A double diptych. I recently came across a great tutorial by Jay Watson, using Lightroom to create Diptychs He shows an easy way to create a template and generate diptychs quickly and consistently. I don’t think I have had ever even used the “Print” menu in Lightroom before.

These are just a couple of older travel photos I had around, the first from Hong Kong and the largest free standing outdoor bronze buddha. The diptych below is from a road trip through the midwest, the trains I believe are from Chicago and the church is somewhere along the way.

I was playing with the interval shooting mode on my Nikon D700, which allowed me to set my camera up to take a photo once every 30 seconds. I tried it on two sunsets on two different days. I think the results turned out pretty good.

I set the camera in manual mode and had it metered for the first shot, that way the photos would get darker as the sun set. It ended up getting darker faster than I expected, but an interesting effect. I like the clouds in the first one better.

I used Quicktime Pro to compile into a video, which was pretty easy. Just use the Open Image Sequence and select your photos, frame rate and export. I plan to play around with this some more.

I took a Memorial Day photo excursion to the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. I wanted to use my new Flip video camera, so my initial idea was recording a video of a flag waving in the wind. I ended up recording the following video which I like better; I was trying to think of a way to capture the size of the cemetery. Music is by John Ames.

Nascent Sexuality Polaroid Study is a photography project by Igor documenting his early sex life, or lack thereof, growing up in Alexandria.

The project uses Google Maps where each map point has a Polaroid and a description of why that photo location is important. The map points are listed in chronological order and should be read in that order.

Nascent Sexuality Map [Google Map]

You can also view the flickr gallery of photos from the project.

I came across Sam’s photos on flickr and was real impressed with her project. Sam is an art teacher who spent six weeks in Nicaragua teaching photography to underprivileged kids. She published the children’s work in an online gallery on Flickr, even without the story, it is some great photography. See the Nicaragua photo gallery.

Sam is now working on creating the non-profit Lens Of Vision and Expression (LOVE) to continue working with children and helping their voices be heard through photography. You can help LOVE here.

Photo by Student Photographer: Farah

I’m finally putting together a series of night photography I did of Foster City. I was printing the shots by hand, actual black and white darkroom work, but I’ve since sold all my equipment, so I need to put together the digital files to be printed. I’m also trying out Soundslides Plus, a program which generates flash slideshows. I haven’t ventured into sound yet, maybe my next project.

Here’s the silent slideshow of Foster City at Night:

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of my favorite photographers. I’m excited an exhibit of his coming to the de Young museum in San Francisco. The exhibit is a 30-year retrospective on his career, with over 100 photographs. The photo at right is from his theaters series, which he leaves his camera open for the entire length of a movie. See my review of Sugimoto Architecture book.

Exhibit runs from July 7, 2007 to September 23, 2007 at the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park. More info: Hiroshi Sugimoto Exhibit [thinker.org]

I was very surprised and proud to find out that my Foster City Carnival photo set received 3rd place in the National Press Photographers Best of Photojournalism 2006 awards; I won in the Amateur Photo Blogs, Festival and Events category.

You may (or not) have noticed that I had two flickr accounts which I’ve since consolidated back down to one. My initial idea was to separate serious photography from snapshots, but there were gray area and was just too much of a hassle. So I’ll have one account and just post whatever; it’s my life, I’ll let it all bleed together.

And a few links to satiate you; here’s a couple of cool new web apps I’ve come across and using:

• 30 Boxes – A sweet online calendar, I’m using it and syncing my desktop/laptop to this. It can even send SMS reminders and a real slick easy interface.
• TwoFifty.org – A site to help track which of the IMDb’s Top 250 Movies you’ve seen. I made a simple list app to do this on my own, but this one is far nicer plus shareable. You can see my list here.
• Swazz Boxovers – A nice javascript library for creating real pretty box overs. I’m using it in my updated blog archives. swazzy!

I’m always looking for little notebooks that I can carry with me. To take photo notes, jot ideas down, to-do lists, or whatever.

The Moleskine notebooks are great but expensive, I found some really cool Rollbahn notebooks in Japan, oddly I think they’re a German brand, but I haven’t seen them here yet and I’ve used up my supply.

So I decided to make my own after reading about the Hipster PDA on 43 Folders; which appears to be a new productivity movement called GTD (Getting Things Done), I personally like Elvis’ TCB (Taking Care of Business) motto better.

I’ve created a few photography related sheets that you can include in your own notebook. More info and download here.

If you are in or around the Bay Area, here’s a photography exhibit to check out: Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes at the Stanford University Cantor Arts Center. I haven’t seen it yet but I saw his work on Shipbreaking in Bangladesh and he is amazing. Big 40″ x 50″ color prints, great colors and composition, definitely worth seeing in person.

The show is up until Sept 18th, check out the site http://burtynsky.stanford.edu/

Plus here’s the Chronicle Article about him and the show: As Nature Bleeds, Edward Burtynsky gets the big picture