Two weeks ago I again had the pleasure of photographing Creative Mornings NYC. July’s Creative Mornings global theme was “space”, and all of us attending the event at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO were all treated to a great talk by astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz (@shaka_lulu on Twitter). Here are a few samples…

Reflections in the Indoor Moat

stealing a shot of the action at the photo booth starring swissmiss

Galapagos before the event

the attentive morning crowd

You can see more on Flickr, or check out Creative Mornings future and past events at creativemornings.com

For the past few years I’ve snapped some photos here and there as an attendee at FOWD. This year I stepped it up and covered the event as the official photographer for FOWD NYC 2011. With 2 simultanious tracks, and sometimes harsh stage lighting (we were running between the set of Avenue Q and other shows), it was sometimes a challenge trying to get coverage of everyone and still sneak in enough time to listen to what folks were saying. In the end I had a great time at the conference, think I saw and learned a bunch, and it was a treat to hear every speaker in the lineup (if only for a few moments). I hope the results convey how great of a show Carsonified puts on.

Check out the full set of FOWD NYC 2011 photos on Flickr.

Event Highlights

Host, Ryan Carson, addressing the audience

Aaron Gustafson on HTML5

Audience of Apple Users

Steve Fisher on the Future of Mobile UX. On the set of Avenue Q

The FOWD Lunch Rush

Voting in The Web Font Awards Ceremony

'Words Convey Knowkedge', Cameron Moll. (be they written, spoken, or signed)

Jason Pamental on what is certain and what is uncertain in our industry

Whitney Hess mentioning one of Apple's rare failure to embrace good Design Principles

Etsy's Randy J. Hunt on the Future of Branding

Aaron Weyenberg of TED on Responsive Design

Dave Shea working with an attendee during the 1-on-1 design clinics

Keynote speaker Joshua Davis refueling on Red Bull in the middle of his energetic presentation on not knowing things

Quick snap of working self portrait in the mirror, starring presenters Aaron, Cameron, and Jason

Other Web Industry Event Photos

If you’re in the New York City web design community keep an eye out for me at events — I’ve usually got a camera over my shoulder, in an official capacity or otherwise. Here’s a few sets from other events:

• Creative Mornings — Jessi Arrington’s Rainbow Parade. Nov. 11, 2011, DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY
• Brooklyn Beta 2011. Oct. 12-14, 2011, Brooklyn, NY
• Past Future of Web Design events: FOWD NYC 2010, FOWD NYC 2009, FOWD NYC 2008, FOWD NYC 2007

The above photos were taken yesterday in South Mountain Reservation & made 80% more autumnal with Instagram filters.

I’ve been commuting to NYC on and off for quite a few years now. Which has put me in the position to see a lot of things, the most memorable of those trips was taken on the morning of September 11, 2001. I had been riding the train to Hoboken, NJ where I would normally then transfer to the PATH train and travel to the 9th street station, near my office. Instead, that morning as we approached Hoboken Terminal, we saw the plume of smoke already haunting the skyline. By the time we were stopped and off the train all public transportation had been shut down and I was left stranded with a ring side seat for what was to unfold that day.

Across The River

Across The River is my attempt to give a proper, modern, facelift to the gallery of photographs that I took that day which I first published a few days after the attacks, 10 years ago. I’ve not altered the photographs, but have reprocessed them at a more larger resolution, and with the addition of photographs of the NYC skyline before the attacks as well as images of memorials in the days and years since I hope to have been able to add just a little context to the collection.

Visit Across The River

The previous 9/11 Gallery, as published in September 2001

FDNY 2001-2011: Published with a President

With many groups and individuals using this 10th anniversary of the attacks to pay special tribute it isn’t a surprise that there are others putting together similar collections of images that tell the story of the World Trade Center. I’m honored to have been asked to contribute a photograph to the newly published “FDNY 2001-2011: A Decade of Remembrance and Resilience”. The book is an amazing collection of images of the events and heros of the days following the attacks, put together by the FDNY Foundation, and has a forward written by President George W. Bush. You can purchase the book here.

