Since I’m in the middle of yet another international trip, I thought I would share this video I made on a previous one – you may remember this! There’s also a making-of on YouTube as well that you may enjoy.

Daily Photo – And on the way to Paradise…

On the way to Paradise, New Zealand is Glenorchy. Be sure to stop here and take a walk around their new boardwalks that go out through the wetlands. You better set aside 2-4 hours, like all the “little” walks around here!

Some days have the water at a pretty high level, and you can sometimes see nice shapes like this one here.

I saw that Flickr is now giving 1 TB of storage of hi-res photos to ALL users. Wow that’s kind of an insanely high number! I’m not sure how existing pros account holders (like me) think about this, but they get grandfathered into infinite, which is a lot more that 1 TB, so that is nice. The new re-design looks nice too. Here’s my Flickr page.

I wonder if they are making this move because it “sounds” good when they know that the vast majority of users will never use that much data. So, it may not be that much of a financial hit on them for the storage space. Google recently upgraded their full-rez photo allotment too, but not nearly that high. But, on the plus side, the Google one allows infinite uploads of photos smaller than 2048×2048, which I think most photos are nowadays. My friend Thomas Hawk also has a nice article about this news from Flickr on his blog.

I still use SmugMug (see SmugMug Review) as my main place for hi-rez photos and my portfolio. Still, however, I spend most of my time on these other social networks, none of which do as good of a job as displaying my portfolio of work.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I still can’t upload full-rez images on Facebook… Sad emoticon.

Did you get the free Lightroom presets upgrade?

We recently added a free bonus package to the Lightroom presets for free. If you already bought them, then this is a free upgrade! Now, we started selling these in the “old” store, which let us send out an email to everyone. But if you got them in the New StuckInCustoms Store, then your account has been automagically updated! Just login and you can re-download the package that will have all the new goodies in there!

Daily Photo – Tom with the Horse

The first time Tom and I took photos of horses was on Oahu. This was our second horse-encounter here in New Zealand! He got up close with his fisheye while I backed up with the 70-200 f/2.8 to get this shot.

I really like those mountains behind Tom. I want to get a shot of them this winter when they are all covered in snow!

I’ll be on with Leo Laporte, Om Malik, and Dwight Silverman today (Sunday) at 3 PM PT, 6 PM ET. You can watch live at http://live.twit.tv/ . If you’re around Petaluma and want to say hi, stop by! I’ll be sharing some new photos from travels and the Glass. We’ll probably also talk about stuff from Google I/O and other random tech geeky awesome stuff…

HDR with Google Glass?

I think I figured something cool out, although it is an absolute hack. But, that’s okay. I mean, if you can get the light, then you get the light. If you think about it, using Auto-bracketing on a regular camera (like a DSLR) to get an HDR is kind of a hack, since that’s not even the purpose of auto-bracketing. Today’s photo below shows the hacked effect working from a Google Glass photo. I have a lot more testing and research to do, and I’ll share it soon. It’s different than the usual HDR Tutorial (which was just re-written from the ground-up less than two weeks ago, by the way!).

An All-Glass Album

I made an All-Glass album over on Google+. I’ve been experimenting a lot with taking photos with Glass. And before you ask, regular visitors to the site (hi!) know that I post-process unapologetically. To me, the first photo is just a sketch. As long as you get enough light and color with an interesting composition, the rest of the light is yours to bend to your will. But yes, all these photos were taken with Google Glass. Some were taken on the San Francisco PhotoWalk a few days ago!

Daily Photo – Running down to the Beach

I was going down to the beach when I decided to get some quick photos up here with Glass. It didn’t take too long. Man, I sure do wish they were RAW files, but sadly they are just JPGs. It’s not the end of the world, but still… it’s a little limiting. Anyway, as you can see, the waves were crashing in and the weather was wonderful… I guess that makes up for the lack of RAW files!

Actually, maybe one of you smart people can tell me why tiny cameras like this and iPhones and Androids can’t make RAW files. I don’t know the technical reason. I assume it has something to do with sensor size and how much light it can collect, but some of that hardware stuff is beyond my ken.

After I got down there, I took a photo of the Natural Bridge, which you can see in the album above.

