Travels with Rhody » photos

Pictures from an Alaskan Holiday

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 17:01:05 +0000

I journeyed to Alaska from December 18 to December 30 to spend the Christmas holiday with my family. My brother Jamie, his wife Jen, and their 2-year-old son Kieran (my nifty nephew) live in a beautiful house in the hills outside Fairbanks — which is about as far as Boston as they could live and still be on the same continent. A great time was had by all. Since I got home, I’ve been busy posting all of my trip photos and videos online. The full Flickr photoset is here and the videos are on my YouTube channel.

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:

Giving My Leaf-Peeping Shots the Animoto Treatment

admin — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:18:53 +0000

I finished converting all of the bracketed photos from my Columbus Day Weekend leaf-peeping trip with my parents into high-dynamic-range (HDR) fusion images. You can view the whole lot in this Flickr photoset. Now I’m experimenting with different ways of presenting the photos. Animoto, a cool New York-based startup, offers an interesting tool for making musical animated slide shows, so I dumped a bunch of the HDR photos into their video-maker tonight. Here’s what it came up with:

Let me know what you think in the comment section.

Rhody is Ready for His Close-Up

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:39:10 +0000

Believe it or not, I have friends who come to this blog to find out what Rhody’s been up to, not me. I guess I provoked that situation by calling the blog “Travels with Rhody.” And the truth that for as long as I’ve had a personal blog—and TWR goes back to 2004 now, though I’ve migrated it over the years from TypePad to Tumblr and now to Wordpress (and lost a lot of the old posts in the process)—part of my goal was always to chronicle life with a remarkable dog who’s worth writing about.

Today, though, some pictures. These are just a few of the many thousand I have on file.

Light and Shadow: Adventures in High Dynamic Range Photography

admin — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:50 +0000

I’d hoped to get out to World’s End yesterday, but didn’t have time. Instead I grabbed my camera and headed out on a walk around the South End, with the goal of taking some auto-bracketed pictures that I could use for my first experiments with high dynamic range (HDR) photography.

I’d read about Photomatix, a program for creating HDR photos, almost a year ago and have been meaning to try it out ever since. Made by HDRSoft, the software costs $99, but you can download a fully functional trial version (the only difference is that the trial version leaves a Photomatix watermark on your finished images.)

HDR photos look weird—that’s the first thing that needs to be acknowledged. They don’t look the way we expect photos to look. They look more like the way our eyes (which are sensitive to a far greater range of luminosities than any camera) really see the world. You know how it’s really hard to take pictures with visible detail in both the highlights and the shadows? HDR image processing software can create such images, by blending a minimum of three photos that you capture using different exposures.

There’s plenty of information on the Web about how to make HDR images, so I won’t go into it here—I liked this beginner’s tutorial from the blog 23x by Jared Earle. I just thought I’d post some of my early HDR experiments—see the shots below (and click to see larger versions). The photos below may not look so odd, but if you could compare them to the originals you’d see how much more detail they have. In fact, I’m definitely agreeing so far with what Earle writes: “When you look back at your earlier HDR attempts, you may well cringe at how overdone they look.” But it’s fun stuff, and I hope to get a better hang of the technique on some future weekend. I haven’t decided yet whether to drop $99 on the full version of Photomatix.

[Update 10/31/09: I did end up buying a full license for Photomatix, and I've created and posted a whole bunch of new HDR photos.]

Flowers in the yard of a Newton Street brownstone

Berries on a shrub

Haven Street

A former church in the South End with the Prudential Center in the background

Ansel Adams Meets Apple: The Camera Phone Craze in Photography

admin — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:04:50 +0000

Seattle-based commercial photographer Chase Jarvis is known for his arresting, color-saturated images of people in motion—skiing, swimming, somersaulting. He’s also known for (literally) trademarking the phrase “the best camera is the one you have with you.” His point is that you don’t an expensive SLR to take great pictures. You can do a lot with the camera in your pocket or purse—which more likely than not is a camera phone.

This week, Jarvis took his slogan to the next level, launching a trio of products—a book, an iPhone application, and a photo-sharing community on the Web—intended to encourage all photographers, pro and amateur alike, to get more creative with their camera phones. This cross-media campaign is a brilliant concept—both as a digital-arts-education project and as a piece of self-promotion for Jarvis and his studio—and it also happens to fit in really well with the theme I’ve been writing about in this space throughout September in “Seven Projects to Stretch your Digital Wings,” Parts 1, 2, and 3. So, if you’ve got an iPhone, go spend $2.99 on Jarvis’s app, called “Best Camera,” and consider today’s column Project #8.

There are more than 1,300 photography-related apps in the iTunes App Store, but as far as I know, Best Camera is the only one that comes with a dedicated community of other iPhone users. The app allows you to take a picture with the iPhone’s built-in camera, apply a range of cool digital filters and effects, and then upload your finished photo to a gallery that’s constantly being updated, in real time, with new photos from other Best Camera users. You can give the photos you like best a thumbs-up, and browse photos either by popularity or recentness.

This is an excerpt from my September 25, 2009 World Wide Wade column. Click here to continue reading the column at Xconomy.