A quick cellphone snap for this Halloween, via the Instagram iPhone app.

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to attend “WordCamp NYC 2010”: on the Baruch College campus. The day started with a morning full of 5 minute lightning talks to help attendees choose which session to attend in the afternoon. I was up front taking photos of the speakers, photos are now up on flickr

Last weekend was the annual Union County MusicFest a few towns over. Part county fair, part carnival, and mostly a free outdoor two day concert with bands such as Train, Spoon, OK Go, and The Bravery. I stopped by Saturday, hung with friends, and took some photos of the event. Here are some shots of OK Go playing the second stage Saturday Night:

I spent last weekend in Gettysburg, PA for a wedding and did some touring of the Gettysburg National Military Park and downtown Gettysburg. The first image above is of the McPherson Barn, one of many locations of conflict in the Battle of Gettysburg, the second is a scene of an alley in town. Both images fitting on this Memorial Day. See all of my photos from the trip in this Flickr set.

This year was the third time I’ve taken photographs at the spring classic car show in the neighboring town of Millburn.

I saw this wall by Shepard Fairey of Obey Giant and the Obama Hope poster fame whlie killing time before the NYC.js meeting last Thursday. Check all the detail in the large size photo

There’s been lots of buzz surrounding Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5 but I’ve seen a bit less about the updates to the photo merge and HDR features. These were the tools I was most interested in taking for a spin when I installed the upgraded applications. If they delivered at making it easy to create High Dynamic Range Photographs, particularly that are more photorealistic then fantastical and candied looking, then it would save me from buying other apps to do that processing or forgetting the genre existed all together.

After watching a video of the new HDR Pro features and some desire to play with new toys firmly seeded I decided to rattle off a few bracketed exposures while in Central Park earlier this week and give the new HDR Pro a spin. I hadn’t gone out intending to shot for HDR and without a tripod the handheld, roughly steadied and quickly taken photos aren’t the best platform to use for an analysis of the application. Still, I have to say I was really happy with the results and the lack of manual input and fighting in the process. Features like image alignment and the new ghost removal features performed better then expected and gave me passable results.

I’ll leave the in depth analysis and comparison between tools to other people, but I thought it would be helpful to others to see a quick rundown of my proces to create the two photographs featured.

Computers are built to perform repetitive & tedious tasks. But as users of the computers we’re never exposed to all the tools that are provided to help, and when we are the balance between familiarizing ourselves the given tool and learning to make it do what we need it to do is a larger endever then just doing the thing manually once or twice a day.

Along these lines Apple has long had the ability to script application and operating system tasks via the AppleScript language — powerful, but not the easiest thing to pick up. However, since OS X 10.4 Apple has shipped a free visual workflow tool called Automator that can do some quite powerful things with just a few clicks or drags of a mouse. Creating complex workflows via Automator still has a learning curve and takes some trial and error, but to get it to do some simple things is easy, will take you 5 minutes, and save you time every day.

60 Second Automator Overview

Automator is a visual macro tool that allows you to string together a series actions associated with single tasks in applications like Finder, Keynote, iPhoto, Transmit & Photoshop and create workflows that you can run via the Finder, Services Menu, standalone Application [Droplet] or iCal event item. Each action takes some input [text, URL, selected files], performs a task and then passes the output onto the next item you’ve placed in the chain.

Prints of the following photographs of spring cherry blossoms, the NYC skyline, and some tree tops in Hoboken can now be ordered from shop.placenamehere.com for your offline enjoyment:

These photographs, and many others at New Jersey Landscape Photography by Chris Casciano, are offered for sale in sizes up to 24” x 36” on a selection of appropriate papers and start at the low price of just $6.00 for standard 4“x6” prints. Frames and mats are available and can be customized after the photograph has been selected and added to your shopping cart.

Pink cherry blossoms and blue skies in Taylor Park, Millburn, New Jersey yesterday afternoon.

