I was extremely fortunate to have several of my photos selected as sample images for the Google.com background feature.  Today I was reading comments people left on them and something caught my eye.

See that circled bit? 519,546 people have viewed this image.  Over half a million people worldwide have seen a photo for which I’m responsible.  I’m absolutely stunned. Nearly everyone with a camera who visits Yosemite gets this shot, but knowing so many people have seen mine, is… well, kind of humbling.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, I noticed that another photo of mine received over 630,000 views.  The Internet is so remarkable.  Where else could someone who’s far from a professional photographer suddenly have over a million people view their images.

If you picked one of my photos as your Google background, I’m honored.  I hope I get the chance to share more of my images with you again sometime soon.

Cheers!!

Last May I attended David Ziser’s Digital Wake Up Call (DWUC) tour when he came through San Jose.  Let me tell you, it was worth every penny.  If you’re just getting started with wedding photography, photography in general, or are a seasoned pro and are looking to learn some reliable and highly effective techniques or looking for that great marketing edge, this 4+ hour seminar had it all.  If I recall correctly, David had over $500k worth of door prizes that he gave out over the length of the tour.  Quite a few people left carrying gear worth many times the price of admission.  Next time he does a tour, sign up, stop by, and enjoy yourself.  It was a fabulous evening that was entertaining, fun, and informative.

Today the UPS guy dropped off a package and it was the DVD set of the seminar, but to call it a recording is a disservice.  It’s a 5 DVDs bundle, with over 9 hours of information (including a lot of content David couldn’t fit into the live seminar).  Plus it comes with a 4 hour bonus DVD with more tutorials on lighting, Photoshop, Lightroom, and more.  Oh yeah, and you get all of the following:  (I frankly don’t know how he does it)

The total price for all this, is only $89 bucks.  I mean, picking up a free Graphic Authority template set?!?   I’ve purchased several copies of their fantastic templates and collections, and to get a full DVD free? That’s unheard of.  A free month of Kelby Training?  and Animoto? 15% of NIK?  Really, it’s kind of a no brainer.

Head over to David’s Digital Resource Center and pick up your copy while he still has all these goodies to give out!  It’s probably not going to last forever.

Today I spent most of the day relaxing at home.  I watched Avatar with my wife, which honestly was a good movie, though I don’t understand the hoopla all around it.  Then around 5PM I had an itch to go take some photos.  I called up Brandon and made plans to meet him at 7 at Shoreline Lake.

I left a bit earlier and drove around Alviso, which coincidentally is quickly becoming a favorite spot of mine for shooting decaying buildings.  It’s not very big, and you can shoot most of it in a few hours, but I like to go back and see what I’ve missed.  (Plus it’s only 3 miles away.)

After wrapping up in Alviso, I headed over to Mountain View.  There is a stretch of trees on Shoreline Blvd. near Charleston Rd. that I’ve been meaning to stop by at some point.  So, why not today?  I parked and wandered back and forth.  I really liked how the low sun was streaming through the gaps in between the trees.  I figured if I really underexposed I could get a nice look.  Considering this is still around 7PM and the sun is out, not a bad job, imho.

From there I headed over to Shoreline Lake to meet Brandon.  I walked along the docs and got a few photos of some paddle boats.  I applied one of Matt Kloskowski’s Vintage New York Presets, and I really liked the faded outcome.

At this point it was practically sunset, and today was a rare day for the Bay Area, for there were clouds in the sky.  The sun treated us to a glorious good bye and I grabbed this 7 shot panorama.  It’s about 70MP after it was merged in Photoshop CS5.

At this point I went home, had dinner with Sara, and watched the Amazing Race.  At about 1AM I recalled thinking about shooting this 24 hour DIY car wash near my house.  I’ve been wanting to do it for about a year, and I figured, “Why the hell not?”  I grabbed my camera and my tripod and I ran out.

The sky and foreground were pretty boring, so I decided to add the black bars.  I’m normally not a fan of these things, but given the fact I really liked the shot of the car wash, it was a small price to pay.

All in all, it was a fun Sunday evening, 3 locations, 3 very different subjects, but a lot of fun.

Time to go sleep so I can get up for work in the morning.

Cheers.

I love working at Google. It’s absolutely one of the most inspiring and creative places for a software engineer to be working. One of the coolest things we’ve done in my opinion is Google Chrome.  It’s fast.  It’s not just speedy.  It’s not just quick.  It’s really freaking fast, kind of precognition fast.  If you don’t have ESP, check out this really cool video put together by the Chrome team.  Using some clever visual metaphors, they really show you just how fast Chrome can be.

So with that said, “What are you waiting for?”  Experience the Internet the way it’s supposed to be experienced.  See it secure, see it simple, and see it blazingly fast.  Go Get Chrome!

I should state the obvious here by saying that I work for Google and the views I express here are my own and are not those of my employer.  That said, Chrome is still really fast.

