Matthew Botos

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…

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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!

View the Just One project images

Thank you to everyone who’s viewed my photos this year and to those who made nominations for the best of 2008! From the 2848 photos posted this year, these 18 represent the most viewed here and on Flickr, along with a few of my personal favorites. My overall best for the year is “What’s in Your Bag?” (right). This entry for a Digital Photography School contest netted a personal record 1700+ views here and 200+ on Flickr, plus it was a blast to light and shoot it.

Looking through the photos from this year, I was reminded of a lot of fun times and how much I’ve learned in the process. Have a happy new year filled with great photos!

View the Best of 2008 Photos

For this year’s Christmas card, I wanted to do something unique and creative to exercise the photographic muscles I’ve grown this year. From a few related concepts, I settled on having Meadow playing with a Christmas ornament ball that I happen to be stuck inside.

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I’ve ordered cards and calendars from Shutterfly in the past and been pleased, but they came up short on this year’s Christmas card. As is family tradition, I always send a card and a letter recapping the last year. After awkward attempts to print the letter inside the card the last few years, I reverted to doing them separately. All I needed on the cards was a single image printed to the edges and a quick greeting inside.

Despite the fact that the image was cropped exactly for the size of the card and looked fine in the previews, the top 1/8″ wrapped over the fold onto the back. So I called their support number and spent a while explaining to the non-native English speaker on the other end what I had been and the problem. Under their satisfaction guarantee, she agreed to reprint them.

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