Category: Photography

It’s here! The Kickstarter project to make a book from the Transamerica View 2012 project is now live!

Last year, I started a project to document my daily view of the Transamerica Pyramid. I used my iPhone and the Hipstamatic app to make an image of the view every day. The result was 256 unique images of the Pyramid. I had always envisioned that the project would take on a physical form, either through a series of prints or a book. After considerable research, I have decided that the best format is a 12″ x 12″ 72-page full color photo book. This size will allow plenty of space for four images on each page, and there will be enough pages to dedicate a full page to some of my favorite images from the project. The book will be printed by Oddi, a company with many years of experience producing high-quality art catalogs and photo books.

Printing a book like this is a large project, and I need your help! If you would like to help make this project a success, please consider backing it on Kickstarter. You can donate any amount and receive a digital copy of the book. For donations at the $10 level and up, the rewards range from a postcard to prints to a poster to the book itself.

If you would like to see all the images, they can be seen here.

Thanks for taking the time to check out the project. Tell your friends! Tweet it! Post it on Facebook and Google Plus! Let’s make this happen!

At the beginning of 2012, I decided to take advantage of the awesome view of the Transamerica Building from the offices I work in. Every day when I arrived at work, I used my iPhone and the Hipstamatic app to take a picture of the view. I used random settings, rather than using my favorite settings, just to make sure there was some variety.

Over the course of the year, I made 256 images. This makes a nice 16×16 grid, and since Hipstamatic images are square format, the resulting grid is a square.

Taking on a year-long project that requires a photo nearly every day is a challenge. Not every image was particularly interesting to me on its own. However, the resulting collection of images as a whole makes the effort worth while to me. In addition, there is the satisfaction that comes from completing a project.

Why not try it yourself? If you have a smartphone, you have all the tools you need. Just select a view that you see most days. Maybe the view from your office window, the view from your daily commute, or the view from your home. Set an alarm to remind yourself to make the photo every day. Get in the habit of posting the resulting image to Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, or another site that allows you to share photos. Once you get in the habit, you will undoubtedly find yourself looking forward to this part of your daily routine.

When you post your image, include the tag “dailyview”. It is fun to look at this tag on Instagram or Flickr and see all the other daily views that people are posting.

What if you miss a day? Don’t worry about it! Just keep going. Over the course of the year, you will still end up with a great collection of images. And who knows… you may decide to keep up your daily view project for a long time to come!

I recently completed one of my photo projects for 2012, the Color Challenge. The concept was to pick one color each month, and then shoot photographs based on that color. Each month, pick your nine best shots and share them.

This resulted in 108 images, which can be seen in this Flickr set.

I have also published a print book and an ebook containing the images from the project. The print book can be found on Blurb, and the iPad ebook can be found in the iTunes store. If you don’t have an iPad, there is a PDF version available for download here. The print version is available at cost, and the electronic versions are free. All content is licensed under the Creative Commons.

If you have never done a year long photo project before, I encourage you to try it. It’s a great way to motivate yourself to pick up the camera and shoot, and it always feels good to complete the project. Keep an eye on photochallenge.org for some new challenges coming in 2013!

Portrait

June 14th, 2012 Permalink

Portrait

Made this one by shooting with my iPhone through a Diana lens, then processing in Camera+.

My Photo Workflow

March 18th, 2012 Permalink

One of the questions I get asked quite often is how I process and organize all my images. I have tried different tools, including iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom. Each of these tools has strengths and weaknesses. iPhoto comes preinstalled on a Mac and provides basic photo editing and organization tools. Aperture and Lightroom pick up where iPhoto leaves off, offering more advanced editing capabilities, seamless integration with third-party plugins, and much better performance when dealing with large libraries. I have been using Lightroom since January of 2010, and it has become my favorite tool for photo processing and organization.

Over the last two years, I have developed a workflow that allows me to quickly pick and process images, automatically find images that need to be processed, and locate any image quickly. My workflow can be broken down into four parts: Import, Process, Export, and Backup.

Step One: Import
The first step is to import images into Lightroom. I keep my Lightroom libraries on external mirrored hard drives, and import images into folders named by the year and month, for example “2012-03 Photos” would hold photos from March of 2012.

Some folders in Lightroom

I have Lightroom convert the images to DNG format upon import. If the images I am importing all have something in common, for example if they are all taken at the same event or location, I will specify keywords for the images at import time. Importing images into folders for each month helps to make the next step more manageable.

Step Two: Processing
Processing involves looking at the imported images, rejecting images that are unacceptable for some reason, adjusting images that I want to keep, and adding keywords. To make it easier to track which images I have not yet processed, I use Smart Collections. A Smart Collection is a virtual folder that contains all images that meet specific criteria. Smart Collections allow you to filter your images in many different ways, and the contents update in real time. I use Smart Collections to group images from specific photo shoots, images for specific projects, images that need to be processed, and images that are ready to be uploaded. Images in Smart Collections are just pointers to the images in your image library, so images can appear in multiple Smart Collections without taking up extra disk space.

