It was dark in Hangzhou, former home of the Song Dynasty in Southern China. The Songs ran the show until the Mongols invaded in the 1200’s. No one ever expects the Mongol invasion.
Now it is devoid of Mongols, but it is filled with cute Ewok-like creatures that live up in the hills and along the idyllic lake.
SXSW is a big deal down here in Austin! I missed the first few days in Chicago, and when I arrived back I see it was just as crazy as I expected. Our studio is right on 6th street, which has been pretty much a nonstop party for the past week. Of all the various locales where the top bands play, this is one of the better-known ones. It’s called Emo’s, and a closeup of the little sign there (might need to zoom on flickr to original size?) will show a special rule for the elite musician class of Austin who might be surprised to know they get their own sweet set of traffic laws.
I notice that good interior design, once rare, now is pervasive. Something has happened in the last 10 years that has enabled the best interior designers in the world to get their work spread widely. It’s snowballed because now everyone has high expectations everywhere they go.
When I stayed in Houston, I went to The Magnolia hotel, since it was recommended by Tablet Hotels, which is my favorite hotel booking site. I normally don’t like giant hotels that are impersonal and predictable. The hotels in the tablet line seem to put a premium on good design and are more along the “boutique” specialty locations. Often, I find, they are cheaper than the Hiltons and Hyatts of the world too.
The other half of good interior design is that it is traditionally very difficult to capture in a photograph. Have you ever been somewhere really cool, taken a shot, then gotten home and said, “well it was much cooler in person!”. I think the problem lies in the detailed textures and light levels that change on a small scale. The eye can pick it up, but the typical camera method can’t. Of course, this HDR method I use and describe in the tutorial is perfect for picking up the subtleties of the textures and light.
In other news, the nice people at Fotoflot sent me a sample of their work using one of my photos. I put up some photos here that you can check out.
Hey everyone! Now that we have such a thriving little community here of clever commenters and cool people, I wanted to have a little site update day. There are a few interesting things and events that some of you might want to know about.
First, the site is more popular than ever! I thank YOU for telling your family and friends about it. I’m glad you find something unique about it and use it to find out unexpected things about yourself. I am sure that the word of mouth has made it as popular as it is. By every measure, we are now the #1 Travel Photography Blog on the internet. That’s no small thing! Traffic estimates are always very difficult to gauge, even with advanced tools. Google Analytics, RSS feeds, and the like have us somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000 unique visitors per month. Many of you come every day to see the latest photo, and that gets our total visits up into the millions. There are all kinds of interesting little stats too that you may find boring… like only 2.11% are using dialup…everyone is broadband now. The visitors are worldwide – from Bangladesh to Tibet to Brazil. It’s very nice suddenly having so many friends from around the world — I am honored that you like it here so much.
Second, the site is currently about to be unleashed with a whole new design! I have hired one of the best designers in the world, Fabien Barral, to come up with a new creative theme around the site. Fabien’s work is well known around the world and has a distinctive look. If you’ve ever been in Paris and walked around the streets, you have probably seen posters and art that was created by him. It’s one of those looks that just “feels” very French and different… you absolutely get the impression that you are looking at something special and different when you are seeing his work. For example, big movie companies hire him to make the French versions of posters for movies like Elizabeth. Here is a sample of that, and more of his work… and some more….
Third, there are scent trails all over. I appreciate all the Flickr visitors very much too. This is not a true measure of photo views, and it only registers for the subset of people that visit the Flickr photos. But we are up to over 16 million views there… I put that screenie below, although it is about a month old now. My emails are also overflowing with 22K unreads… sorry for that! I need some kinda system here! I feel bad for all the nice people that send out such heartfelt emails and I don’t have time to respond… my apologies.
Last, Social Networking Update! I know that many of you use a lot of social networks like me… if you want to keep the digital vapor trail alive, here are the details for you… Speaking of this Facebook Fan Club… I don’t know what to do with that. I know groups now have discussion boards on there in FB, so I suppose people could talk about general stuff instead of having to limit comments to one photo post or another. I’m not sure… like anything, we’ll see where all this stuff goes!
Anyway, I hope you like the new site… it’s coming along soon enough (or maybe already here if you are reading this after-the-fact).
Here is a shot of our pilots for the shot below, Bill and Jeff, circling back towards the city about an hour before the sunset.
(also, the site is going through a redesign… please ignore any changes you see that might mess up in IE or Safari… getting it worked out…! thanks for your patience).
I was lucky enough to be in a helicopter over Chicago at sunset. A big thanks to Fiona and our pilots Bill and Jeff. They took the door off the helicopter for me, which sounds like a good idea until you are experiencing 100 MPH of chopper backwash while hanging out trying to get this kind of shot!
It was a fun day. We stayed up for a few hours and circled around the city several times. I got hundreds of amazing shots. I haven’t had time to process any of them except for this one… but I wanted to go ahead and get it up since I know the Twitter and Facebook crowd has been waiting on it since I mentioned it on there. Also my mom was very worried about the whole door-off-the-helicopter thing.
Right in the center of the shot on the bottom is the famous Navy Pier. We timed this shot to get at the right height the second the sun dipped below the horizon to cast a rainbow of hues into the sky.
The Rockies are the source of a few rivers, and here is one of them. I can’t remember the name of it for sure (although I am sure some of my smart readers can), but I am pretty sure this is the Yellowstone (or maybe the Madison?) river, flowing westward out of the park. This part of the river is impossible to see from the road. I had to pull over and then walk over a tiny little hill/mountain to get there. I stayed at the top, listening to my ipod, waiting for the sun to set… It was all quite serene, as you can see! 🙂
After a few long days with lawyers, I was invited out to go dancing with one of ours. He’s a great guy and, as much as I like to tease lawyers as members of an impenetrable sovereign nation (they have their own superset of rules, their own imports and exports, they live among us, yet exist within a patina of independence), I do like being with them for the intellectual stimulation. From these photos, it’s hard to get any sense of intellectualism, although that’s not really the point. I suppose the counterpoint is the point in this case.
My attorney here is Chanler, the only guy consistently in all the photos! And in the end, I put up a sunset photo of Houston. That’s about the prettiest you’ll ever see Houston.
Angkor Wat was really more of a fortress than it was a temple.
There is a massive moat that encircles the complex. I can only imagine how long it took peasants to dig a thousand years ago. I also wonder how they all drank fresh water back then. I know I couldn’t go more than 10 minutes walking around the area without needing a drink. The massive heat, humidity, and standing water was a perfect recipe for cavalcade of bacteria to rise up and fight back. I don’t suppose they all boiled their water. Maybe everyone was just more hardy back then… Luckily, when I was there, there were plenty of little children running around selling me bottled water. Which, upon further reflection, I probably should not have drank.
I found this daunting chap while trekking to northern India. We stopped to rest on the long road to Agra at a fairly imposing little structure on the side of the road. I was curious to see if I could find a drink or maybe a bit of food.
As I approached, this guy stood out front. I was pretty sure he didn’t speak English. We regarded one another for a bit. I tried to survey the authenticity of his weapon and the his circumspect agility. He examined at my anachronistic garb and camera for a bit. Then I gave him the international symbol for, "Can I take a photo?" He stiffened proudly in a pose. I took a quick shot, nodded, then passed by to see what he was guarding within.
I think, as Americans, we are over-the-top interested in European train stations. I really enjoy them. I don’t know why… they just seem like really interesting places to be. This is part of the train station in Leipzig — the part after you get off the train and go into the shopping area.
Curiously, if you look at the large or original size, you can see taxi cabs driving through the inside of the mall. I do not have a full explanation for this.