Often the goal of a new technology or new feature for an exiting technology is to lead a silent existence while making the owner’s life easier. Rather then being in your face forcing you to notice it, or worse, not working as intended and doubly frustrating the device’s owner it hums merrily along unnoticed.

I’ve been shooting steadily with the Nikon D90 dSLR since November of 2008. It struck me only last week in part because I was shooting some sky photos — which are notorious for making dust apparent — that in all that time I hadn’t had to do a manual sensor cleaning like I had often with my previous camera. The built in sensor shake/cleaning that Nikon has added to some of its recent camera bodies, and that triggers automatically each time the camera turns off or on, just works.

A while back I posted instructions on geotagging photos with any GPS capable cell phone or device. Prompted by a question from one of my students (oh hey, I should talk about my new gig sometime!) and the fact the post is one of the more popular around here I thought the post deserved revisiting.

Since 2008 I’ve updated my camera body, gotten an iPhone, and streamlined both the number of devices I carry and the workflow for getting geographic data into my photos. Still, the premise of the old post hasn’t changed — you can encode any photo you take from any digital camera you have by syncing the photos timestamp with your saved GPS information.

Here’s how I’m currently tagging photos from my Nikon D90 with information saved on my iPhone using the RunKeeper Pro app.

Commercial photographer and serial iPhone camera user Chase Jarvis has recently popularized the idea that “the best camera is the one that is with you” in a big way. Armed with a camera small enough that you’re willing to carry it everywhere you become free to capture moments, record mental notes, and other save images that would have otherwise passed you by. Though his weapon of choice is a cell phone camera my weapon has recently been an artifact of a decade ago picked up off of eBay — the Casio WQV-1 wrist watch camera. Though it only takes postage sized [120×120 pixels] black and white images it does so in a way that satisfies my bestcam needs.

I got wrapped with work early yesterday [no 3 day weekends for freelancers] and ran over to South Mountain Reservation to catch the long shadows of a late winter day and the sunset from one of the overlooks in the park. Found a pretty sunset and a nice way to kick off the week.

Digital video and digital photograph formats are so close, and yet so far away.

On many cameras like the Nikon D90 I use, the difference between capturing one or the other is a switch or a button away, and destinations for the content like Flickr do little to distinguish the two formats. However, when you get the memory card back to the computer what you do with them and how you process the captured files is worlds apart. I don’t have a handy solution to process images and video in the same way, but here’s one way to help the management of the files by using a still reference photograph as a hook for the metadata though our workflow from acquisition right through publishing onto web sites.

See you all in 2010! I’ve got some plans and posts lined up for this site in the new year and will be participating in a different Project 52 starting in January. Until then, enjoy the holidays and family.

There is something in the air and its causing a shift in the overload of internet based discussion about photographic technology into discussion of content and subject. Under the idea that you can “improve your craft without buying gear” humanitarian photographer and author David duChemin has self published a series of eBooks on content and composition now at Craft & Vision. The takeaway message from Chase Jarvis last week had more to do with what you’re doing with the camera in your hand then how to use it or which camera it should be. And last week the project The Daily Shoot was launched on twitter.

Even if your weekend is booked with other events, when you see a tweet like this you jump at the chance and figure it out later.

Chase Jarvis Meetup

I was quite happy to find out that I had made the cut and got and invite to meet, learn and hang with photographer Chase Jarvis and his crew last weekend. Chase is a commercial photographer, who has been making sure he spends time giving back to the community of photographers out there. But if you didn’t already know that you should run now and check out Chase’s blog and check out his book of iPhone photographs The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You.

Its been a hectic month or so at the day job making web sites, but its also been busy month of photography related happenings anchored by the PhotoPlus Expo and the peak autumn colors here in New Jersey. Most recently I’ve had a photo published in New Jersey Life Magazine and posted a few fall landscape and flower prints to the store.

This week saw the annual PDN PhotoPlus Expo come to the Jacob Javits Center. I stopped in a couple days of the Expo to meet up with friends and walk around drooling at the gear, but wasn’t shopping for anything in particular this time around.

