This morning, we went to the blacksmith's shop at Williamsburg, where I took this picture. I'm not altogether happy with it. I was using the stubby little 25mm "pancake" lens with the aperture set to f/5.6 (since it was dim in the shop, and taking pictures of people going about their business ruled out really long exposure times -- I settled on 1 ( Read more... )

I'm at Colonial Williamsburg right now with my wife and her family. I took a few pictures earlier today. Apart from cropping them (not particularly aggressively) and scaling them down to a reasonable size for displaying online, I haven't touched them with Photoshop. This first picture was taken at the front window of the apothecary's shop, ( Read more... )

It may surprise people to hear that "the holidays" make me wish I lived closer to my family. Why? Because as matters stand now, the primary role of "the holidays" is to play "catch up," through travel, compulsory gift-giving, and a few brief days of high-stakes intensive socialization. I'm not a very social person, and I never have very much ( Read more... )

I went to the Met this past Friday. I did, indeed, see the Japanese arms and armor, but I made the mistake of wandering around the ancient Egyptian and medieval European exhibits first, so by the time I got there I was already getting tired and footsore, and "all photographed out." Here are thumbnail versions of some of the pictures which I did ( Read more... )

I also took a few pictures in the greenhouse at Reynolda Gardens. Of those, I only really liked this one -- it's a close-up of a cactus with a tangle of unusually woody-looking stems. For some reason, it reminded me of those Chinese paintings of impossibly steep and picturesquely craggy mountain landscapes (e.g. the 17th century specimen shown ( Read more... )

This past Sunday, September 6th, was my thirty-ninth birthday, and I got an Olympus 25mm f/2.8 "pancake" lens for my camera, which turns out to be very good for taking close-up pictures (it was quite willing to focus on a subject only six inches away). On Labor Day, I went to Reynolda Gardens again to try the new lens out. I had intended to just ( Read more... )

There's no story behind this picture. I took it in the front yard, shortly after I got back from Lake Tahoe. It's mainly just a demonstration of the impressive "pseudo-magnification" achievable by starting with a reasonably well-focused high-resolution image, throwing the bulk of it away, and displaying whatever is left at screen resolution. ( Read more... )

Earlier in August, my wife and I spent several days in Lake Tahoe, celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary (we went to Lake Tahoe for our honeymoon). While we were there, we spent a couple of hours on a catamaran, riding out to the middle of the lake and then back to the dock. The lake seemed remarkably empty and quiet to me (which, I must ( Read more... )

I've had a long, tiring, and anxious week, and don't have very much to say.

As I'm mentioned before, when there's nothing else to photograph, there's always the dog. It's just a cellphone picture, so please don't judge it too harshly.


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Okay, so I've posted a panorama from Pilot Mountain, so here's a stereo-pair to go with it. From a purely technical perspective, it's definitely flawed. Since the primary objective of this past Saturday's trip to Pilot Mountain was to socialize outdoors with our visiting friend, I didn't take my digital SLR (whose many features encourage time- ( Read more... )