Leaves

Leaves I found on the ground in DC. There were a lot of them. They were pretty.

My Best Friend

So, on Monday, my Dad called me with the call I had been expecting for over a month but one that I had been dreading.  My Dad called to tell me that they would be putting Mick, our 15-year old Australian shepherd to sleep. We got him while I was still in kindergarten, and we would have never dreamed that he would make it to my senior year of college.  I still remember picking him up on St. Patrick's day of 1994 from a farm just outside of Des Moines. It was puppy-love at first sight.

Mick would sleep in my bed with me, sometimes under the covers.  He would usually stay there until I fell asleep, but then the next morning, my dad would let him into my room to jump on my bed and wake me up for school.  As I got older, there wasn't room for both of us on the bed, but I still started everyday by getting jumped on and licked by a relatively large dog.

We had a lot of fun growing up together. We explored the woods behind my house. He would chase after us as we sledded down snowy hills and would steal our hats and gloves from us once we got to the bottom. When I played catch with friends, it turned into a game of keep-away from Mick, and when he eventually did get the football/baseball/whateverball, it turned into a game of catch-the-stupid-dog-so-we-can-get-the-ball-back.

I could go on and on about Mick. How he chased the deer in the park, and how the deer weren't scared of him at all. How he used to greet my family with a special bark and how his left ear was always perked in the air. How he hated to have his paws touched and how he "played guitar" when I scratched him on his chest just below the neck.

Mick was simply the best dog a boy could ever ask for. I'm gonna miss you, buddy.

So without further delay, from about a year ago, here is a self-portrait of me with the best dog ever to grace this earth.

Octuple Stuf

All I really wanted to do was show you this Oreo. Look at it!

Row House

While walking around the Shaw-Howard area, I found this old section of row houses. The red brick and teal tops were an interesting contrast, so I decided to show it. One of my favorite parts of this scene is the old sign. I love old rusting signs like that, but unfortunately it's kind of lost in this photo. From a couple years ago, this was one of my first experiments with Photoshop Lightroom.

Fall

It's definitely fall in DC. Took this picture last weekend, but now the trees are more gorgeous than ever. Lent my camera out to someone, but should be getting it back tonight or tomorrow.

Terrifying Playground

One of my very first HDR attempts.  Also, don't take your kids here.  It is terrifying.

Narcissism

Because I know all of you want to see how I looked two years ago. Here I am. Rough, raw, and unedited.

Beer

I don't imagine many of you outside the Midwest have had Schlitz. Hell, I bet most of you in the Midwest haven't had Schlitz unless you're over fifty.  Way back a million years ago, like when my parents were in college, it was the cheap beer of choice.  The original Natty, if you will. They changed the formula, and apparently it made the already crappy beer undrinkable.  Recently, Schlitz reverted back to its old formula, and the beer is making somewhat of a come back. I have even had more than one!

Pontiac

The same day I caught John McCain eating a pork chop on a stick, I took this shot of an old Pontiac at the Iowa State Fair. Do any of my readers know what model this is or what year? I know nothing about cars.

Smile

One of the reasons my friends hate me is because when I have my camera, I am constantly taking pictures of them. I know I will throw out most of the pictures I take, but the reason I take so many of them is so that they get used to the camera and act natural. That's exactly what happened here with my friend. We had gone out on a walk to take pictures, and every couple of minutes or so, I would take a picture of her. I got the usual playful "stop it" and "cut it out," but she finally relaxed a little bit and I got this picture of her towards the end of our walk. 

Solar House

This is the side of a solar house on the National Mall in DC built for the Solar Decathlon. I can't remember who built this house, but I toured the house built by Iowa State. One of my friends from high school helped build the house, and it was pretty cool.

One thing that I have always liked in photos, but never have done all that well myself are photos with a bunch of parallel lines crossing the photo. It might be benches in a stadium, ceiling beams, or something else. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

Warning

Having never been to Northwestern, I decided to take a walk around campus.  The weather was miserable, so I didn't stay out very long.  I found this sign as I was walking out to the Lake Michigan shore.