What I liked

There are always lots of things to look at — great photos, great papers and output samples, books and promo materials for working photographers [above: moo.com’s business card and postcard service featuring a case study they did for the Perch CMS in a book made by Blurb], and lots and lots of gear from some of the biggest lenses you’ll ever see to some of the smallest. What caught my attention this year?

• Nikon’s revamped 70-200mm f2.8 VRII lens due in stores in a few weeks is nice and smooth and responsive in the trade show floor lighting conditions. Might not make those that have the current model run out and upgrade, but the staple lens just got better
• Sony had, among lots of nifty toys on both the still and video side, a nice lineup of speakers including Cristina Mittermeier, founder of the International League of Conservation Photographers
• Walked in just as Joe McNalley was giving a talk at the Bogen booth. Having caught his Nikon speedlight demo in past years I was happy to hear him talk more generally about his career. Oh, and I won a copy of his book!
• Manhandled the Olympus EP-1 again. Its a format I really want to like, and the kit with the 17mm f2.8 pancake lens is nice and compact. Focus seemed really hunty with continus focusing and face recognition on, but aside from some momentary settings issues it was solid. I just haven’t had the need to pull the trigger on one of these things yet.
• Helicopter! Sky Shutter AeriCam was getting lots of strange looks and many, many questions about their Radio Controlled Helicopter capable of carrying a DSLR sized camera with a 360º rotating controlled mount for aerial photography.
• Lensbaby had a booth again this year and had their new 12mm 160º fisheye at the show. Optics looked alright and a nice cheap way to get a fisheye lens if you’ve already got there system.
• Don’t have studio space? StudioShare.org is a brand new venture that looks to take a little from the coworking movement and a little from model mayhem to marry people with available and unused studio space with professional who could use it. Definitely something to watch closely.

Above: Nikon’s new 70-200mm 2.8 on my D90 shooting one of the large prints in the Nikon booth.

Who I missed

Though the show floor was packed with people and the booths that were set up were constantly busy, the show did seem a little smaller then previous years. There were a few less gadgety vendors [GPS units, photo frames] and a few notable names missing as well. I was bummed the following weren’t there:

• Panasonic: I would have liked to check out their micro 4/3s entry the Lumix GF-1 and compared it to the Olympus EP-1 which I did handle.
• Adobe: MIA the week they released LR3 Beta. Apple having stopped attending and demoing Aperture a a year or two early it wasn’t a crazy idea not to show, but would have liked to see some live demos.
• Crumpler: I hear they have some new bags soon. mmm bags.
• [Micro] Stock Companies: Unless my subconscious blocked them from my mind they all seemed absent this year.

Now that I’m all amped on photo stuff its time to get out on a beautiful Sunday and make some photographs.

The Secret Lives of Insects from Chris Casciano on Vimeo.

I spent Labor Day afternoon on a 7 or 8 mile hike of some local trails, exploring areas of the park I don’t normally get to. During the hike, while still in the South Orange area of the park, I passed a really busy tree. It was snack time for a wide variety of insects from ants to flys, bees and wasps.

Video shot with a Nikon D90 & Nikon 105mm 2.8 VR, though I shorted and recompressed it a little, its otherwise straight out of the camera.

View HD version of the video at Vimeo

View Slideshow

In the vein of events like 24 Hours of Flickr and Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk a local photographer recently used Flickr and other local web sites to organize 48 Hours of Maplewood, an event where people in town were asked to go out on a nice summer weekend and document their suburban New Jersey neighborhood.

Each Monday night throughout the summer a local car club gets together at the Galloping Hill Inn hot dog stand to show off their cars and hang out with other car enthusiasts. These photos were taken last Monday night.

• See these photos on Flickr
• Galloping Hill Cruisers Official Site
• Info on other NJ Car Shows at njcarshow.com

Last week I had the pleasure of attending an evening talk followed by a full day workshop by wildlife and landscape photographer Moose Peterson. The event was hosted by Adorama and Nikon.

Presentation Night – All About Food & Sex!

