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.  :-)

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.  :-)

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.

One of the things I’ve long wanted to do with Lightroom is get a graph of my lens usage.  You know, I’d like to see the focal lengths with which I spend most of my time shooting .  Unfortunately, getting this information out of Lightroom has been practically impossible.  Knowing that Lightroom stores its catalogs as SQLite databases, I tried to use some SQLite knowledge to pull this information out of Lightroom.  You know what? It possible.  If you’re not comfortable with terminology such as DOS/Command prompts on Windows and/or Terminals on OSX, you might want to turn back now, otherwise, keep reading.

First I must say something very important!!!

Doing this may break Lightroom for you. While I don’t believe it will, I take no responsibility for what may happen. To be safe, work on a COPY of your Lightroom Catalog, and delete the copy when you are finished.

Here are the steps you need to pull data out of Lightroom.  I’ve tested this with Lightrom 2.5 and it worked perfectly.  It’s unlikely this will work with Lightroom 1.x or the Lightroom 3.0 Beta. (UPDATE: Troy Gaul, engineering lead for Lightrom dropped me a line and said that this will likely work for Lightroom 3 Beta and Final as this part of the catalog isn’t scheduled to be modified.) Let’s get to it!

1. Make sure you quit Lightroom. Don’t have it running while you do this.
2. Open a window and go find your <catalog name>.lrcat file on your disk.
3. Copy your <catalog name>.lrcat file to another folder.  We’ll be working from this copy.  I will assume you put this file in c:\catalog.lrcat
4. Go over to the SQLite download page and download the precompiled binaries for your OS. (i.e. Mac, Windows, etc.)
5. Open the downloaded file, and you’ll be looking for sqlite3.exe on Windows or sqlite3 on OSX.
6. Copy sqlite3.exe (or on OS X just sqlite3) to the same location where you put the copy of your Lightroom catalog. For me, that’s just inside c:\.
7. On Windows you need to open a DOS prompt. Goto the Start Menu, goto Run, and type: cmd.exe and press <enter>.
8. On OS X, you’ll want to goto Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.
9. At this point you’ll want to go to the directory where you put sqlite3.exe (just sqlite3 on OSX) and your catalog.lrcat.  Since I put it in c:\, I’ll type: “cd c:\“.
10. Now, you’ll want to copy and paste the following command, note the bolded text.  You’ll want to replace the text in bold with the name of your catalog copy.  Here we’re using catalog.lrcat:
11. sqlite3.exe -csv “catalog.lrcat” “SELECT focalLength, COUNT(focalLength), AgInternedExifCameraModel.value, AgInternedExifLens.value from AgHarvestedExifMetadata, AgInternedExifCameraModel, AgInternedExifLens WHERE cameraModelRef = AgInternedExifCameraModel.id_local AND lensRef = AgInternedExifLens.id_local GROUP BY focalLength, AgInternedExifCameraModel.value, AgInternedExifLens.value ORDER BY focalLength ASC;” > analysis.csv
12. Now, the results are stored in a file called analysis.csv.
13. You’ll need to do some of your own processing of the data using Excel or Google Docs, but that’s beyond the scope of this tutorial.

The lines of the file analysis.csv will look something like this:

13,9,”Canon EOS 40D”,”EF-S10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM”

13,5,”Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi”,”EF-S10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM”

14,21,”Canon EOS 40D”,”EF-S10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM”

The first number is the focal length in mm, the next number is the number of photos that were taken at that focal length, using the camera and lens specified.  From this, you’re own your own.  Perhaps some enterprising person will write a tool to extract and generate the graph automatically, but I don’t have the time right now.  Hopefully you found this useful!

If you’re curious to see what I was able to make, take a look:

This is a graph of what focal length’s I’ve used over the previous 2 years.  It is interesting  I tend to use the extremes on my zoom lenses more than anything else.  Note the position of 10mm & 22mm, coinciding with my use of the Canon EF-S 10-22mm ultra-wide angle lens.  The same thing occurs for my use of the Canon 24-105mm, Canon 17-40mm, and the 70-200mm lenses.

Two weeks ago I was supposed to fly to Tokyo.  On the way to the airport I felt slightly sick.  I arrived at SFO three hours before the flight was scheduled to take off, and in the Japan Airlines lounge I felt even sicker.  I took the usual dose of travel sickness drugs, but to no avail.  I felt bad, looked green, and ultimately thought that I’d never make it on a 12 hour flight to Japan.  At the gate, as people were boarding, I told the gate attendants that I didn’t think I could get on the plane.  The Japan Airlines staff were very helpful and they quickly pulled my bags from the cargo hold.  I went home and ended up missing my trip completely, as I spent the next 2 days in bed.  Talk about timing, right?

Two days after that I managed to make it into the office, and things were getting back to normal.  Well, the next day, Sara came home from work and she was pretty sick.  I took her to the doctor, who diagnosed her as likely having H1N1.  I say likely because they gave up testing for it, since everyone seemed to be coming down with it last week.  The next day, I got it too!  I was sick pretty much all of last week, and it was just horrible.  I’m feeling better now, thank goodness!

So, anyway, on Friday Sara’s dad and Charlotte came to visit.  Today we ran up to San Francisco and while walking around I grabbed this photo of a fire engine in one of North Beach’s fire stations.  I haven’t taken a photo in weeks, and despite the fact I still feel weak and somewhat tired, it felt really good to snap off a few frames.  Photography is just what the doctor ordered!