I’ve been using SmugMug for years (see my SmugMug Review!) – and they invited me up to give a talk. Since I’ve given many hardcore tech-talks, I decided this time to tell a few traumatic and embarrassing stories about when I was growing up and how I ended up in the world of photography…

Daily Photo – A Tropical Sunset

I did a lot of snorkeling out in that bay. This whole area of Virgin Gorda is called The Baths, and it has some of the best beaches in the world. There are basically no waves of any consequence. So, if you’re just learning to snorkel, it’s a perfect environment. The kids had a lot of fun here too… lots of private little alcoves and caves!

I believe this French newspaper article is speculating that Google Glass is too geeky for the public, and they chose to put my photo right next to a naked Robert Scoble in the shower. This may be a new internet-low for me… not sure where the link is!

Daily Photo – Bathwater Warm Pool at Sunset

I didn’t actually get in this water, but I was imagining that this was exactly the same as my body temperature. It just kinda looks like that, doesn’t it?

I took this photo at the Disney resort on Oahu. I didn’t even stay here… just stopped by for a few hours with Tom to take photos! It’s very pretty there… certainly worth a visit.

Did you miss the Hangout Show #76 when I talked to Thomas Hawk about this? We both see out of one eye, and we talked a bit about it towards the beginning of the show. To see that episode (or others you may like), go to My YouTube Channel and go find that playlist for “Trey’s Variety Hour” — then show #76 should be close to the top!

Daily Photo – Another Max Patte Statue

The Hills Golf Course is covered with these amazing sculptures! I think they have a good thing going here, and I hope they keep adding more and more statues. With all these statues and whatnot, it reminds me a bit of a miniature golf course for grownups! These statues are not on every hole, but they are elegantly placed here and there. Also, they seem to all be set up for really good photo ops as well.

When I started taking photos with my iPhone a few years ago (I’ve since switched to Android) I started taking 10x more photos per week. And just wait till more and more people get Glass; the number of photos will go up another order of magnitude. I’m taking about 100 pictures a day with it, mostly because it’s so much more convenient than pulling out my mobile phone! And, if you’re a photographer, you’re always seeing awesome little compositions that you just can’t ignore. I’m COMPELLED to take a photo!

No matter how good your workflow, you just end up with an ever-growing burden of photos. Pros have this problem, but even we have workflow issues!

So, along comes this exciting new announcement from Google – that they are using their massive server farms to intelligently organize and post-process photos for us. It looks really smart! I can just upload (which is automatic if you turn that on with your mobile phone) dozens or hundreds of photos, and it automatically puts the best photos in the front. It knows which are the best by analyzing human aesthetics in other popular photos! If I don’t agree with its suggestions (or post-processing!) I can undo those bits and make them my own. But it’s like having an assistant that does all the organizing all for me – and an assistant that gets smarter all the time.

Displacing Lightroom?

I think if you’re a casual photographer, this is a compelling new option! It’s free. It’s smart. And it will only get smarter. I notice that one problem casual photographers have with Lightroom is that things still get unorganized. It takes a workflow (and perhaps an understanding of “collections” in LR) to select the best of the best photos. Beyond that, it takes a little while to post-process the photos. It’s a bit faster if you know how to make presets and stuff, but this is still beyond the ken of casual photographers. Not everyone is a hardcore Lightroom geek, no matter what Adobe might think. It’s still a scary product to a lot of people who are just looking for a way to organize all the new photos they are taking!

The other reason casual users will like it is because the photos are automatically backed up on the cloud. That feels good because you don’t have to worry about syncing up your home library on Lightroom with the cloud. It’s confusing! Adobe still hasn’t given users an easy way to do this. People are very scared to lose their photos in a hard drive crash, and hardly anyone (especially casual users) have a good backup situation in place.

For pros that do serious post-processing and hardcore organizing, I think Lightroom is still a smart way to organize your pro photos at home… But, for all those “other” casual photos that pros take… (see the next section!)

Why it’s good for Pros:

Your first instinct might be, “Hey, I’m a pro. I use Lightroom and have a pretty good workflow. I don’t need Google’s server farms to make any decisions for me!” Well, I think you are right for your “Pro” photos that you do for clients or for your own master portfolio. But, pros also take a lot of “casual” photos. These include quick photos of your family, mobile shots from your phone, fun party shots, a casual dinner with friends, and this sort of thing. Not every photo a pro takes is a serious major undertaking.