Thursday night at Adorama’s workshop space on Moose gave a nice presentation both on his photographic passions — shooting endangered wildlife and other little critters on the west coast — as well as some instruction on his compositional technique and working with light and your environment. Moose has been shooting for 30-some-odd years and shared with the group his top tip for getting close to animals in the wild

After another order of test prints arrived in the mail this afternoon [ordered Thursday, arrived today!] I’ve selected the images and papers I liked most and added a bunch of new prints to shop.placenamehere.com. With these additions the New Jersey landscapes and parks album is starting to fill out nicely, and hopefully has some familiar sights if you live in the norther half of the state.

In my inbox this morning was an ad by Nikon touting the latest consumer digital cameras from their Coolpix line. While I’m not in the market for a little camera [my Fujifilm F30 is still working like a champ] I thought I’d poke around their web site and see which cameras offered GPS, WiFi and what other wiz bang features were being touted. I was struck by the lengths and features packed into these little machines to try and help your grandmas around the world get the right photo of their grandkids, automatically!

Comment on this photo at Flickr

Comment on this photo at Flickr

This is a bit more of a cheesy blatant affiliate linking then I like to do on my site, but given today’s deal I’ll have to make an exception. Today’s Amazon US Deal of the Day is for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. Until end of day Tuesday 1/27 you can buy the full version in a retail box for $189.00 — that’s 36% off the usual price for the non-upgrade version. They’ve also got the LR2 Upgrade version for $89, but that is their everyday price.

Popular Science has gotten their hands on some amazing satellite photography of yesterday’s inauguration on the National Mall. The amount of people and the crowds formed and grouped looks indistinguishable from a colony of ants coming though the cracks of a sidewalk. The sidewalk in this case also having a miniature sundial shaped like the Washington Monument and the White House.

If the imagery and resolution of the ground wasn’t amazing enough [at a 19.6inch ground resolution], one commenter points out:

If you look at the full size image, you can actually see another satellite in the top left corner.

That’s some depth of field!

I’ve just added two autumn prints from a 2007 trip to Watchung Reservation to the Landscapes of New Jersey gallery at shop.placenamehere.com.

Comment on this photo at Flickr

Many photographers on Flickr and across the web have come across Project365 in the last few years. As described by early driving force Photojojo, along with other benefits:

Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you'll start to care about lighting, and you'll become more creative with your photography when you're forced to come up with something new every single day.

I’ve thought about joining in each of the last few years — hey, I already take photos a few times a week, what’s a few more? But that’s why I never have. I already shoot a few times a week, carry one of my cameras almost everywhere and spend more time then most looking around for a potential photo op. In the end I just didn’t think taking more photographs would advance my skills.

As 2008 comes to a close many sites are doing year end wrap ups see previous post and here are two sites highlighting how New Jersey saw the year.

After reading Moose Peterson’s blog post on the Nikon GP-1 GPS Device I need to correct a bit of misinformation from my earlier post Nikon D80 To D90 Upgrade First Impressions.

There I lamented the fact that you could only plug in the Nikon MC-DC2 remote cord, or the GPS unit, but in fact the GPS unit has a remote plug in is so you can daisy chain the two devices. Also in the blog post, Moose mentions the GP-1 includes a clip to attach it to your camera strap instead of the hot shoe leaving the hot shoe free for flash usage.

Though I’ll continue using my off camera geologger for now, with these two options the GP-1 design looks much better and it will be an alternative I’ll consider should the time come that I want to change up my system.

Comment on this photo at Flickr

The Boston Globe’s high resolution photo blog The Big Picture has been one of the highlights of photojournalism on the web in 2008. It seemed to have kicked off a slew of similar sites willing to post high resolution news imagery on the web so that we at home can really appreciate the work of photojournalists around the world.

Not just first, but The Big Picture has seemed to be best when it comes to the tireless curation of the editor Alan Taylor and use of multiple images to really provide impact and lend life to a story in the news. That theme cannot be illustrated better then with their 1st part of a 3 part series The year 2008 in photographs.

