Stuck In Customs

Morning at Angkor Wat was a very cool experience. It was very muggy — the kind of muggy that makes you just give up and give in to being covered in sweat. I wasn’t going to any dinner parties, so I figured it was okay. Moving around the complex to get photos from many perspectives was a lot of fun… this place was a treat to compose.

In vaguely related news, a friend of mine in Shanghai just opened a new spa and used my images throughout. The one that is linked here at “Spa City 5.5” is another from this area of Cambodia. It’s not the highest quality photo of a high quality photo, but you kinda get the gist… If you want to see the original of that photo of the Angkor Wat Temple, just clicky click there!

This is yet another glacier-filled lake in the mountains between Chile & Argentina. I got up pretty high on a short hike to get this shot. I had seen this bright tuft of red leaves and wanted to work it into the final product. We were on the edge of autumn and a few leaves were starting to change colors. Most of the leaves were not in any interesting compositional angles or were impossible to get near! So this one took a bit of a hike to find and set up…

Also, thanks to everyone on Twitter and Facebook that became agitated when the cop threatened to arrest me because I looked like a professional photographer with my tripod in front of the Coke museum. Anyway, Coke saw the message on Twitter and via several emails that were sent in – so thank you Gail and all the others that helped! Props to Coke Social Media (see down in comment 55) for the response.

And last, I’ll be on FOX here in Austin this (Tuesday) morning for the morning news… A little interview at sunrise. It’s midnight and I should be asleep right now… okay here I go.

When walking around New Delhi and getting lost in the backstreets, I came to an active area where everyone was selling accoutrements for the Diwali festival. I think the ladies knew that I was not a potential buyer, but all of them on the street were very happy to show me what they had to sell. Delhi itself is a very gray and dusty town, so it makes these colorful outfits and flowers stand out even more.

Here is an HDR photo of downtown Atlanta from Olympic Park. This is not the shot I wanted, although I am still happy with it.

I had a run-in with the law this evening while I was with my friends Scott Kublin and Rick Shearer. Just next door to the Olympic Park is the aquarium and the Coke Museum with a big field in between. There were about a fifty people or so there at the park. I set up my tripod to take a photo of downtown and the Coke Museum was in the middle of the shot. A female cop of came over and told me I had to take down the tripod because I looked like a professional. Coke does not allow that, so she said. I said I’m a blogger with expensive toys and hardly a threat. Then she got quite huffy and agitated before telling me if I did not take down the tripod that I would be arrested.

This policy is absurd. She claimed that Coke is worried about their brand and image so professionals need special permission. So, it’s okay for amateurs with crappy camera-phones to take photos and upload to Facebook and Flickr? But not me, someone that can make their building look amazing? And they don’t want their pretty museum to be on a popular travel blog that gets over a quarter million visits a month and millions a year? Or even, who cares if I was not that popular and only 10 people saw it?

In fact, in the world of social media, Coke (and every other company with old-rules made by out-of-touch people) should welcome people like me that are making their brand even more popular.

And to think, I had just had a Coke.

Additional Note: There’s also quite a discussion happening over on the Facebook Thread and the Flickr Thread if you want to read even more about it! Thanks again for the interesting discussion and your insightful stories!

Finally, here is a useful guide for all the legalities around photography…

This is an awesome church in Paris. These places are great to photograph. I believe this one was taken inside Le Sacre Coeur up near the altar. At the PhotoWalk, I had a few questions about how to get a tripod into a church, of all things! I wrote up a 10-step guide for this sort of activity a while ago that you can view at your leisure!

I’m spending the weekend in Atlanta. It’s about 10 degrees cooler than Austin here, which means it’s still inhumanly hot! I did get a chance to do a little shooting this evening. I’ll see if I can grab the sunset tomorrow night! I don’t yet have a good Atlanta shot… I’ll hope for some good clouds!

Thanks to everyone who came downtown for the PhotoWalk tonight. It was lots of fun and I hope everyone got something out of it.

I asked everyone to please share their photos from the evening and encouraged people to comment on the photos of others. You can get this started by posting them either inside the Facebook Event Here, or, of you prefer Flickr, inside this thread in the Stuck In Customs group (which you can join).

