Stanford Walk

I’ll meet you all at The Oval on Thursday at 4 PM. There is ONE bit of bad news. There was going to be a talk afterward at 5:30 PM, but it looks like the auditorium at Stanford fell through. This was a surprise to me too – so, my apologies… however, the walk is still on and I look forward to meeting y’all.

As a bonus, I’ll be giving away a lot of Smugmug goodies! So be sure to come with room to take home something special!

Topaz Detail Review

Topaz Detail just upgraded their cool software. I have written a quick Topaz Detail Review, which I will add to more in coming weeks. It’s a really nice and fun program – I invite you to check it out!

Daily Photo – The Gothic Study

Note this is the “small” library. I’ll post the main library in a few weeks!

As always, you can zoom in to see the details by clicking through. The details are quite incredible, and I am sure you will delight in seeing the closeups of the hand-carved wooden arches and the painted Spanish ceilings… it was all amazing! If you look closely at the full res version towards the middle, you can see a portrait of WR Hearst when he was 31-years-old.

Filed under the categories: California, Hearst Castle, Nikon D3X, Travel

See you all today at Google!

I’m excited to meet a lot of my Google friends in person!  The talk is today, and I’ve got everything ready for it.  For reference, here are a few links I will mention during the talk:

• HDR Tutorial – Free tutorial here on the site – you’ll be up and running with a pretty pic in an hour!
• Jill Bolte Taylor – about the Right and Left Brain on TED
• HDR Spotting – a site with the Attention Distribution Engine to drive more traffic to other HDR Artists sites (still in beta – you have to get an invite code from existing member)
• Textures Tutorial - The textures and a video showing how I got those textured-photos
• Videos – A collection of free videos showing how I take HDR Photos in the field…
• Twitter and Human Evolution – A longer treatise on what it suggests…

Daily Photo – The Azure Blue Indoor Pool at Hearst Castle

I mentioned yesterday that I was able to get a private tour throughout Hearst.  It was a long and great day!  Thank goodness I had a mass of memory cards… I got so much footage it was crazy!

I could have picked a bunch of shots to be the “first”, but I thought this one was particularly wonderful.  There are two enormous pools at Hearst Castle, and this is the indoor one.  This is a nice vantage point because this spot is actually quite difficult to reach!  There is no door behind me… so I had to “shimmy” along that edge you see… It was NARROW… the shimmy was like a video game, except while holding a $10,000 camera!  Sketchy!  But I just had to get over here because I could visualize the shot before it happened…

Here’s a cool fact about this pool.  Nearby, there is a huge room that was intended for a gymnasium that Hearst never constructed. The State then made it usable for IT and Archive area, so the water cools the computers…  wild, eh?

Filed under the categories: California, Hearst Castle, Nikon D3X, Travel