2008 has been an eventful year to say the least – it is difficult to sum up the thousands of stories in just a handful of photographs. That said, I will try to do what I’ve done with other photo narratives here, and tell a story of 2008 in photographs. It’s not the story of 2008, it’s certainly not all stories, but as a collection it does show a good portion of what life has been like over the past 12 months.

I recommend that everyone take a few minutes over the next few days to really dive into the 120 stunning photographs being posted over the course of the next 3 days.

New Storefront at Zenfolio

For a long time I’ve just looked at my photographs as something to for myself and as an excuse to get out of the house and into the outdoors. Maybe I’d share some of the images on Flickr or print something for a family member or friend but nothing more. No, I’m not looking to go pro or anything, and I don’t think I’m Ansel Adams either, but its time to do a little more with my hobby [and maybe pay for some of my gear in the process].

So just in time [barely] for the holiday gift season I’ve launched Chris Casciano Photography.

Its another blue beanie day to show your support for web standards. Find out more from the original blue beanie wearer and Designing With Web Standards author Jeffrey Zeldman.

After a long fight that started when I handled the Nikon D90 Digital SLR camera at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo in October I finally lost my battle against the upgrade bug and bought one to replace my 2 year old Nikon D80. I had been on the fence about the upgrade being worth it. I knew the D90 would be a great camera, but my D80 doesn’t yet feel like yesterday’s technology and I wasn’t convinced the newer body given my expectedly light use of big bang features like video would pay off for me.

comment on this photo at Flickr

Comment on this photo at Flickr

This past week brought the PDN PhotoPlus Expo to New York City once again. The show is a photo gear geek’s dream — where you can handle the swankiest new gear from the likes of Nikon, Canon, Adobe and Epson. And if gear isn’t your thing there are lots of demos, presentations and signings from famous photographers like Joe McNally, Moose Peterson, Vincent Versace, Jay Maisel and Scott Kelby.

Update 2/1/2010: I’ve written a new post about my current workflow for geotagging photos based on information from my iPhone

While some cameras and camera phones have the ability to geotag digital photos as they’re taken, most still don’t. However you can still geotag your photographs accurately and automatically with the use of an external GPS enabled device like a cell phone, navigation device, or a dedicated GPS logger. Any device that can record a “GPS track” that can be transfered to your computer can be used to tag photos. And photos taken with any digital camera can be tagged in this manner.

Here I’ll explain how I use GPSPhotoLinker on OS X to batch tag many photos from a day’s photo shoot with GPS tracks recorded on either a Sony GPS-CS1 or a Nokia N95 cell phone in order to create mapped photo galleries, like this one on Flickr.

Comment on this photo at Flickr

Comment on this photo at Flickr

The New York skyline will never be the same.

View here of the Twin Towers and the rest of lower Manhattan as seen from Eagle Rock Reservation, 13.4 miles away. Taken some time in March 1998.

On Place Name Here: Photos from the morning of September 11, 2001, Hoboken, NJ
On Flickr: WTC, September 11 Memorial

I’m usually not one to enter photo contests and other events, but the Great Destinations NJ book project was interesting enough and the rights grab wasn’t too bad so I’ve uploaded some images. to the project.

Its sort of an Everywhere — or JPG — style book and DVD project showcasing the diversity of the Garden State.

There’s now 4 days left to contribute by uploading photos of New Jersey or voting on your favorites. So head on over. You can start by voting on my photo contributions.

Last Friday, Flickr held its second 24 hours of Flickr event where it asked photographers to take a photo sometime in the 24 hours that made up August 8th, 2008 and contribute to a giant pool of images from around the world.

Above is my humble contribution, taken late friday during a break on my regular bike route at Verona Park, in Verona NJ.

Those who read photography blogs may have already come across the dustup, but the discussion over [ab]use of the Flickr API and application developers not respecting copyright on content should be of interest to the web developers out there as well.

