Planning for Yosemite Natural Fire Falls
Posted by latoga | Filed under Technology
February is a magical time of year for Yosemite. It’s the one time of the year when everything lines up correctly to create the natural fire falls at Horsetail Falls. The sun sets at just the right angle to illuminate a slice of the northern side of the valley walls right were Horsetail Falls is located. So, if you’re there on a day when the weather conditions cooperate and there is enough water flowing over the falls, the sun illuminates the falls creating a nature fire fall affect.
And as Michael Frye said on his blog: It’s That Time of The Year Again. Michael has some great information on his blog about when he calculated the window of optimal sunset angle will be this year as well as where the best locations are to photograph from. Also see his article about Photographing Horsetail Falls.
So far this year, I’ve been so busy with the day job and other pressing projects that I haven’t had much time to focus on photography (which has been a personal point of frustration). Combine that with the fact that I’ve been down sick for five days recently fighting a bug of some sort and I’ve got a serious case of cabin fever and need to get out in the landscape. So I’m planning a trip next weekend up to Yosemite to try to capture Horsetail Falls.
While planning this trip, I discovered a rather remarkable tool from Stephen Trainor called The Photographer’s Ephemeris. TPE is a Java Air application that acts as a wrapper around Google Maps and overlays the Sunrise/Sunset and Moonrise/Moonset paths on top of the map for any location at a give date. So you can figure out when the sun/moon will appear over a specific mountain, what the angel of the Sunset will be, or the optimal day for photographing Horsetail Falls in February. The screen shot below is the paths for Horsetail Falls on February 18th (the day Michael Frye estimated was day of optimal angle).
TPE Screen Shot of Yosemite's Horsetail Falls
If you’re a landscape or cityscape photographer, TPE is a handy tool to keep in your tool bag to add another dimension of location planning to Google Maps. (It also appears that Stephen is working on an iPhone version of his app. If he would add additional details like what Focalware provides, it would be a killer single location scouting tool for the iPhone.)
If you’re going to be up in Yosemite next weekend, drop me a line and let me know. Perhaps we’ll run into each other…either accidentally or on on purpose!
Tags: Horsetail Falls, Photographer's Ephemeris, Yosemite
Apple iPad: For Photographers?
Posted by latoga | Filed under Musings, Technology
Today was the big Apple announcement of the new iPad. While you can view all sorts of immediate reaction from various technology pundits, this view of the iPad is from a photographer’s perspective (check out my labs later this weekend for additional thoughts from another viewpoint).
[For full disclosure, the only photographer related posts I have read about the iPad as of this writing was G Dan Mitchell's.]
The first thing to keep in mind is the market segment that the iPad is designed for: the consumer. Meaning it has a specific set of uses and is designed around those uses. This is not a device that you will use for editing photos out in the field, it doesn’t have the horsepower designed for this type of task.
The next immediate thought for photographers is: can I use it as a image tank? Possibly. If you buy the 64 GB version, you could use it for this, but only for the smallest of photo shoots. And you would have to buy an adapter to transfer the photos to the iPad. I recently upgraded my MBP to a 500 GB hard drive as I was running out for space for photos during long trips. 64 GB, 500 GB. Nuf said.
What I do see the iPad excelling at from a photographer’s end user perspective: a killer portable portfolio. From this aspect, the iPad is the Masarati of photo frames. The ability to showcase your work to new clients or existing clients in style…impressive. The ability to do it on the fly at any time the iPad is with you…priceless. So if you buy an iPad as a photographer, make sure you have a collection of your work on the iPad at all times. (Personally, I’m not all that excited about iPhoto being the key application to get the photos on there..but it’s Apple. And this will change over time.)
Even better is the iPad as a photo frame for another person. With an iPad App from FrameChannel coupled with a customer charging dock and now we’re talking! FrameChannel is a service I’ve been keeping an eye on for the simple use case of how to share my photos with my parents. With my parents being in their 80’s and my Dad being the only one who uses their current computer, and just barely, there is no good way to proactively share with them my latest photos. Let alone family photos from my siblings. With FrameChannel, I can create a channel for them, link in my RSS photo feed and give my siblings a way to add their own photos to the channel. Then point supported digital photo frames to this channel on FrameChannel and viola, the automatically get the latest photos from everyone in the family. Now, let’s take that to the next level with a FrameChannel iPad App: it connects to the channel of your choice and you sit back and watch the slide show or actively browse through the photos. Add a customized charging dock that triggers a special mode in the FrameChannel iPad App and it turns the iPad into an active photo frame while you’re not using the iPad and it’s charging. Now this is just active dreaming as this app doesn’t exist…yet? (anyone out there listening?)
