Painted Desert, June 13, 2010

Continuing in the Southwest, as we were leaving the Painted Desert in Arizona, we stopped at a remote visitor center quite far from the entrance and main visitor center. It was quite a beautiful adobe building.

 As we walked outside around the visitor center and a bit further down into the valley, the views were quite spectacular.

It is difficult to capture just how far you can see if the crystal-clear air. These clouds help to show that immense sense of depth. As always, click on the images to see a larger version.

Enjoy,
Radzfoto

Grand Canyon June 10, 2010

I am going to try and catch up. I have a lot of photos from interesting places. Let's start with another visit to the Grand Canyon. The place is amazing, unbelievable and incredibly difficult to photograph. The scale is so large and the air so clear that the human mind has difficulty understanding how far it is seeing. You can see for hundreds of miles. It goes on forever. You look down one mile!

Below is my youngest son looking down that mile depth and simultaneously scaring the you-know-what out of me. Did I mention that I am terrified of heights?

Here are just two more scenes from this national treasure that is ours.

All taken with rapidly changing weather and light. It had been completely overcast, very cold (for June), and raining hard. Just as sunset approached, the skies suddenly cleared. Miraculous!

On photo software in Linux and Windows

It's been over a year since I posted last, and, to be honest, it's a year that I would prefer not to repeat. But back to photography. This post is about photo software (in a way).

As some of you know, I am a big proponent of open source for content and software. Most of my photographs are posted under Creative Commons license with little or no restrictions on their use. In my company, we use almost exclusively open source software including applications such as OpenOffice.org and many others.

However, I have been loath to give up Adobe Photoshop, which is truly an excellent piece of software, and I value paying for good technology. But I have continued to search for good alternatives. For my serious editing jobs, the GIMP offers a very solid alternative, but it still lacks 16-bit color depth support. For casual family snapshots, I often use Picasa, but I never liked its interface very much. Recently, I found a application called Fotoxx that is absolutely wonderful. It's designed just for photo editing, but it is easy to use, yet very powerful, and it even supports 16-bit color depth. I find myself using it almost exclusively these days.

One big caveat: it only runs on Linux. Personally, I want to switch to Ubuntu Linux full time, but I am stuck with Windows for the time being for only one reason: Netflix. I love streaming movies, and Netflix only works under Windows because it uses Microsoft's Silverlight platform for video delivery and digital rights management. Arghhhh!

But I found a great solution: I run Ubuntu in an Oracle VirtualBox (also open source!) and then I run Fotoxx. I can set up shared folders so that my Ubuntu "window" can access all my photographs on my Windows computer. Fast, easy and it works wonderfully. And, let's face it, Ubuntu is downright awesome.

Well, that's it for now. I hope to post more photos soon. I have some great photos from Germany that I want to share with you.

Radzfoto

A Year in Trees

It's a bit more than a year, but you get the idea. I did not realize that trees were playing such a central role in my photographs until I started to photograph trees themselves with all their unusual shapes, textures and colors.

In each of these photographs, trees play a central role in the composition. The trees are either the main subject or they frame the photograph. In several cases, the trees create balance and perspective.

This collection of tree photographs spans 4 countries (Brazil, Chile, Mexico and the United States) and two states in the US, California and New Mexico.

I hope you enjoy the tour.
Radzfoto

Using the work of others to build something better

From Schmap selections

From Schmap selections

Recently I received a request for the use of a couple of my photographs (above) from an online mapping and travel guide company called Schmap. This company searches the photo sharing website Flickr for photographs that they like and then ask the owners for permission to use them as part of their online service. As an amateur photographer, I was flattered to receive the requests and I immediately gave them permission to use my images.

When I told my friends and family about this, almost everyone asked: "Are they paying you?" It never occurred to me to ask for money. I was simply pleased that more people would get to enjoy the two photos that they selected. This question made me think about the fundamental idea behind Creative Commons which is to offer a flexibile licensing structure so that others can build on your work. All of my photographs and all the content in this blog are marked as "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License".

I realize that Schmap may make some money from the use of my photographs. I am happy for them to do that. Some photographers may be angry that the "value" of the photograph is somehow lessened by us amateurs. But I think that photography is going through a dramatic shift from "profession" to "vocation", not unlike what blogging is doing to the mainstream press. This does not mean that professional photographers will disappear. There will still be a place for professionals who are hired to shoot events, models and specific assignments. However, many photographic requirements will be satisfied through the self-organized content on the Internet.

A couple of months ago, I saw a video presentation on ted.com by Clay Shirky entitled Institutions vs. collaboration (see the video here) that specifically addresses the social transition from institution to collaboration. He argues that certain tasks are being done through strong communication tools such as cell phones and the Internet that allow groups of people to self-organize and for others to benefit from this type of self-organization in ways that the individual contributors don't even realize. He describes the use of "tags" for photographs in Flickr and how they help organize searches for photographic content. In my particular case, Schmap was looking for specific content for their travel guides and searched the images that individuals had uploaded to Flickr.

Mr. Shirky does not apply a value judgement to this transition. He merely describes a societal process that is occurring. For me, it is enough to know that my photographs are now published and that others will enjoy them or that they will be useful. I know many amateur photographers from my youth before the Internet and before digital cameras that have large collections of negatives, slides and prints sitting in boxes. It is impractical to scan large quantities of photographs, so they just scan a small number. But, in my case, Schmap selected photographs that would not necessarily have been my first choice. The ability to search through a large collection with the use of tags provides a new way to view and use photographs that was not possible before. Schmap is building a business around that concept.

I hope that others find ways to use my photographic efforts to build bigger and better things.

Radzfoto

Remembering a year and a half of travel, October 12, 2008

I always want to post new photographs with new ideas, but sometimes it's important to look back and remember where you've been. So I decided to do something a little different.

This video is a travel log of the cities, states and countries that I have visited in the last 18 months from mid 2007 until now.

I hope you enjoy the worldwind trip in 7 minutes.

Radzfoto

Good friends

Good friends, Santiago, Chile, September 5, 2008

I have been friends with Pepi since as long as I can remember, and I really mean that I cannot remember a time when I did not know her. My mom says that we met when we were two months old.

I took about a dozen photographs just before lunch on a beautiful September afternoon as we talked together with her husband. I think that the photographs tell a story, a story of love and happiness, but also a story of a life with difficult lessons and great trials and sadness. She is normally very difficult to photograph, glaring at the camera, but for some reason that afternoon she was relaxed and open.

I would rather say no more about her life or the photographs. I will let them tell their own story.

Enjoy!
Radzfoto