According to the Driskill, we had about 160 people squeezed into the Victorian room. Cool! Is this one of the biggest PhotoWalks ever? Maybe so! Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed your assignments. By the time we got to the capitol, the group was a bit scattered! It was wild to see over a hundred photographers out there taking photos, using tripods, and running around to get the best angles. Very cool!

I set up to take some HDRs and talked through the process as much as possible. Around the backside of the capitol, I stopped here to take a photo. It just seemed like a nice spot with the little rolling hills and the evening lights. Like I explained to the group there with me, half is the shot, and the other half is the processing. There were many new people there today that are new to this scene, so I wanted to point them to the free HDR Tutorial here on the site.

I understand that CBS and NBC were there covering the event. I know I saw a camera from CBS out on 6th Street. If any of you can find footage, feel free to post it below. Thanks again to everyone that came — I hope you had fun!

An all-Texas episode of Stuck In Customs today! 🙂

We have our big PhotoWalk this evening here in Austin. It’s going to tonight (Thursday, Aug 6th) at 7:30 PM. Be at the Driskill on 6th and Brazos. We’ll meet inside the Driskill in the Victorian Room. All are welcome, whether you are a beginner, amateur, or pro. It’s simply a very laid back event where we will walk to a location, meandering this way and that as a group, taking photos, sharing techniques, and the like. Afterward, we share the photos online, exchange comments, contacts, etc etc.

Also, if you tune into ABC news in Austin on Thursday for their midday news broadcast, you might just see me! I have a short interview on there. I’ll also endeavor to get a YouTube of it to share afterward in case you miss it (like I will).

To share your photos from the PhotoWalk, you can post links in the comments here, or you can put them up in a few places. Share them on Facebook here, or share them on Flickr here!

Daily Photo – A Sunset on a Texas Farm

As for this photo, it was shot about two hours outside of Austin in a little town called Brady. You’d like it. They have a Sonic there. This was a 5-exposure HDR shot at f/16. This kept everything in focus and kept the shutter open long enough to let the clouds drag across the sensor. In these conditions, you don’t have a lot of time to fool around because the sun is bookin’ it towards the horizon. If you are new to the site, then you might enjoy reading more about how photos like this are made in the HDR Tutorial.

A Sunset on a Texas Farm

Photo Information

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• Date Taken2026-06-15 18:15:01
• CameraNIKON D3X
• Camera MakeNikon
• Exposure Time1/125
• Aperture16
• ISO50
• Focal Length31.0 mm
• FlashNo Flash
• Exposure ProgramAperture-priority AE
• Exposure Bias-3

I received some cool news today. One of my photos of Glacier National Park has showed up in the #1 spot of the Huffington Post for a story they did on the Top Ten Best National Parks You Don’t Know About. That’s another good reason to keep your images under the “Creative Commons” license; people end up using the photo for interesting stories like this. I know not all photographers agree with me – that’s okay.

The first one is the photo from the article. The others beneath it are some of my other favorites from the park. The second one is Ethan, standing on the edge of the “Going To the Sun Road”. Isn’t that a cool name for a road?

We’ll make a final announcement for the PhotoWalk on tomorrow’s post. I understand that I’ll be on the Austin ABC midday news on Thursday to talk about HDR Photography and the like. I’ll get you more details when I have ’em!

There is an amazing hallway that connects the The Hotel at Mandalay Bay with the rest of the casino. It’s long and at its end is a cool bar, which is a welcome respite no matter what kind of night you had in Vegas. Actually, I wouldn’t really know since I don’t drink… but, I do like to hang out in them, drink tomato juice, and process photos on my latptop. Yes, this is lame, I know.

I’ll be going to Vegas again in two weekends. I’ve got a list of places I want to visit with the camera… any suggestions?

After we set up camp in a little wooded area, we headed off to see if we could get to one of the glaciers by sunset.  This is near Cerro Torre, a region that is disputed between Argentina and Chile.  I didn’t see much of a dispute while I was there — no armies or anything.  I did see some wayward Guanacas, but I was not sure which side they were on.

I walked along the river until I got to a stopping point, where I got stuck.  I couldn’t cross because it was too sketchy, even for me.  So I set up here to prepare for the sunset.  This was shot about two hours prior to the sunset while I was exploring the area.  I’ll be sure to edit the other photos soon (ish) and get them up!