Now, if you’re like me, then you take TWO kinds of photos. You take serious portfolio pieces and you take casual family and walking-around photos. And then you kind of have a workflow for EACH kind of photo. And for me, this has been a problem (well until this Google announcement). I have ended up with a pile of family photos that sometimes builds up over time in my Lightroom because I just haven’t had the time to go figure out the best ones and post-process. I feel bad about it — but it is a real problem!

So, in the future, I’ll still keep my pro workflow for my portfolio pieces with my usual Rambo workflow using several Adobe products (if you want to see my whole workflow, see the newly updated HDR Tutorial). But for my family and casual shots, I’m just gonna upload them to the Google Cloud and have it pick out the best ones AND post-process them. This will 1) save me a ton of time 2) unburden my mind from tasks-left-undone and 3) quickly deliver pictures to my whole family, thus increasing the circle of happiness that keeps everything zen.

Why it’s good for casual photographers:

I probably get more questions from casual photographers than pros about “How do I organize my photos?” It’s a big problem actually. The process of getting the photos off your devices, onto your computer, then selecting a few to share online is rather complex. Now I think the workflow is much simpler. There are still two situations:

1) Shooting with just a mobile phone (Android or iPhone): If you have Google+ activated and up and running, your photos can just go automatically to the cloud (private just to you by default). It will take your hundreds of photos, post-process them all, and then automatically choose the best ones and push them to the front of the album. It might make a few mistakes, but it’ll be pretty dang good. And if you don’t like the post-processing, you can undo it… But I have a feeling that people will really dig the automatic skin-softening. That is almost a universally adored feature!

2) Shooting with a compact camera or DSLR: The easiest path is just to download all the photos to a folder on your computer (put them in Lightroom, if you want) and then just upload the whole lot to Google+. Let Google figure out the best, or at least make a first pass at it. Give it a run a few times… It’s a drastic change to a workflow, yes, but I think this is a smart way to do it.

Why this is bad news for Adobe

I know some of you may disagree that “casual” photographers don’t use Lightroom, but I’ve talked to thousands of casual shooters that DO use Lightroom. It’s arguably the best way (hitherto) to organize your photos. All you need to do is take a few thousand photos a year, and you have yourself an organizational problem! There are millions of “casual” photographers that fit into this category. This is, in fact, Adobe’s biggest growth area — new photographers that are needing a way to organize and post-process their photos. They still continue to grow with pros, although you could make an argument here that that area is slowing because most pros already use Lightroom or Aperture! There’s just not a lot of room there.

But now, these casual shooters have a free way to organize and post-process their photos with this new Google server farm. Even better, the photos are backed up onto the cloud, which you don’t get with Lightroom. Google will be able to snipe away millions of users who would have previously chosen to go the Adobe route.

What I want to see next from Google:

I do like the post-processing already. I think it makes good decisions for the most part, but I’d like to have even more control on the web. I know they just bought Nik, so I can only assume that we’ll get some of those handy “Snapseed” controls soon, and then in the future, maybe some of the other cool effects from the whole Nik suite of tools. The other thing I’d like to see is the ability to upload RAW files. Once we can upload RAW files, then we’ll have even more power to post-process photos. Again, I don’t use the Google post-processing farm for my pro-portfolio pieces. I still do all that RAW processing locally.

It will be a long time before the web is fast enough for me to quickly upload a set of RAWs and process them all online. Pros will keep our hardcore processing local for quite a bit, I think. However, I am at peace with the idea that there are two kinds of photos in my life – those that need massive at-home client processing, and those that the web can organize and process for me.

Here’s a snippet from the latest tutorial for you. This is the part we filmed when we were up close to the North Korean prison here in New Zealand. I talk a bit about expanded visual consciousness…

Daily Photo – Entering the Dungeons

Here’s the dungeon from under that French chateau that we visited several months ago.

I can’t imagine actually living in a house with a dungeon. I mean, it would be pretty dang awesome, but you would also feel like you’d have to put the place to good use. I guess I have a few enemies that I could capture and put down there, but that seems a bit extreme. Maybe just have parties and stuff. Or maybe a studio for processing down there. It’s hard to say… it all seems a bit dreary.