I make a Smart Collection for each month of images, naming it with the year, month, and “Undeveloped”. The criteria for the Smart Collection includes all images captured that month, with a rating of less than one star, and a pick flag that is not rejected. The dialog in Lightroom looks like this:

In this example, the Smart Collection will contain all the images that I have taken in March of 2012, and that I have not yet processed. When I am ready to process images, I click on the Smart Collection that I want to work on and start looking at images. Images that I know I do not want to process get marked as Rejected by pressing the “x” key. When I reject an image, it immediately disappears from the Smart Collection, and the next image is displayed. When I find an image that I want to keep, I switch to the Develop module (option-command-2) and make adjustments. When I am satisfied with the adjustments, I switch back to the Library module (option-command-1), add Keywords to the image, add a title, and rate it with three to five stars, depending on how strong I feel the image is. Once I rate it, the photo disappears from the Smart Collection and the next image is displayed. By using this simple reject/rate technique, I let Lightroom keep track of images that need to be processed, freeing me to concentrate on the images themselves.

Some Collections in Lightroom

This workflow also ensures that I have added keywords to every single image that I have processed. Adding keywords to images is very important. Without keywords, photo management quickly becomes an impossible task. But when keywords are added to every image, it becomes a simple matter to find any image without having to remember when it was taken or what folder it might have been saved in. In addition, most photo sharing sites automatically parse the keyword data, making it easier for potential clients to find your images online. I always include the location of the image (City, County, State, and Country), information about the subject (Neon, Architecture, Graffiti), and keywords describing other things about the image. I would rather have too much information here than not enough. If you build your keywords in a hierarchy, Lightroom will automatically add parent keywords. I have created lists of location keywords from USGS data which can be imported into Lightroom. When I add “San Francisco” as a keyword, Lightroom adds “San Francisco County”, “California”, and “USA” for me.

This image contains the keywords Abstract, Architecture, Boston, Building, Cambridge, Distortion, MIT, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Reflection, USA, MA, United States, Gehry, Frank Gehry, Stata Center

You may wonder why I use three stars and higher for images that I have processed. What about one or two stars? I use one or two stars to rate images that were used as source images for other processing. For example, if I send an image out to Silver Efex Pro for processing, I will rate the resulting image with three or more stars, and the original image with one or two stars. This makes sure that I keep both the source and processed image, and removes the images from the Undeveloped Smart Collection. The images with three or more stars end up in a Smart Collection that is used in the next step.

Step Three: Export
Once I have a batch of images ready to export, I click my Smart Collection “Ready to Upload”. This collection includes all images that have a rating of three or more stars, and that do not contain the keyword “exported”. I export these images as high-quality JPEG files to a directory on my local hard drive. Once the export is completed, I add the keyword “exported” and the files disappear from the Smart Collection.

I then upload the images to various photo sharing sites. Every image that is exported will end up on Flickr. Selected images are also uploaded to other sites, such as 500px and Pure Photo. When I have uploaded the images, I delete the JPEG from my local hard drive. I know that I can export the images from Lightroom at any time, so I don’t feel that there is a need to keep the JPEG images. I know some photographers who also keep the JPEG images on external hard drives.

Step Four: Backup
My photo library represents a significant amount of time and effort over the course of many years. To ensure that my images are safe, I have a three-part backup strategy. The first part is to keep my images on external mirrored hard drives. In the event that a hard drive fails, I can simply replace it and rebuild the mirror. The second part of my backup strategy is a weekly backup of the external hard drive to a second external hard drive. The second hard drive is kept at a separate location. This helps to prevent the loss of images from theft of disaster. The third part of my backup strategy is the files that I have uploaded to photo sharing sites. If a disaster were to destroy both my working copy and backup copy, I would still be able to retrieve the JPEG images.

This workflow is the result of many hours spent in Lightroom, and reflects how I ultimately use most of my images. Some of the techniques may not work for you, or you may find ways to improve upon what I am doing. Let me know what you think, and how your own workflow compares. Happy shooting!

I will be presenting selected images from my “Feet On Muni” project at the Open Show iPhone Stories event at the Apple Store in San Francisco on March 15th. The event is from 7-9 PM, is open to the public, and will feature presentations from five artists. You can RSVP on the event page.

Feet On Muni started because that was what I noticed when I rode Muni. I realized that I was always looking down: Perhaps playing a game on my iPhone, reading, or listening to music, but always looking down. I was seeing people’s feet, but not the people. The more I thought about it, the more I noticed that there is little interaction between passengers. We seem to seek anonymity while crowded together in public.

These images attempt to reflect that sense of anonymity. We know there are people present, but we don’t know who they are. We could walk by them on the street and not recognize that we were riding with them on our morning commute.

