No, this is entry has nothing to do with the USSR or the Cold War, but we do like red. Libby and I have some bold red curtains that span an entire wall in our living room, so we decided to have a bit of fun with some gear that was laying about being inventoried. These past few weeks have seen little shooting as I have been laboriously preparing my entries into the various photo contests that all have deadlines either fast approaching or shortly past. I had some lighting gear laid out over our living room floor space so during a break in the editing action Libby (and in a few frames TT) graciously posed for me during an impromptu portrait session. The trick here was that I used my point and shoot Canon G9 camera instead of my big cameras. I’ve had the G9 for a little over 2 years now and still love it. I used to use it for multimedia projects back when I was in Colorado, but now that my main camera bodies both shoot full HD video, Libby has taken over the G9.

One of the major benefits of the G9 is its hotshoe and its ability to sync with a flash up to 1/1000th of a second +. Knowing this, I slapped a pocket wizard on the G9 (which looks silly as the wizard is just about the same size as the camera itself) and went to town. The background light is a little harsh, partially because the G9 doesn’t render colors as well as a proper camera and partially because the light was just thrown up there, but you get the drift. After several different expressions we wrapped up and I went back to editing.

I put together 9 that I particularly liked into a little grid, which is below, along with a slideshow of the individual images.

Every year Libby and I send out a self-designed holiday card using our own skills as graphic artists and photographers. When it came time to produce this year’s card we had some initial trouble coming up with a fresh idea. After a bit of thinking I came up with the idea of using images taken specifically with my iPhone.

We whittled down hundreds of images from 5 continents and numerous events down to 70 colorful images that all appear on the front of the card. I wanted the thumbnails on the front of the card to be large enough to be readable to the viewer, yet small enough to maintain the graphic element of the grid. After putting the design together, we were both pleased with the initial outcome, but wanted to take it a step further. I decided to create the online aspect to supplement the physical card. IPHONEADVENTURE.COM is the manifestation of that.

Since all of the images that were chosen represent a significant moment or memory from 2009, we wanted this project to go beyond just a tiny thumbnail, and to explain itself, in context.

All 70 images from the physical card, are viewable in a larger, un-cropped format on the website. In addition, each image is accompanied by the date the image was made, the GPS coordinates corresponding to where the image was taken as well as a short and candid description of the image. Since the iPhone automatically embeds GPS location data into each photo taken with the device you will be able to see exactly where we were when we took the image via Google Maps. Clicking on the coordinates in each image’s description will open up a new window with data about the location.

Happy Holidays to everyone. Please take a moment to visit our little end of year project, IPHONEADVENTURE.COM

(ps. the image above is also an iphone image!)

Since the lady leaves tomorrow for Houston, we decided to pick up a few pumpkins at the Fells Point Safeway. I feel guilty buying them from Safeway given the fact that I’ve covered countless events at local farms that feature fresh pumpkin patches, but I like to think I just bought them from the retailer instead of the wholesaler. They are (hopefully) local, farm-fresh pumpkins! Either way we drug them up here to my temporary 3rd floor room and carved away. We had visions of elaborate designs, but in the end decided on a simpler theme. She usually beats me as far as speed and overall design goes, but I may have her this year (don’t tell her that) We had a grand old time. I slapped the trusty G9 on the 1 second time-lapse setting and let it fly during the process. The following video is the result. Nothing too crazy, just a little view into the event, complete with a cameo by my old Persian cat, TT, who awoke from his perpetual slumber and dawned his curiosity cap.