You may recall the 50 States Project that I blogged about a while back. The project consisted of visiting all 50 states within the year, documenting each state with photographs along the way.
Recently the project was completed, and Sarah has published a book documenting her journey. It’s called “Changing States”, and you can get it on Blurb.
I can’t do much better than to quote her own description of the book:
An observational account of my journey to all 50 United States over the course of this year, including photographs and writing that seek to reconstruct the transformative experience.
The preview of the book on Blurb looks great. I can’t wait to get my hands on a hard copy. Congrats on completing your project, Sarah!
Last night I joined a large group of photographers at the Ferry Building in San Francisco for a nighttime photowalk. We shot around Pier 14 and the spider sculpture before splitting off into a couple of groups. There were lots of new faces there, which is always nice to see.
I have started up a new blog called “Through My Eyes”. It will be photos only, in a large format. This is where I will showcase my favorite photos. There will also be links to purchase prints.
I will still be blogging here about photography, the photo challenges, and random stuff. Eventually this blog will move to the new domain, when I have time to figure out how to migrate the content seamlessly.
Head on over to Through My Eyes and check it out. Let me know what you think of the layout. It’s a work in progress, so it may have some rough spots. Thanks for your interest!
The 2008 Challenge was a challenge. One photo per week, documenting my community. Committing to shoot the same theme every week was not always easy. Some weeks I had no idea what I was going to shoot. Some weeks I just didn’t want to shoot. But I managed complete it. Here are some things I learned from the experience:
Planning is essential
Doing some research about my community and planning to shoot specific things greatly helped in completing the project. I found a list of Richmond fire stations and a list of public art in Richmond. These lists provided an abundance of subject matter. Each week I picked one of the items on the list to shoot.
Don’t wait until the last minute
It was much easier to pick a subject and attempt to shoot it at the beginning of the week. If the subject was no longer there (as was the case for some of the public art I tried to shoot), I could pick another subject and shoot it later in the week.
Make the project public
Posting the shots on flickr, zooomr, and my blog gave me incentive to complete the project once I had started it. The shots appeared at photochallenge.org as well.
Tag the photos and make a set
Tagging each photo with ‘2008challenge’ made it possible to see everybody’s 2008 Challenge photos. In addition, it made it simple to automatically add my photos to a 2008 Challenge set. Flickr does not have the ability to create sets automatically based on tags, but you can use SmartSetr to do it.
Some of the project photos are not very inspired. Some are quite boring. Some I am really not happy with at all. But I posted them anyway, and I am happy with the project as a whole.
I’m really looking forward to the 2009 Challenge, and seeing what the completed project will look like at the end of next year. Can you do the 2009 Challenge as well? Why not give it a shot? It will be interesting to see a whole pool of photos from the year!
My mom, who has been taking photos for as long as I can remember, has recently joined Flickr. She has been shooting with digital cameras for several years now, and recently moved up to a Canon G9. You can imagine the backlog of photos that are on her computer waiting to be uploaded!
The four photos above are from her recent uploads. There’s more good stuff in her photostream, and much more to come. It’s worth watching.
Testing out animoto, a web site that spits out a video based on the music and images you give it. You can re-render the video over and over, and get different results each time.
You can see the photos of the locks on Zooomr or Flickr.
Thanks for all your votes on my post Help Me Pick. The post has been updated to show the total votes for each photo, and comments have been closed. The winners were:
Number one: “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams” with 13 votes
I need to choose three photos to show at a restaurant in San Francisco in December. Here are twelve of my favorites. Pick your favorite three, and leave a comment with your choices. You can just use the numbers, there’s no need to type out the whole titles. Your choices will determine which shots I show. If you want to see a photo larger, click it and it will take you to the photo on Zooomr.
Thanks for your help!
Update: Thanks for your comments! The winners were #1, with 13 votes, #6, with 11 votes, and #8, with 8 votes.
1) Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams (13 votes)
2) Vintage Drag Queen (4 votes)
3) Fenderlicious (2 votes)
4) Zero (4 votes)
5) Perspectives Change (2 votes)
6) Number One Crush (8 votes)
7) Left Turn (0 votes)
8 ) Make Another Round (11 votes)
9) Watched You Waiting (5 votes)
10) For The Love Of A Girl (3 votes)
11) Futureland (5 votes)
12) I Came Around To Tear Your Little World Apart (0 votes)
I like to take a screen shot every so often of the photos that I have marked as favorites on Zooomr. Here is a capture of my favorites, sorted by awesomeness. There is so much great photography happening over on Zooomr, it almost seems unfair to only show a small portion of it. But if you want to see more, just click the photo to get to Zooomr, and start exploring.
You may have seen still photos where people paint with light. Basically, it’s a long exposure taken at night, and somebody is waving a light source around in a pattern. The long exposure means that the camera sees the path of the light source, so the net effect is a shape painted with light.
Well, today I came across this animation on Zooomr, which takes the idea of painting with light to a new level. I can’t imagine how much time this must have taken to put together, but is is pretty impressive. Check it out.