Hey folks, now this isn’t my idea, so I’m going to give credit where credit is due.  (See: http://www.diyphotography.net/the-strobist-corner-extending-your-ttl-flash-cord for the original blog post).  However I wanted to write and say that this works perfectly.  I purchased a E-TTL extension cable.  I didn’t buy a Canon one because I wasn’t going to risk ruining such an expensive OEM cable.  However, the other day I found a cheap alternative online.  Tonight I cut it in half as the blog post described and I connected the ends to 2 Cat5E keystone connectors.  The result?  Well, it works perfectly.  I tried it with a 50 foot cat5 cable and it’s flawless.  I can’t wait to give this a try soon.  Syl Arena is giving his Speedliter’s Intensive Workshop for us tomorrow, so I’ll be sure to take it with me!  I hope it works in the field.  :-)

So a silly little note, but I updated my main website at http://mikewiacek.com. Nothing drastic, but I made the images much bigger and changed the navigation bar somewhat. If it doesn’t work in your browser, please let me know.

I drove down to Big Sur today.  Right around sunset I grabbed a 7 shot handheld panorama at the edge of a cliff near the Bixby Creek Bridge.  I used the CS5 Photomerge functionality to automatically align and then stitch the images together.  It did an amazing job, don’t you think?

One problem with making panoramas is that the the corners are usually too short due to automatic distortion correction, but that’s not a problem with Photoshop CS5. I cropped the image above leaving some of the corner(s) natural and used the Content Aware Fill feature to fill in the missing pieces.  Can you tell which is which?  I can’t.  It’s like magic. It’s just amazing!  Way to go Photoshop team, CS5 is going to change the game big time.

Tomorrow I head over to Yosemite.  Hopefully it’s a good day for that too.

P.S. Check the photo out at Flickr “Sunset Through a Break” and see it bigger over there.

So, I’ve been playing with Photoshop CS5 for a while and now I can actually talk about it.  It’s going to be absolutely off the hook.  I was saying to someone last night that CS5 is really like CS7.  It’s got so much good stuff baked into it that it’s like 3 major versions ahead of CS4.

The painting / wet brush effects are absolutely amazing.  Take this photo (I admit it’s not a great photo) from my trip to Hawaii a couple of years ago.

After a few minutes with my mouse and Photoshop CS5 (this isn’t done with any filters) you get this.

The brushes behave like real paint brushes.  You can set how ‘wet’ the colors are and modify all sorts of settings, getting amazing textures in the process.  I can’t wait to see how people start making use of these tools.  This begs the question though… “Is real paint dead?”

Update: I should note I apologize to real artists everywhere.  I don’t claim this painted photo to be any good, just want to show off what you can do with Photoshop CS5.  :-)

Like many relatively young people, my wife and I have the hope of one day owning a house of our very own.  One of the wonderful things that tries to make it more affordable is that mortgage interest is tax deductible each year.  However, figuring out exactly how much money a mortgage interest deduction puts into your pocket is somewhat tricky.  For a long time I heard different formulas for trying to figure it out.  Last week, I got fed up with it, and I sat down with the IRS 1040 instructions and tried to come up with something.

I wrote a small python script to do the work for me.  It’s not perfect, and it might be entirely wrong, but as far as I can tell, it provides a reasonably good estimate of how much money a mortgage interest tax deduction could be worth.

So, to share my work with everyone, I threw this little app together today.  It takes your expected AGI, loan amount, number of payments, interest rate, and tax filing status, and gives you a reasonable idea of what your deduction will be worth.  Again, note that I’m not a CPA and this is provided as a free service without warranty.  Please check with a real CPA before making any major financial decisions.  In the meantime, if you feel like getting an idea of what you can expect, head on over and check it out.  (http://taxsavr.appspot.com)

I live about 5 miles from Alviso, CA, which is a small part of San Jose that used to be a major port at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay.  It’s built on marsh lands and is technically below sea level.  After bad floods in the 1980s, most businesses  left, leaving a handful of residents.  Oddly enough some tech companies such as TiVo and Foundry still call it home.  It’s an interesting place if you ever get the chance to stop by for a few hours.  Where the bay meets the grasslands surrounding the town, the city has constructed these interesting little house facades on wooden boardwalks.  I’ve always found them quite interesting to photograph.

On Sunday I was a little bored, and since I’ve been working so much recently, I decided that I’d drive over to Alviso and take some pictures in between rain storms.  When I got out there, things just didn’t seem to be very photogenic.  There were lots of little bugs in the air.  The sky was bright and gray. The light was fairly uninteresting.  I decided to salvage what I could, and I grabbed some bracketed shots for some HDR experimentation.  I haven’t done much HDR recently, and this felt like a worthwhile time to give it a whirl.  I got the photo above, which is a result of 3 bracketed exposures processed with Lightroom 3 Beta and Photomatix Pro.  If you’d like to see some other stuff I grabbed on Sunday, head on over to my Flickr set on Alviso 2/21/2010.