Orange

Orange is my favorite color, and this is one of my favorite flowers.  Grown at home last summer.

fotoflōt Review

I have been looking for a way to display my HDR photos for quite some time now, and I think I've finally found a way. Framing has always been too expensive, especially when I have an odd sized picture. I used Imagekind once, and it worked alright for a normal photograph, but I was a little worried about putting an HDR behind glass.

I first found fotoflōt a couple of years ago while looking for framing options, and although I thought it looked cool, I never really considered it. fotoflōt does framing in a totally different way than ever before because it isn't actually framing at all. Instead, the photo is printed and mounted onto a 1/8 inch thick sheet acrylic. Magnets are attached to the back of the picture, and once the included wall mount is installed, the picture snaps to the wall mount and appears to float just off the surface of the wall.

I finally caved last week, and bought my first fotoflōt. It came yesterday, and I was so excited to see it, I opened the box before I even got back to my 4th floor apartment after picking it up on the 1st. I picked it out of the pile of boxes left at our apartment because of the big fotoflōt sticker on the box.

Once I got the thing open, I was actually a little disappointed at first.  The print seemed a little too dark.  Then I decided to turn on the light.  The image popped! I was so excited.  Installing the wall mount was a little difficult, but that's because I had no idea how to use the wall anchors (for those of you that don't know, those are the plastic things you put into drywall before you add screws).  For the record, you can also use a hook or a nail to hang the picture, but the screws are a lot more sturdy.  Here's what it looked like after I got it onto the wall.

As soon as I got the thing up on the wall, I went back to fotoflōt and ordered two more.  I ordered another shot of Chicago that's 7.5"x15" which is the same same size as the one that's on my wall now, and one of the National Cathedral that's 15"x12.5".  The National Cathedral pic is black and white, so I'm excited to see how that turns out.  I plan on doing another panorama of the American University quad once the trees change color and turn it into a 5"x25" fotoflōt.  If I had the cash, I would do one for all four seasons and hang them stacked over each other to make a square.

Price was, I couldn't complain.  While certainly not cheap, the fact that fotoflōt offers free shipping in the US made it about the same price as a cheap frame on Imagekind.  Basically, I think I'm in love with fotoflōt.

Just for fun, here's a picture of our kitchen table.  This is why my roommates hate me.  It really doesn't matter though, because they are gone this weekend.

Update: The folks over at fotoflot gave me a shout out on their blog. Check it out: http://su.pr/3DKx17

Grandmother

I have a really hard time taking pictures of strangers, so this was a little difficult for me.  While I was in Cairo on my class trip, our professor took us to the apartment of the family that hosted her while she attended the American University in Cairo. I had been snapping hundreds of pictures everyday, so I asked the professor to ask the family if it was okay for me to take pictures during the meeting.  They said it was fine, so while I was snapping pictures of them, they were snapping pictures of us on their cell phones.

Although the apartment itself was in pretty rough shape, the uneven blue on the wall, the old lace drapes, and the beatings that the door posts had taken over the year made for a perfect back drop.  Photographically speaking, the apartment was perfect.  The grandmother's dress and headpiece made the scene even more colorful.  I was so excited that the family was so comfortable with me taking pictures, especially with these two.  At the time, 20 people were crammed into the room, but by the look on their faces, you'd think they were the only two in the room.

Cartoon

Something crazy happened while I was in Baltimore this summer.  People were undergoing a bizarre transformation into cartoons.  I caught these folks about halfway through their metamorphosis.

Peace

During the winter of my freshmen year, there was an anti-war rally down on the National Mall, so I decided to go.  I wanted to show my family where I was, so I took a picture on my phone and sent it to them.  I then made the picture the background on my phone.  When I came home for spring break a couple months later, I borrowed my brother's phone only to find that he was using the picture on the background of his phone as well.  He then told me that my mom and dad were using the picture on their phones too.  Basically, my picture spread like wildfire.

Sorry for the poor image quality. The phone was made in 2005 at best.

Moving Along

Been a while since I've posted a Cairo pic.  This one is from my first day there.  By the look of this photo, you might think that they were the only people on the road. To understate it, they weren't.

My Other Roommate

I like taking portraits with a wide angle lens.  It makes people look not quite right.  It's appropriate for him. He's not quite right.

