I am not able to bring my SLR with me most of the time on the Las Vegas strip due to the difficult logistics of juggling a large camera and tripod in endless seas of people unless I’m working, so I was excited to see what the new iPhone 4’s camera could do. I almost always have my phone with me, and have eagerly anticipated decent camera capabilities to merge with the incredibly useful device. If I brought my SLR to a Vegas show I would never make it inside, so a phone is the way to go for minimum fuss. This shot was taken at the end of Le Rêve at the Wynn. They don’t seem to mind photos before and after the show. I always respect the artist’s wishes against photography during the show. As a creator of content myself, I fully understand their issue with unauthorized reproduction. Plus, I occasionally enjoy time without a camera on my face. Surprisingly, this photo required very little work, a very small amount of sharpening, and a slight contrast boost to make distractions in the background fade away. That’s it! While I know an iPhone won’t be replacing my SLR anytime soon, I am looking forward to seeing what else can be done with it. Sometimes a new tool, even a seemingly less capable one, can bring a new creative outlook to your imaging.

You can’t take this picture without a very wide-angle lens.  In this case it is a Canon rectilinear 14mm that I use quite a bit in tight interior spaces.  I was at the location a tad late to have sunshine on the building face but I like the image anyway.  One of the challenges with super-wide lenses is the sky.  It captures so much that you can see distracting tone changes, so I usually try to limit the amount of sky when using this lens.  Our eyes see the rough equivalent of a standard 50mm lens perspective, so using wide-angle lets you see a new world that is often surprising when looking through the viewfinder.  I occasionally let clients see my frame-ups with this lens, and they are always amazed.  Todays point-and-shoot cameras, at their widest, are around a 24mm field of view, and rarely do they have useable viewfinder.  I doubt that you can feel the same amazement when viewing a three inch screen as when looking at the actual scene unfolding through a good viewfinder.  Of course it’s apples and oranges.  I use point-and-shoots all the time, and I’m thankful that they provide such amazing performance in tiny packages, but it will be awhile (if ever) before they offer the flexibility of an SLR.

Spending time in Santa Barbara is no hardship, but finding interesting viewpoints is always challenging in such a well loved, and photographed area.  The Mission is a well known landmark, and I was just another tourist, so I had to stay “on the rails” for the self guided tour.  Even so, there are ways to find a unique shot.  This time, my wife and mother in-law pointed this scene out for me as I was looking at a plant or something.  This happens often.  My wife is very good at finding interesting scenes, and I find a way to make them look decent.  After many years together she has developed a great eye for things that I like to photograph, and sometimes she finds things I would have never considered.   Occasionally, I am overwhelmed by the newness of a place, sometimes I just get lazy, so it’s great having that little push because I won’t pass up an opportunity for a cool shot. I didn’t bring a tilt-shift on this trip, so a little perspective correction was required to keep the converging lines at bay.  Perspective control is important to an architectural photographer, but I do enjoy crazy angles, when they are done on purpose….

Getting up early is easy with jet lag.

I decided to start over with this blog thing, and integrate it into my website a bit more.  So enjoy this picture of a nice sunrise in New Zealand to kick things off.  This one of the last trips I made with bags of film.  It was sometimes nice to be surprised by images when I got home. Laying out slides on a light table was a treat, vivid colors punching your eyes in the best possible way.  Now, I have a good idea of what I have before getting back to my office, and certainly wouldn’t trade back to the “old days” of five years ago, but shooting slides for so many years still influences how I shoot and present images today.  I always strive to achieve the colors that I use to see on the light table, a difficult task at times with raw files.  I certainly won’t missed having airport security “punish” me by opening every film canister because I refused to send them through the xray machine.  Now, I usually breeze through security, and if that was the only benefit digital offered, it would be worth it.