thedude.com

We’ve been spending a lot of time with our neighbors Jack Tres and Olive lately. That’s a good thing. I shot this picture at Flora on Thursday night. The light was provided by a single candle on the table in front of Tres. I used my old manual-focus f1.4 Nikkor wide open, at 1/15th of a second with the Magic Camera set to ISO 3200. This image is to me, nothing short of amazing. It’s as if the camera added light to the scene. I could not see her this well with my naked eye!

Then, I added the neat little border and drop-shadow to the above thumbnail without ever opening any image editor. Instead of PhotoShop, I used ImageMagick on my Linux server to create the effect at the command line! The command I used to do this:

convert image.jpg -resize 605x \
-unsharp 0.5x1.2+0.5+0.1 -matte \
-bordercolor white -border 8 \
-bordercolor grey85 -border 1 \
\( +clone -background grey60 -shadow 80x3+6+6 \) +swap \
-background white -mosaic image-thumb.jpg

Why would I do this? A few reasons.

1. It’s very fast - it takes just 2 seconds to create this nice effect.
2. I can create this effect form anywhere without any special tools.
3. The effect can be applied very quickly to a whole directory of images.
4. I can add a “create pretty thumbnail” option to Wordpress.

I have a lot to learn before I have item 4 working, but the challenge is half the fun of it!

Olive said she wanted a shot of her jumping in the air, and I had in mind what I thought was a cool way to frame the shot. Olive braved frigid temperatures at sunset tonight, but the wind and the light conspired against us. And though none of the pictures turned out exactly as I had hoped, we both had fun during our 20 minute shoot.

It’s official! Last night over dinner with a group of friends who have all been to Burma several times, we decided that we’re really gonna do it. We’re planning a November trip to Burma! Everyone in the group is very excited - and even a bit jealous of our budding travel plans. Their enthusiasm has a lot to do with why we decided to do it. But the main reason we feel comfortable about the idea is because we have now had dinner twice with our guide-to-be on the trip - William Myatwunna. William totally charmed us with his warm smile and polite good-nature. He is also the best tour guide in all of Burma. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Conde Nast magazine recently picked William’s Good News Travels as one of of the top 128 travel specialists in the world!

Interested in traveling to Burma? I’d suggest you book with William soon. He’s about to become very busy!

With love and a prayer for world peace from a beautiful girl named Grace.

My wonderful friend Olive needed a picture to accompany an article she wrote for a blog, so we went outside with the long lens and had some fun.

However, I will make an exception for Antonio Piccolboni! He’s been a huge fan of my photography for five years, a terrific coworker and friend. I could not turn him down.

Antonio and Maria were married in a charming Quaker ceremony in a spectacular amphitheater at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens. Congratulations, Antonio and Maria!

It sure was great to see you! We wish you all the luck in the world with your twin boys. Jack and Cole are lucky to have you and Neil as parents. And don’t worry, you will always look great to us - Fred Flintstone feet and all.

Lelah found Lohtse in an adoption agency in Saigon about 6 months ago. My hunch is that they’re lucky to have found each other.

The Grand Opening at our favorite new restaurant appeared to be a smashing success. Lots of delicious food, wine and a few of our favorite neighbors. Thanks, Todd and Eloisa!

BTW, I went “old school” when I shot these. Just to see what kind of results I could get, I mounted an older Nikkor 50 mm 1.4 lens and focused manually! It was a lot of fun, and when I got the focus right, the results are very pleasing. This old lens looks great at 4.0! The only bad part is that it takes two hands to do this, so I couldn’t easily carry a glass of wine while shooting.

View the rest of the images from the Grand Opening here or here.

Olive and an over-abundance of hair products? How could that not lead to some fun?

Want more fun? Click here.

I was asked at the very last moment to shoot a few pictures of the new restaurant for an upcoming issue of Bon Appétit. With the deadline literally hours away, I went downstairs to see what I could do. The funny thing is that I was apologizing for the photos all the while I was shooting them, fearing that I’d get lousy results in the less-than-ideal lighting.

Shots like these are simply not possible without the Nikon D3 and the its spectacular 14-24 mm lens.

Andrew took these awesome panoramic shots on a recent vacation trip. The arrangement on the left is the Ring o’ Brodgar, the Stone Circle at Castlerigg is on the right. I don’t know much about how the circles came to be, but then, neither does anyone else.