Anyway, it was interesting to see a little bit of natural drama unfold right on my street. My camcorder was right at hand so I grabbed it and filmed a few minutes of the action. Shortly after I stopped filming the hawk finished its meal, picked a few bits of blood and meat off its talons, cleaned its beak against the wooden pole, and flew away.

Here’s the result. Lots of unsteady shots—I definitely need some practice with the stability. Not to mention just grabbing eye-catching shots. But hey, it’s a first solo outing.

Here are a few of the best photos, followed by a video slideshow made using Animoto.

Kieran and Grandma Roush Reading a Book

Kieran and Jamie on Christmas Morning

Kieran in his New Play Tunnel

And now the video:

I’ve bought several batches of cards on eBay, and whenever I’m in the vicinity of an antique shop I make a pass to see what kinds of stereo views are on sale (there are usually at least a few). I probably have 300 to 400 cards now, which is still a small group by most stereo view collectors’ standards. I wrote about my early adventures in stereo view collecting at Xconomy in December 2008.

Lately I’ve decided to get a little bit more systematic about the collection. I’m gradually going through the cards, grouping them according to the date I purchased them, numbering them, and digitizing them with a scanner. I’m uploading the finished scans to a growing Flickr photoset of stereo views, where they’re open to all (under a Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike license).

Today I uploaded a group that’s part of a genre collectors call “sentimentals,” although it also has elements of comedy. It’s a boxed set of 25 cards called “Wedding Bells.” I’m not sure who the set’s publisher is or when it came out; the box doesn’t say. I’m guessing it’s from around 1895. The set shows a young couple courting, proposing, preparing for their wedding, getting married, etc.

The set doesn’t have much of the historic, documentary, or geographical value that make most of my other cards intriguing, but I do think it offers an interesting glimpse of the Victorian ideals around courtship and marriage, including the wedding fashions of the time. Card No. 25 is cute: it shows Grandma reading a letter from the young couple, with the caption “I Always Knew It Would Be a Boy.”

I’m also working on digitizing a fascinating collection of 50 stereo cards from approximately 1906 giving a comprehensive tour of the Sears, Roebuck & Co. complex in Chicago, Illinois. These cards have extensive captions on the backs, so I’m scanning those too.

[Update 3/7/10] I’ve finished scanning the Sears, Roebuck cards. They’re collected in this photoset at Flickr.

It’s a dilemma, actually, because the HDR “look” can be peculiar, artificial, even surreal. If you lived in a world where every photograph was made this way, you’d have a constant migraine. But for now, I’m a little bit addicted to HDR (see my Flickr photoset of HDR photos of New England here). And at the risk of getting you addicted, too, I want to talk this week about how the technique works, what you can do with it, and how it can help all of us question some of the conventions and expectations we’ve built up around the art of photography, and around the related art of looking at photographs.

HDR images are unusual because they don’t represent a single moment in time, like most photos, but rather are digital fusions of several images of the same scene, taken at different exposure levels. (In photography, the longer the exposure time, the more light gets captured by a camera’s film or digital sensor, and the brighter the resulting image.) To collect raw material for an HDR image, photographers generally take at least three pictures: one that’s underexposed, one that’s overexposed, and one at a normal exposure. This is called exposure bracketing.

(This is an excerpt from the November 6, 2009 edition of World Wide Wade. To continue reading, please see the full column on Xconomy.)

In October 2008 I visited the cemetery on a crisp, cold, bright Sunday after a rainy Saturday, and got lots of gorgeous shots of the foliage, which was still shiny with damp. While the leaves were showing brilliant color, I also used that visit to start experimenting with black and white shots.

Today (Halloween 2009) was a very different kind of day at Mt. Auburn — warm (in the high 60s) and very blustery, with fast-moving clouds in the sky that kept throwing different kinds of shadows. My rechargeable camera batteries were dying, so I didn’t get as many shots as I would have liked with the Canon. But I had my iPhone with me (as always) and used that to get some nice shots, with an emphasis some of the amazing statuary around the park. A few of today’s best shots are below. (Can you tell which of the shots below came from the Canon and which came from the iPhone?) As always, you can click on the images to see larger versions.

After my recent leaf-peeping trips through New England, I’ve got a quite a little collection of cemetery shots going now — here’s my cemetery set on Flickr.

Let me know what you think in the comment section.

I was not upset about the general cloudiness, because I wanted to do some more high dynamic range (HDR) photography during the trip, and in my (limited) experience, clouds actually make HDR photos far more dramatic.

I took hundreds of shots and so far I’ve processed just over a dozen of them as tonemapped HDR images. I’m assembling the whole set of HDR photos over at Flickr, but below are a few of the more interesting ones.

Well, Facebook may still be a fad, but with 300 million users and growing, it’s a remarkably enduring one. It’s probably time for me to get used to it. On top of that, I’ve had some experiences over the last couple of weeks that have started to change my attitude about the site.

It started with my iPhone. Two weeks ago, as you might remember, I wrote a column about “The Best Camera.” It’s an iPhone app created by Seattle photographer Chase Jarvis as part of a cross-media campaign promoting his message that “the best camera is the one that’s with you.” The app lets you apply some intriguing digital effects to the photos you snap with the iPhone’s built-in camera. It also lets you upload your processed images directly to Facebook, where every new shot will show up on your Wall and in your friends’ news feeds.

I’ve sent a few of my Best Camera shots to my Facebook photo albums, and a truly surprising thing has happened. People have been commenting on the photos. Not a huge crowd of people, but enough to make me realize that there are Facebook users who actually pay attention to the new stuff they see every day, and that some of them care enough to leave feedback.

This is an excerpt from the October 9, 2009, edition of World Wide Wade. Click here to continue reading the column at Xconomy.