Since the iPhone has the DSLR Camera Remote application already and the iPad will run all the iPhone apps, you’ll be able to use the iPad to remotely control your Canon or Nikon DSLR. Given that there will be 2 months for onOne software to update their application to fully leverage the iPad. Image having not only the larger screen for LiveView from the camera, but you could also have the ability to zoom into the LiveView image to fine tune the focus. When you start to get creative with what the multi-touch surface could do things can get very interesting…image a fully remote controlled camera interfaced with a tilt-pan motorized ball head! It could be like photographer…the video game!
I also can’t wait to see how some of the photo hosting application get creative with the large screen. Blossom (for SmugMug), Darkslide (for Flickr) and of course Cooliris and Brushes. We can all expect larger photo viewing and more interesting browsing capabilities, just to start.
Now, the most important part of the iPad for photographers: how will consumers use it?
This is how we should all be thinking about it. How can we use it to generate more revenue for ourselves? The most obvious is building more iPad centric applications that use our photos. I’m thinking of applications that allow your latest and greatest work to be downloaded and used as the iPad’s background. Or how about a new generation of photo e-books? Maybe ones that not only include photos but behind the scenes videos ala DVD extras. Or, how about travel/instructional e-books geared toward photographers or sight seers? The options here are only limited by your imagination, your time, and of course the iPad SDK.
If you think about how the iPad could influence the future of digital media, then what we should be looking for are true digital photo distribution services. All this electronic content being viewed on the iPad could have your photos embedded in it by the content providers via a new type of stock licensing model, one geared toward the future of digital media. This is an area that I have given lots of thoughts to in the past (watch for a future sharing of some of these thoughts…).
So, have you taken a look at the iPad? What are your thoughts on how you would use it?
Photo: State Street Parking
Posted by latoga | Filed under Cityscapes, Photos
State Street Bridge with the Marina Towers
I’m slowly working through a couple of photo related tasks: work on this website and processing photos from my holiday trip to Chicago. Here is one of the latter with links to work in progress.
Tags: Chicago, State Street
Photo: “South Facing”
Posted by latoga | Filed under Photos
A close-up view of South Facing, one of the pieces from my recent visit to Chicago’s MoCP. This piece is a city of 750 miniature towers, all at a slight angle representing China’s dictate that each new building be at least 15 degrees south-facing.
Tags: MoCP, South Facing
A Visit to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography
Posted by latoga | Filed under Reviews
Last year while visiting downtown Chicago, I stumbled upon the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP). Located at Columbia College Chicago, on Michigan Avenue across from Grant Park, MoCP was something that I didn’t have time to visit at the time. This past month I was finally able to stop in (the fact that MoCP was about halfway on the walk from my hotel to the museums and that it was about 15F was just coincidence).
Even though the holidays signaled the end of the Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture exhibit, I was able to catch it. A very interest collection of photography, some video, and strange sculptures (which were never really explained considering this is a photography museum). All on the theme of the changing Shanghai.
Most interesting was Isidro Blasco’s mixed media display which consisted of an overlapping set of images that were re-assembled in 3D on a wooden frame rather than digitally combined into a larger 2D image. Most compelling was Zhou Xiaohu Temporary Sculpture which was a digitally created image of modern day Shanghai in the background with the old historic 2-3 story buildings of the demolished Shanghai in the foreground; at first glance one wouldn’t think it was digitally created if it wasn’t pointed out.
Overall MoCP was an interesting find in the heart of Chicago. I was a bit disappointed by the Reversed Images exhibit from the fact that there didn’t seem to be as much quantity of photography as one would expect for a Photography museum and that there seemed to be very little artist participation in the display of their work. Most of the sparse signage was obviously written by the curators of the museum where it would have been more educationally, especially considering the cross-cultural nature of the exhibit, to have heard about the work in the artists own voice.
Another large disappoint I personally felt with MoCP was the lack of engagement from the staff. There was a person (student perhaps) that was on duty near the front door who didn’t even greet us as we walked in. An after that I never saw another person from the museum the entire time. While warm temperatures of the space was a welcome refuge from the winter winds on Michigan Avenue, the cold reception for visitors was a bit off-putting.
And, as far as I could tell, the entire museum space was being used for the exhibit. If there was any permanent collection at the museum, I couldn’t see where it was. (That being said, visitors need to make sure they keep climbing the stairs upward, the museum has three levels and the third level was almost missed as it appeared to be more of a staff access area than museum display space.
While these were just my wind chill induced first impressions, I do recommend visiting the museum if you are in the downtown Chicago area. While I will be the first to admit that I don’t always get some contemporary photography, there is always value in expanding your photographic vision.