On A Drinking Spree

A little more about Open Show, from their web site:

Open Show organizes innovative events worldwide where the public can see compelling work and interact directly with photographers, filmmakers and multimedia producers in high‐profile spaces.

We work with our network of local co-producers to connect, inspire and educate both creators and the public through academic institutions, media, non‐profits, galleries, studios, companies and other partners.

Lightroom’s hierarchical keywords make it very easy to tag your photos with lots of meaningful data. For example, when I tag a photo with “San Francisco”, it automatically inherits “San Francisco County”, “California”, and “USA”. It is too much work to enter all that data manually, so I used the geographic data from the USGS geonames website and wrote some scripts to transform it into a format that Lightroom can import.

Files are available for all 50 states, as well as associated areas and territories. You can also download data for counties within states. The data is available on my Location Keywords for Lightroom page.

2011: A Look Back

December 30th, 2011 Permalink

Some of my favorite photos from 2011.

It’s the end of another year, and time to take a look back. I have found myself shooting more and more with my iPhone this year. The increasing number of photo apps has been part of the reason, and the convenience another. Mobile photographers like Doctor Popular have inspired me to push the iPhone to new limits. I also wrote Interlacer, a photo app for iOS devices.

However, I still shoot regularly with digital, and this year finally acquired the Canon 135 f/2L lens. This is a lens I have been wanting for several years, and it has quickly become my favorite lens. It’s sharp and the bokeh it produces is silky smooth. I’m looking forward to using it more in upcoming projects during 2012.

Here are twelve picks from the 1,600 or so photos I shared on Flickr during 2011. I don’t know if they are the best images I posted during 2011, but they are some of my favorites. Enjoy!

Bittersweet

Opera In The Alley

Drowning, Screaming

99 Cent Discount Outlet

Caferocks

The Smell Of The Warm Summer Air

Everybody In Town Today

Give Me A Start

Urban Sunsets

Now I Know How That Felt

Ya Vacancy

Just Assume That I Care

Interlacer Contest Winners

July 4th, 2011 Permalink

It was difficult, but we narrowed down the Interlacer contest entries to select ten winners.

Last month, I announced a contest for users of Interlacer and Instagram. There were a lot of great entries, and it was difficult to choose only 10. The images are presented here, in no particular order. In the end, I think we got a great cross-section of really interesting images that people are creating on the iPhone.

This image by Ventri was chosen as the overall favorite:

This image by Always Breaking was chosen as the most creative. Both Doc Pop and I loved the way the interlace effect echoed the architectural theme of the shot:

dottiebobottie made this cool image of the 16th Street BART station:

deena21 created this interesting double exposure portrait:

debinsf used Decim8, Camera+, Blender, and Interlacer to make a very interesting landscape image:

maansee made this image along the Embarcedero in San Francisco:

topspinguy used Interlacer, Photoforge2, Diptic, and Slitscan to make this interesting abstract image:

mikistrange used Photoforge2 and Interlacer to come up with this image:

brandondoran came up with this creative entry:

amywhiggins used Stripecam and Interlacer to create this abstract:

I want to thank all the talented photographers that took the time to post an image. Special thanks to Doc Pop for helping to select the images and to Postagram for providing prizes.

Can’t get enough? Check out all the images on Instagram that were created with Interlacer.

Interlacer was released about a month ago, and people are making some really cool images with it.

To inspire you to keep creating awesome images with Interlacer, I’ve decided to hold a photo contest during the month of June. All you have to do is process an image with Interlacer (and other apps, if you want), then post it on Instagram with an #interlacer hashtag. The top ten winners will each receive five Postagram cards. In addition, the most creative and the overall favorite image will win a $10 iTunes gift card. The contest will be judged by myself and the king of iPhone photo app experiments himself, Doctor Popular.

When you post your photos to Instagram, please make sure you tag them with #interlacer so we can find them! You are welcome to describe which apps you used to create your images as well.

Sponsored by Postagram. Thanks, guys!

Here’s the fine print:
RULES

  1. Photos must be yours
  2. Photos must be processed with Interlacer and posted to Instagram
  3. The photo on Instagram must contain the hashtag #interlacer
  4. Any photo posted between June 1, 2011 and June 30, 2011 is eligible
  5. Photos do not have to be taken with the iPhone
  6. Any combination of apps may be used to process the photo, as long as Interlacer is one of the apps
  7. Judges are not eligible to win prizes
  8. Enter as many times as you like
  9. One prize per photographer
  10. Winners will grant a non-exclusive, royalty-free license allowing their photo to be featured on the Interlacer web page and on the Interlacer App Store page for promotional purposes only. Your photo remains yours.

PRIZES
Ten photos from ten different photographers will be chosen as winners. Each winner will receive a promo code good for five Postagram cards. One of the photos will be chosen as the Most Creative, and one as the Overall Favorite. These winners will also receive an iTunes Gift Card in the amount of $10 USD.