Special Advance Notice for Special Communities

I know you all are BUSY. Also, I know you like to come here and hang out with the community since we enjoy finding some of the best stuff, sharing tricks, techniques, and art with you. However, some people go the extra mile. For each little sub-community within Stuck In Customs, I try to do something extra special:

• Newsletter Subscribers – I gave out a $50 off coupon on something cool just to subscribers, and many acted on it!  Cool!   The Newsletter is free, so why not join?  Besides that, I try to give advance notice on all sorts of things.
• Facebook Fans – I gave these fine people an advance link to a new review I am doing, so they can see it before anyone else.  The Fan page was started by a Dutch fan, and we are starting to do all sorts of things on it, including a fun discussion on Which Lens do you Want?
• Twitter Followers – Many times throughout the week, I open it up for questions on the new book or anything in between.  I think it is cool that I can have direct contact with so many people — I really try my best to answer most everyone!  In addition, I sprinkle in all sorts of inspirational art finds and do my best to keep things fun and light – the way the internet should be!

If you are a member of one or more of these special sub-communities – let me know any other ideas you might have!

Chicago Party in a Few Days!

Woo!  This will be fun!  The New York and Austin parties were exciting and fun – I really enjoyed getting to meet people and the like.  Chicago is next.  You can either RSVP on the Facebook Event Page or see more info here on the site!

Daily Photo – Belly up to the Bar

Here is another shot from the ultra-cook Hotel Sax, where we are having the party mentioned above. The Hotel Sax has tons of these really swanky rooms that have a very nice feeling about them. Now, I don’t drink alcohol at all… which makes awesome bars like this a little disappointing… but not so disappointing if there is someone interesting to talk to!

I actually, on occasion, end up with people who spend half the time talking about previous drinking experiences while having a drinking experience. I suppose this becomes a recursive function at some point… and I guess it’s no different than going out with photographers and talking about other photography outings!

Upcoming Chicago Party

On January 2nd, we have our Chicago Book Party.  You can see more information there or sign up on the Facebook Event Page.

Free talk in New York on Dec 15th at B&H Photo – A Firehose of HDR

See the photo below? One of the most common questions I get is “How do you make an HDR out of a single photo?” Well, I’ll go over that and more on Dec 15th at noon at the Incredible B&H Photo in New York. You can get more New York B&H event info here.

Also, you may know that B&H is a partner of Stuck in Customs — I recommend you buy from them on my Digital SLR recommendations page.

Daily Photo – Chicago from a Chopper

Chicago is an awesome city and I always have a good time there.  This time of year, it gets a bit cold… and if you don’t have a good coat pre-buttoned before you go outside, well, that’s a big mistake.

I have a good friend there that arranged a helicopter for me in Chicago and took the door off!  I hung out for a few hours battling the backwash as we circled the city and flew in and out of the buildings.  This is one of the shots from that series, and I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I did shooting it!

Update: I am very excited about the HDR Workshop. Thanks for all the great feedback! Registration will open close to midnight next week at this time (The midnight between Thur and Fri… hehe… I know saying “midnight” can fall either way!). I’ll also update the full list of everything that will be included, the amazing venue, extra bonus post-processing “fun” time with me after hours, etc etc.

I was lucky enough, thanks to a friend, get entry to run around the Crimson Lounge in Chicago on a Saturday before they opened. I think maybe some of you have seen the other Chicago photos of this location… there were so many interesting things to shoot with great angles. That reminds me — did you know that if you scroll down and look on the right, you can click there to see photos from various locations around the world?

Speaking of shooting cool stuff inside of an amazing place, we have a secret event coming up in Austin in the beginning of December. But shhh… don’t tell anyone… I’ll announce more as the time gets closer. It’s going to be quite a party. It may or may not have something to do with a major book launch from someone you may or may not know.

Does anyone else remember the Red Room from Twin Peaks? I was a real fan of that show and saw every one. The Red Room was this perfectly insane place that came out of David Lynch’s mind. All the scenes inside were filmed in reverse, and the lines were spoken backwards. They were then played backwards (so it appear forwards, but twisted) to give a very creepy feeling to the place. This was where the quirky Agent Cooper visited in many of his strange dreams… It’s also because of Agent Cooper that I give myself a small gift every day, like a nice slice of pie. I wish Lynch would make a new TV series!

This is yet another shot from the Crimson Lounge in Chicago. The place was awesome. I took a ton of shots and I probably could have taken even more!

Also, we have a new sponsor of the site here – BorrowLenses.com. I have a review coming up in the next Newsletter that will talk more about it. In short, it’s like Netflix for lenses! Very cool idea… It’s a great way to try out all those lenses that you’ve always wondered about or wanted!

This is another shot of one of the coolest lounges in the world. It’s called the Crimson Lounge in downtown Chicago. It has incredible textures and lights inside that are very hard to capture unless you use this HDR technique. At least, that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Now, if you really want to see the details, I will explain how to see the huge size. I sometimes expect people know how to do this, but many do not, so I am happy to explain. 1) Click on the photo, and that will go to the Flickr page. 2) Click on ALL SIZES+ above the photo. 3) Click on ORIGINAL. That will show the huge version… the only problem is it probably won’t fit on your monitor! You can do that with all the photos I upload… I like putting the huge ones on there for people to enjoy, use as personal wallpaper on their computers, other non-commercial purposes, etc.

Here is another photo that I took that evening when I was flying in a helicopter around downtown Chicago. The pilots were cool enough to take off the door to give me an unencumbered view. That part was great — the thing I did not expect was the 200 MPH backwash flying through the cavity. It made it rather tough to keep the camera steady!

This is a shot (on Facebook) that Fiona got of me hanging out of the helicopter (albeit on the ground!).

Now, I know some of you EXIF-hunters love to know all the dirty details of the exposure. I keep it inside the Flickr page if you click on More Properties. But to save you the time, here is the basic info. BTW, this is a single-exposure RAW file that I converted into an HDR. This was shot at f/2.8 with an Exposure Bias of -5. The shutter was 1/8000, the ISO 800, and it was shot at 18mm. The camera was the Nikon D3X and it was shot with the 14-24mm 2.8 lens. I have details of all that stuff over there in the DSLR Camera equipment area.

I would love to have a mad scientist lab that is only accessible via a retinal scan and a special dance. Inside I would have all kinds of fabulous things, including a clone chamber where I would clone myself several times so that I could keep track of all my various social networks. The clone would, of course, have the same retina, but it could not gain access into the mad science lab because it would fail the special dance bit.

I’d very much like to record a music video in here alongside Flight of the Conchords.

As you can see from my intricate tagging system, this was shot in Chicago. Who is the first to know this location? ..and my Chicago insider is not allowed to say!

The Crimson Lounge sits behind some ornate doors in the lobby of the Hotel Sax in Chicago. I was lucky enough to get a private tour of this beautiful and secret place. It would be callously gauche to call this a hotel bar, because it is so much more.

There are about a dozen little rooms, enclaves, and velvet-curtained grottos that make up a textured complex of rooms that are just waiting around for me to lounge in while drinking something with an absurd name.

I collected a variety of other shots from this little gem of a place that I will be sprinkling into the blog over the next few months and years…

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.

(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).

And here is a shot of our pilots, Bill and Jeff, circling back towards the city about an hour before the sunset.