The discussion centers around the realization that last weekend Every Flickr Photo Ended Up on Sale as cell phone wallpaper at MyxerTones.com

view more photos and comment at flickr

Jaromir Jagr’s 2nd goal puts the Rangers up 3-0. Stanley Cup Playoffs, 2nd round, Game 4. May 1, 2008

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view all photos and comment at flickr

comment on this photo at flickr

comment on this photo at flickr

comment on this photo at flickr

comment on this photo at flickr

comment on this photo at flickr

comment at flickr

A little thank you to Jeffrey and a promotion of Web Standards. More info here

More on Flickr

I saw the first signs of something being wrong from my seat on a NJ Transit train into Hoboken. Though I did make it to that stop, by the time I did they had shut down all the train service and other public transportation both in to Manhattan and out of Hoboken.

Gallery of photos from the shores of the Hudson as I was stranded for the day.

Due to rain last night some town had postponed their 4th of July fireworks. Millburn, NJ was one of them

Spring is here and I’m well on my way to filling my quota of pretty pictures of flowers.

They do. And I never do a good enough job of pointing their efforts out, so here are a few new products to check out.

Seems like a good time for a little update on my contributions to other sites around the internets…

I’m looking for your vote, if you think the shot is worthy, on this image of seedlings for the JPG Magazine ‘Breakthrough’ theme for their next issue.

And last weekend was the Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown, the weather was pretty good and the costumes better. A bunch of photos from the event are now up in a new Flickr Set

For digital photographers, particularly people shooting any sort of volume of RAW files you may find you need a better workflow for ‘development’ and organization of the photographs then simply storing the files on your file system and then opening a few at a time in Adobe Photoshop. Into that gap has come a few new applications including Apple’s Aperture. More recently, Adobe has finished work on its Lightroom application and moved it from a long public period to an official 1.0 release.

With that release two professional photographers and bloggers, Micah Walter and Michael Clark, have committed their time and expertise to putting both Aperture and Lightroom through the paces on a typical week or so of shooting and editing.

Yay! I really dug the free 10 pack of Flickr MiniCards from Moo.com and had to have more. Now my order of 100 is on their way.

Lately it seems I’ve been carrying some bad luck with me when it comes to interesting photographic subjects around town.

Case 1: The Delicious Chicken Dinners sign.

Now gone after the store got a new awning.

Case 2: The old swing set at a nearby park.

Now removed along with some other (newer?) climbing things.

JPG Magazine, started by Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ a few years ago, went through some big changes a few issues ago and have turned themselves into a very creative take on using a ‘community’ to submit to and create content for their print magazine (yes, I said print).

Five year ago today, on September 11, 2001, I was on my way to the work but never got there. The commute at the time was a NJ Transit train to Hoboken and then the PATH train to 9th Street where I got out and then walked across Broadway to the office. I made it to Hoboken shortly after one of the planes hit the towers and by then all transportation there was shut down and I was let wandering Hoboken all day like so many others.

Gallery

When putting together this gallery and looking through the photos I had taken and digesting it all I wrote:

Look elsewhere for words. I have not yet found any that does what I saw justice.

I still don’t have the right words to describe the events, and 5 years later I fear the attempt would only be muddied by feelings about the events and changes that have taken place since.

On my trip through my feed reader this morning I ran across a post by Jason Kottke talking about how he recently picked up a Kodak Duaflex II camera in hopes of taking some digital shots through the lenses of the old camera.

It just so happens I had sitting on my shelf as decoration (has a few cracks and dings that prevented me from trying to use it for its intended purposes) a Duaflex III. 4 minutes with the cardboard insert from an Amazon shipment for the sides of the hood and the last bits of a roll of gaffers tape and I have my own TTV ‘contraption’.

[Warning: The following post is not safe for Molly.]

Picking my head up from a few projects to pimp my latest flickr postings… My South Mountain Reservation Photo Set is about to hit 80 photos. All taken during my various strolls around the area including these from this past Saturday:

There I was moving some long forgotten magazines off one of my bookshelves and out popped this blast from the web design past from between two of them.

I’m loath to make a big deal of this before the customary five corrections that BoingBoing makes to any article—but, uh, what the hell?

NY photog held for hours by police over flag photo