Stuck In Customs

Thanks all of you that were able to come out to my talk last night. I hope it was entertaining for y’all! The good people at CapMac said there was a good crowd there with just over 100 people. There were some very interesting questions, and everyone seemed very nice and affable. We’ll have to do it again next time – thank you all for coming – sorry I could not meet all of you! 🙂

This, below, is the Fig Tree restaurant on the River Walk in San Antonio. If you’ve never been around there for a walk, I highly recommend it. It’s a very touristy thing to do, but, still, it’s cool. And if you like Mexican food (who doesn’t???), there are a million restaurants right there on the river.

It’s all great for people watching. I always like to watch couples walk by and play, secretly, "Do those two look like they belong together?" That probably sounds like a weird game to play, but I can’t help it!

This was a pretty cool area of Glacier National Park – the continental divide. For those of you that have never been there, this is the line that runs through the Rocky Mountains and separates the flow of water from one side of the continent to the other. We put Ethan up there and he did his own little part for erosion while I snapped away! 🙂

Dresden had beautiful building after beautiful building!  They were just all lined up, waiting to be photographed.  As blind luck would have it, a storm had just ripped through, leaving this incredible purple sunset.  Well, heck, I guess I don’t have to tell you… since you can just look below and see! 🙂

And any of you in the Austin area that are coming tonight to my talk and tutorial (it’s free and you don’t have to be a mac user – more info here), be sure to come over and say hello! 🙂  Don’t be shy — I’d be happy to meet you in person!

Whenever I drive from my home to downtown Austin, I listen to a few podcasts. One of them is the TWIP (This Week in Photography) podcast, and they recently interviewed Rebekka from Iceland. I had been lucky enough to shoot with her before when I was there, so it was nice to take a little trip down memory lane. When we had met, she was just getting into knitting, and now it’s turned into this major business for her, besides her other artistic pursuits. If you visit her Flickr page, you can see a bunch of nice photos as well as some of her sweaters. Besides those, she also made this green scarf seen below (you can see her knitting it here al fresco). She makes each one by hand and they take about a month… she’ll make you one, but be sure to offer her 4x her normal rate just to make sure you get to the top of the list!

Anyway, while I was with her, we went out to this fjord area about 100km outside of Reykjavik. There were horses milling about, so we got out to do some exploring. At first I was surprised how tame the horses were around humans and how easy it was for Rebekka, who, hitherto was known only to me as the camera whisperer.  I started going back through my photos from that trip, and I found this one to share with y’all.

One of her favorite things to do is jump in a car and go drive around Iceland to get lost. I like that so much too, that’s just what I did! Below the photo of Rebekka are a few shots from other fjords that knife into the meandering coastline and various places that kept me walking across the tundra as moody skies rolled in. She says she doesn’t take the raw beauty of Iceland for granted, and I believe her.

I’m embarrassed that I can’t remember the name of that little island out there.  I think it’s called Bird Island… but I am not totally sure!   If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d open up Google Earth to figure it out for sure.  But then I know I have a lot of clever readers who can probably tell me for sure!

This was taken in Glacier National Park.  I woke up around 5 AM to drive out to this lake to capture the little island in the soft morning light.  I really like this area of the Rockies.  They seem very old and ancient to me.  I spent the rest of the morning tromping through the forest, trying to find more interesting vantage points while making enough noise to scare away any grizzlies that might have been looking to get me in an interesting vantage point.

In reverse order of the titles, some of you might notice that I have added Facebook Comments below, so now you can leave comments with the old style or the new style. I left both systems in place since there are so many good previous comments, and they are not really convertible. The New Facebook comments are pretty cool because they re-use your Facebook info, and it extends that community and network of friends, since all these networks come together nowadays. It took a tiny bit of coding to set myself up as a Facebook Developer, but it wasn’t so tough (I knew that major in Computer Science would come in handy some day!).

There is a very nice community of people that come here to the site! You all are very nice and helpful… you give excellent comments, help one another out, give me advice, and drop all kinds of cool info bombs on the crowd. Thanks for that! I hope this Facebook comment thing can help more people to join the fun.

Anyway, to the photo for the day. This is not the usual, but it was such a cool slice of life, I could not pass it up! I was walking through the streets of Malacca in southern Malaysia, and building after building have all sorts of industry spilling out of them. Many of them are just deep garages where people have holed up to perfect one craft or another. This one was full of thousands of little bicycle parts. I stood out front for a while, watching all of them slowly convert the metallic entropy into bicycles…

The second photo below was taken in a similar fashion, although it was in the backstreets of Bangkok, Thailand.

There is a spread of farms in the plains that face the northern face of the Grand Teton mountains in Wyoming. I explored all around the area to find as many wonderful little things that I could find. There was this old little shack sitting alone in the middle of a field, so I had to jump a fence and circumnavigate a few bison to grab a quick shot for you all! 🙂

The one below here is one that Flickr deleted!

It was a nice clear night, which I normally don’t like for these sorts of shots. I prefer the sky to have some clouds and a bit of drama… but the best thing about a clear night is a little 10 minute window when the sky has a nice spectrum of blues and light reds while the sun plays with the atmosphere. Big cities always start to light up right around this time, so it’s prime photo-takin’ time. I thought the deco border of the building looked pretty cool, so I was aiming to have it become the bottom grill along the border.

For those of you that have never been to New York, Central Park is that big green rectangle in the middle there. You can see a few lakes, trees, and paths scattered about.

On one special night per week at Disney World, they have this pirates and princesses party. This last year, I took my son, who was totally into Pirates of the Caribbean at the time. He went in full regalia and ran around like a nut… it was great and he had a super time!

The fireworks show is over the top on this night, and they project all kinds of cool stuff on the “Cinderella Castle” (that’s what my daughter calls it as she screams it out every time I have to watch that infernal Tinkerbell DVD).

…and next Thursday night you are all invited to my little photography talk here in Austin. It’s free… I know its being put on by a Mac user group, but PC users are welcome too. I think I will be giving a little tutorial too! You can get a map, times and stuff, at this website.

Some towns seem to have taken the meme of painting everything in nice colors very seriously.  I wonder how these things get started.  I assume, like other things, a few well-connected neighbors in conspicuous places start painting their homes with interesting colors, and then it spreads on its own.   Anyway, however it starts, I think its cool and I wish stuff was colorful like this everywhere!