Guys, before you start reaching for your wide angle lenses to take pictures of your girlfriend, keep in mind that it makes things in the middle of the picture bulge.  Your girlfriend will not appreciate the extra 20 pounds the lens adds to her.

Alban Towers

I think my experimentation is getting a little out of hand.  This is a panorama of the apartment complex across the street from my place.. To that panorama, I applied something called the Ansel Adams effect in order to boost contrast. I think the effect misnomered and should be called the infrared effect. Infrared film produces an effect a lot like this with white leaves on the trees.  I am going to post a normal photo soon to prove I can do this photography thing well without Photoshop.

A Boat

A tugboat in New Hampshire.  It hurts my eyes.

AU Quad Panorama

Alright.  Trying out SmugMug again, so bear with me.  This is a panorama of the American University quad that I took yesterday.  As you can clearly see, the picture below is waaaay too small.  If you click on the picture here and then mouse of the picture on SmugMug, click on "O" to see all of the fine details.  Since this is a stitched image of 12 different images there are some funny mistakes.  For example, you can see the same golf cart times in this picture.  There is also another person that can be spotted three times as well.  Can you find this person?

Also, SmugMug has a feature where you can either give a photo a "thumbs up" or a "thumbs down."  If you like a picture of mine, click on the green thumbs up! Thanks all!

Mega Church

One of my friends told me that the stitching function on Photoshop CS4 was amazing, so naturally, I had to try it out.  For those of you who don't know what stitching is, it's sort of a collage.  It is a composite of a whole bunch of different images put side by side to make one image.  Photoshop will automatically stitch the images together seamlessly into one image. My friend told me about it at night, so I had to wait until morning to try it out.  I walked outside in gym shorts and a t-shirt first thing yesterday morning and walked across the street to the National Cathedral, snapped 12 shots, and walked back home.  Apparently, 12 shots is going overboard.  I crashed Photoshop a few times before it agreed to do it for me, and then once the final image was processed, every program I used struggled to open it.  Then I made things really interesting by converting it into in HDR.  Photomatix was not at all thrilled.  By the time it was all said and done, the image size was 19.8MB.  My photos, even my most intense HDRs are only around 4 or 5MB.  I really wanted to showoff my picture full size to the world, and that's where I ran into another problem.  The free flickr account only allows a maximum file size of 10MB and my SmugMug account only allows 12MB.  Upgrading my SmugMug account was a bit out of my range, so I cashed in on my parents' offer to buy me a flickr pro account.  That account allows a max size of 20MB.  Please click this image and then click "all sizes" above it once you get to the flickr page.  Then click "original."  It's huge.

Trying out Smug Mug: HDR Slideshow

Basically, I decided I hated flickr, so when I friend turned me on to Smug Mug, I decided to try it out.  I can't do this with flickr!

Yogurt

Because I occasionally enjoy yogurt.

Skyline

This photo is not a repeat.  It is the normal version of this HDR.  It's proof that I can make a good image without hyper-processing. Seriously, though, Chicago is one of my favorite cities in the world.  I think it's safe to say that the Bears are going to destroy the Lions today.

Happy October

Halloween is a little more than month away, but here are some pumpkins and a scarecrow to put you in the mood.  I'd also like to ask a  favor of all my kind viewers.  Show someone you know my blog.  I'm trying to find some incentive to keep updating this thing, and I feel like if I get more people looking, the more I'll feel obliged to post.

My 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th Roomate

Well, I suppose it's just my 3rd roommate four times.  For those of you who have wondered what my images look like in a before and after comparison of normal to HDR, here's your chance.  This is a kind of a bonus picture because it's 4-in-1.  The top left is a normal exposure, then progressing clock wise is a normal black and white, then an HDR black and white, and finally a normal HDR.  Sure, I may have overdone the HDR on this one a bit, but whatever.

My place

Because most of you haven't seen where I live, here's a picture of my living room.  Notice how the American flag takes the place of honor to the left ad is hung with the blue field on the left.  That is how to properly hang an American Flag.  I've done it a million times, I'm pretty sure.  Anyway, I invite you to come take a look for yourself sometime.  It's not quite as cool looking as in this picture though.