400 miles, 4 states, 182 photos:
The images in the video are all from my trip from Pennsylvania to Virginia to visit my brother, by way of Shenandoah National Park. With this in-car camera rig, I used a radio remote to trigger the shutter when there was an interesting scene. Post-production was done in Aperture, Quicktime, and iMovie HD.
John Fielder remarked that the best time for photos is often when normal people would like to be eating dinner, so if you want the shot, pack a sandwich along with your camera. Catching this sunset at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia proved this to be pretty good advice!
I arrived in the park later than planned, which left me just enough time to make camp before driving to the trail head. Dinner was in the car - a turkey sandwich from the camp store. With the light waning, I double-timed it up the trail to the summit of Stony Man, and was rewarded with a great view, beautiful colors, and a nice collection of rocks and small pools in the foreground. After a few hours of shooting the changing scene, I donned a headlight and hiked back down in the dark, relieved that the glowing eyes in the forest were just deer and rabbits, not bears!
Three weeks in southeast Asia exploring new places with camera in hand made for some great photos. In this post, I’ll elaborate on the gear, shooting, and processing of travel photos from halfway around the world.
Not being a city person, the main attraction to me of Bangkok are the sights and many historic temples or wats. Built by various rulers, they feature ornate and colorful tile and architecture on the outside, and contain richly painted interiours housing a variety of Buddha statues, including a massive reclining Buddha at Wat Pho.
Pre-trip Flickr-scouting confined a guidebook recommendation: hitting the upstairs bar at The Deck to watch the sunset behind Wat Arun. It was a spectular view well worth the wait; the sun glowed red through the hazy clouds and soon after it set Wat Arun’s dramatic night-time lighting kicked on. It’s obviously a popular spot; myself and other photographers lined the front row of tables, and another group was actually doing some modeling photos with a studio strobe.
One of the other shooters was Tony, orginally from California and now living in Bangkok. We had a nice chat and found common ground exchanging Flickr id’s. Nice to find some things are universal halfway around the world!
Shooting lots of snowboarding and skiing action in Banff this year provided plenty of frames for this video (click the HD icon for full resolution):
Banff Snowboarding and Skiing from Matthew Botos on Vimeo.
Actually producing this gave me a lot of respect for the effort that goes into videos versus photography; the difficulty increases at least an order of magnitude. I really liked the pauses in Chase Jarvis’s Pray for Snow, and set out to imitate the effect with my own series of bash scripts that sequence still images and letterbox them. Titles and assembly were done in iMovie HD, with a Creative Commons soundtrack from Jamendo.
My first photo show opened at Earth Mart in Phoenixville Friday night to a great crowd - thanks everyone for coming out! It was a blast talking to everyone who stopped by, and store owner Lisa came up with some great arrangements for the photos. My dad was there early to help setup, and he and Denis Brenan provided many photos of the opening.
You can see the show at Earth Mart through March 31, or preview and order from the collection here.
Aperture’s stacks are a handy way of organizing similar photos, but can be dangerous when you’re deleting images. If a stack is expanded when you select all rejected images, only the rejects will be deleted. But, if the stack is collapsed, the whole stack will be deleted! I managed to do this to two months worth of projects and didn’t realize it until weeks later.
Restoring the images from Time Machine retrieved them, but it’s not straight forward. Apple seems to have forgone any intelligent interaction between Time Machine and Aperture in favor of Aperture’s Vaults - perhaps I should take the hint! Aperture can import older versions of projects from Time Machine backups, but you’ll first have to copy them out of the backup Aperture library since you won’t be able to browse it for imports.
I’ve heard for years how beautiful Banff is, so I was thrilled to have a week snowboarding there in the Canadian Rockies this year. In addition to the usual photo opportunities, a number of people were already asking about a trip photo book like the Whistler one, and I picked up another “assignment” on the plane. Needless to say, it was a full week…
Here’s a good clip in which Lawrence Lessig and Stephen Colbert square off on copyright:
Photographer John Harrington makes a good point in his analysis: it’s a lot easier to be permissive about open copyrights and making your work available for free after you’ve already made your money from it.
This is something I struggle with in my own photography; I’d like to be able to share my work, see people do cool things with it, and theoretically have that circle back to me in the form of more business. But as a business, it’s tough to justify giving up those rights and income without proof or confidence that there will be a return from freeing it.
Perhaps there’s strength in the idea of hybrid businesses that implement both sides of Lessig’s hybrid economy: a protected avenue of content that generates income, and an open, possibly parallel avenue of content that fuels artistic expression, community-building, and personal branding.
Now that you’ve seen the Best Photos of 2008, it’s time for something new: the Just One project. Drawing some inspiration from Jim Talkington’s new photo blog, this will be an artistic project focusing on single images. Much of my photography is storytelling in the form of complete albums, so for this project, I’ll be choosing just one image from each album that’s a bit different and stands on its own. Please join me on this journey and share your own projects for the year in the comments!
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