with friends Rachel, Paul, Nick, Jeff, Sean, and Michele. A few pics from our trip…
Photoset on Flickr (Slideshow)
Snow is starting to fall! Yay!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6473483627Social Media Integration time in the condo after a long day of playing in the mountains
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6473470041The whole group at Fat Alley BBQ, the best BBQ in town!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6473487191Rachel rocking the powder turns
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6473495665After the snowstorm, the stars seemed especially bright…
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6473503497Mt. Wilson in the background
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6473505313Warming up at Ouray Hot Springs
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6473506811Snow up by the airport
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6473500227 -
Planet Protest
Amazing photos of the protests in Russia from photographer ??????????? ???????. Apparently he used a quad copter radio controlled aereal platform, with a Canon SLR dangling beneath it, and a remote control system.
More photos from the shoot on the photographers’s livejournal. Interactive photo from AirPano.
Related links, thanks to fellow redditors:
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Landed safely in Denver, en route to Telluride.
Hello mountains and snow!
See this image in my Flickr Photostream. -
Turkey Weekend, 2011
A few shots from the weekend at home with the family…
Full set on Flickrhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6429306465/in/set-72157628215651537
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6429327371/in/set-72157628215651537
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My Top 7 iOS Apps For On The Fly Field Photography
Amazon-owned digital photography site DPReview.com recently published a quick list of some top mobile apps for digital photography. Android and iOS App Tools For Photographers: Digital Photography Review.
While their list is a great, I have my own set of tools.. here’s what I roll with in the “Photography” category of my Apple iPhone 4 running iOS 5.
- Camera+ – The classic and most powerful supplemental photo taking and filter-based editing app. Camera+ does so many things, it’s recently replaced a couple of other apps: Photo info – it tells me where/when/how photos were taken, and if they have GPS coords embedded, plots the photo on a map. Photo cropping, enhancements, filters, borders, titles – great filters, with an optional film effects package upgrade. Photo taking self timer, stabilizer, and lightening quick startup. Flashlight – by using the flashlight photo taking mode, Camera+ has even taken over as my go-to flashlight app for my phone.
- 360 Panorama -Uses the built in gyro/accel hardware of the phone to automatically create a panorama on the fly as I swing my phone around a scene. It’s not the absolute highest quality panorama, but it’s quick, simple, and effective. The gyro-guided viewer function is a cool “wow” feature too.
- Autostitch – For more complex or higher quality panoramas, I use Autostitch. Take a series of overlapping photos – of a whole scene, or a specific detail, feed them into Autostitch, and watch as the app pieces are aligned and blended together. It takes considerably longer than 360 panorama to put the pano together, but the results are solid.
- Pocketbooth – The most fun you can have with the forward facing camera on your phone in with Pocketbooth. Load up the app, hold your phone out in front of you and your friends with your heads smooshed together into the frame, and out comes a classic looking 4-up photo strip, complete with border effects, vignetting and variable colors. And before your amazed friends can say “ooooh, can you send that to me?!”, you’ve already hit the convenient “email” button and zinged off a copy.
- PopBooth – Love taking photostrips, but with you had the real physical printed piece of paper with the photos, instead of a fleeting email? Enter PopBooth. Same concept as PocketBooth, but this time you give the app a few addresses, some cash ($2.99 per two strips), and 3 days later two nifty photostrips show up at your door.
- Simply Postcards – On the same vein as PopBooth, Simply Postcards transforms your digital photos into real world goods. However this time, its one photo, on a full bleed, full color postcard. The actual app UI/UX is terrible, but the end product is great. Also worth mentioning are Postagram which is more hip, but sends square popout cards (versus full bleed), and Cards from Apple, which provides very high quality greeting cards.
- Photoshop Express – For those nitpicky photo fixes that hipster filters just won’t fix, Photoshop Express does the trick. Granular control over color, lighting, and cropping.
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Pixelcase Makes Interactive 360 Degree Video Environments
360 degree immersive mega panoramic photos have been around for a while – I remember back in middle school playing around with QTVR files on my Macintosh Performa. Now company Pixelcase has started advertising technology to make 360 degree immersive VIDEO experiences. Interact with their demo reel below, and just hold on for the inevitable leap to 3D 360 Degree Video environments…. heck, why not even throw in the ability to live stream it?
“Pixelcase’s proprietary videography capture system produces the highest quality, fully interactive video available today. The Pixelcase camera system has produced some of the worlds most popular 360 video to date with over 25 million hits in 2011 alone. Pixelcase HQ is based in Perth, Australia with offices in London and Vancouver.”
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RC Aerial Cam Provides Amazing Stabilized Footage
Quick video for today – a gyro stabilized camera suspended by a custom helicopter rig.. as we’ve seen in popular media, with cheap, high quality, nimble aerial video platforms, the creative possibilities are endless.
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Shooting the 2011 Tri State Tough Mudder
Today I went with a group of friends to the 2011 Tri State Tough Mudder. I was registered to compete, but sadly because of a recent shoulder injury, my PT told me I couldn’t. Instead, I accompanied my team out there and took photos of the entire race. Running around to each obstacle to beat the rest of the team there so I could set up for a good camera angle was no small feat, and I luckily ended up getting to run around almost the entire 12 mile course with them – albeit without doing the actual obstacles.
Tough Mudder Photoset on Flickr (Slideshow)
My intro post about the Tough Mudder – Getting Ready for the Tri-State 2011 Tough Mudder
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Quora Answer: What is the best point-and-shoot camera for concert photography?
Here’s my quick answer to this question, originally posted on Quora. I currently have Canon’s new Powershot S-100 camera on backorder from B&H, and will surely be making a post about it once I have some time to use it. Quora Question: What is the best point-and-shoot camera for concert photography?
My Answer:
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The Clowns at Brooklyn Bowl
On my way to see indie rock band Caveman play at Brooklyn Bowl, I passed this wall of clowns… Fitting?
See this image in my Flickr Photostream. -
Video: The City
Yet another super cool example of the power of the Canon 5D mk2 to make stunning videos, here is photographer Wesley Townsend Kitten’s series of stills turned into a movie called “The City”. He shot it on a 5D mk2 all around San Francisco, capturing the stunning beauty of the city. Kitten used Boards of Cananda’s “Dayvan Cowboy” for the backing track – one of my all time favourite electronic tracks, which has been used in countless cool videos – including my own movie documenting my trip through Turkey.
Here’s the video on Vimeo, as well as a few other related links.
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The Creators Project
Last weekend I went with a friend to check out The Creators Project in DUMBO, Brooklyn. A few shots:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamfan2/6267249373/
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How good is the video from the iPhone 4S? Pretty Damn Good.
One of the key new features of the iPhone 4S is its upgraded 8 megapixel camera. The new camera module, coupled with Apple’s powerful A5 processor now has the ability to take very good looking 8MP still photos, as well as full 1080p video. But how good really is that 1080p video? Very good, according to this side by side comparison with the Canon 5d MK2 camera.
iPhone 4S / Canon 5d MKII Side by Side Comparison from Robino Films on Vimeo.
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Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating In Space
Graphic artist Michael Yu immerses in Jonathan Glazer And J. Spaceman's physical manifestation of Spiritualized's "Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating In Space" at The Creator's Project in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