Maybe when I get some miner-bots, I’ll minecraft up a design under my existing house and send them on their way. I can carve something out down there. Well maybe I better do it beside the house so my bad designs don’t make the whole house collapse.

Hope to see you there! See the event info here! We’ll be giving away Google Glass, so good luck to all of you attending.

New part of the HDR Tutorial – mini-masking tutorial

If you have seen the new and improved HDR Tutorial, then you may see this new video below on page 3! This describes how to do masking, which is a very common question for people that are getting started in Photoshop.

Daily Photo – The Night of the Aurora

I think these happen a lot down here in New Zealand! I’m hardly an expert though… I’m very last-minute about all these things and only know about them once they start happening. Some people are real aurora experts and track them like storms. There are websites, apps, and all sorts of things. I gotta get my act together so I can plan for these events better.

I was having so much fun with the landscape orientation… but then I decided to go vertical for a few shots, and I am glad I did!

When I show people these photos without any explanation, they never ever ask me what that yellow-green light is in the lower part. I don’t know if they just assume it is the aurora, or maybe they think it is light from a city, or maybe they think I added it in post. I just don’t know… but I do like to see people’s reactions, especially when they are confused. I don’t know why I enjoy confusing people with these sorts of photos, but it is just kinda fun. I think it is fun because I am also confused by how this kind of light can even be possible!

No? Well, me neither. I’m not sure who subscribes. I think it is an Asian magazine. Singapore? Anyway, they interviewed me, and they now have the (honor?) of having the article with the BIGGEST PHOTO OF ME EVER! haha it’s so crazy… I was shocked when someone sent me a PDF!

Actually, when I saw this giant spread, I thought that “Hardware Magazine” might be some kind of a Singaporean gay magazine.

Daily Photo – Robots in the Streets of Tokyo!

Someone gave me a hot tip to go see this cool robot area of Tokyo! There’s a place called the Robot Restaurant, and it’s one of the craziest places I have ever been!

It’s basically like Medieval Times, but with robots and girls in bikinis.

Outside the Robot Restaurant, they have all these awesome-looking robots with iPads on their chests. There are people inside, which is kind of a disappointment, but also kind of a relief. Either way, they are pretty awesome!

Recently appeared on Greek TV to talk about Google Glass and he mentioned me in a very nice way. Antonis composes a lot of the music I use in my videos, so be sure to look for his work on one of the sites below!

iTunes: http://goo.gl/LYY7j
Google Play: http://goo.gl/mtW23
Amazon MP3: http://goo.gl/SvsJq

Missed this behind the scenes video?

Last week I posted a behind-the-scenes of this shot. You can find that video right here on the blog!

Daily Photo – Ancient Mount Fuji Village

Here I am in that little village of Saiko. I don’t know if it is always relatively empty or just this one day, but hardly anyone was around. I did see this one older gentleman sauntering around, and he happened to saunter right into the frame! A lucky grab!

This “look” for this photo is a bit experimental, but I kind of like it. To achieve it (this is Photoshop-heavy-jargon I’m afraid!), you can duplicate the layer then do some extreme sharpening and a black and white conversion using something like Silver Efex Pro (there is a review here on the site). After that, you can change the blend mode to Hard Light… it makes an interesting effect!

Those of you that sign up for the free Newsletter not only hear about specials, but you sometimes get to see videos early! Like this one below… Happy subscribers got to see it first!

Behind the Scenes in the New Zealand Forest (silly video warning)

I ran around in the forest in New Zealand with Curtis, Karen, and Scott. We decided to make a video after we got to a stopping point… Anyway, here’s something fun (and maybe a tad useful) for you

Daily Photo – Exploring the old Village

If you ever get to Mont Saint Michel, give the whole place a full circle on the curtain wall. It’s easy to get up on the wall (and quite safe to walk on… even though walking on a wall sounds dangerous). There are stairs to get up there and everything. Anyway, the wall circumnavigates about a third of the old village and monastery. There are countless good angles. It’s also worth walking this route at least three times – Sunrise (or sunset), mid day, and night!