Pasadena Bridge

This is the second in a series of photos I did while playing with the Nikon tilt/shift lens. The bridge is Pasadena's famous Colorado Street Bridge.

When built, the bridge was the longest span bridge in the world. I've blocked the majority of it with the trees and this is just the last section as it crossed the Arroyo. Unfortunately such a beautiful bridge was found to have some other uses other than cars and has taken on another name, the "suicide bridge". Such a shame for such a lovely bridge.

What makes this photo a little different than the other pano stiches I did with the lens, was that I realized this pano just didn't quite work. But the middle photo all by itself did.

I recently printed this photo up on 16x20 Metallic Paper through Mpix. Never having used it before, I didn't know what to expect. Holy Crap. Freakin awesome! Give it a try with one of you photos if you can.

What I've Been Reading: Strobist

It only seems fair if I'm gonna talk about the blogs that I read, that I start with the one that really turned me on to the whole blog thing. And that in a nutshell would be have to be Strobist.

Before I came upon this little jewel, all blogs seemed to just kind of be random rants about someone's overly self important life or hobby. While many were well written and amusing (and occasionally useful), they really where of little interest to me. But then there was Strobist.

With the self proclaimed purpose of only one thing, to help you take better pictures with off camera flash, Dave Hobby has achieved the well deserved praise he's received for not only following through with this simple task, but also by exploring this subject as wide and deep as it warrants. He know boasts, and we are all the beneficiary, of over 1000 articles on the site. What this means is this is not some site you bookmark and start following along as he goes from assignment to assignment. Instead, there's a vast treasure of info, all categorized and ordered for you to basically read like a course. And along with all the outside references he recommends along the way, I don't know how you won't become a better photographer if you give it the time it deserves. I know I did.

Thanks Dave!

A Little Less Wise

If there's one really important piece of equipment in the photographer's kit, it's the one standing behind the camera. And in this case, that would be me. So this quick post is all about yours truly and a lovely little modification I had done to my hardware this morning when all 4 of my wisdom teeth were removed. Yep, all four. All at once. Good times!

Thanks to the help of my beautiful wife, the wonderful world Jell-O, a velcro strap-on ice pack & a full prescription of vicoden, it's all been pretty tolerable.

But then again, ask me how I'm feeling tomorrow....

Pasadena City Hall

Since I showed you one of my "first" photos last time, I figured we could just jump all the way ahead and go to one of my latest.

The building is Pasadena's terrific City Hall. Completed in 1927 with this amazing terra cotta dome and open courtyard.

The final shot is a 3 frame HDR panorama, going from top to bottom. I was trying out Nikon's 24mm tilt/shift lens, and used the top, middle & bottom shift positions to take the 5 bracketed frames. Brought the bracketed frames together in Photomatix and then stitched the HDR frames in Photoshop. Lots and tweaking and cleanup in both Lightroom and Photoshop, and viola!

But for all the gizmo steps, it's the moon in the upper left hand corner that makes it one of my favorites.

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