Category: 2011

Toy car in downtown Phoenix

This is a real car, driving next to a real man on a real bike in downtown Phoenix. Why does it look like a toy car on a model set? Because I used a miniature faking effect that simulates a shallow depth field and fools your eyes into thinking it’s looking at something up-close.

Another component of the miniature illusion is selective focus, which in its purest form is achieved with tilt-shift photography. However in this case, I faked it with Photoshop and directed your attention to the car in the picture for this miniature effect.

Not bad for a first attempt, although I should have spent more time fiddling around in Photoshop to make the guy on the bike less blurry. This tutorial made it surprisingly easy to achieve this effect.

See more photos like this in this tilt-shift miniature fakes flickr group.

Photo details:

  • Exposure: 1/400
  • Aperture: f/9.0
  • Focal Length: 50 mm
  • Taken from the fifth floor of a parking garage at 10am

Mommatorial: 5 Twitter Fears, Conquered

My mom asked me a while ago to show her how to use social media better. After I rolled my eyes and said something snobby and confusing like, “Well…what do you want from social media?” I realized that it’s a great question for her to be asking.

I sometimes forget that despite the massively over-publicized explosion of Facebook and Twitter users, there are a lot of people who are still unsure of how to get any value out of social media for themselves.

In my Mom’s case, she knows how to find her way around on Facebook, and she has a blog, but Twitter is still a scary, somewhat hairy animal. The more I thought about her question, the more it made me realize that I know a ton of people like her, who are still either afraid or completely unfamiliar with Twitter.

And it’s a shame because if they could all just get over a few initial hurdles, they’d have a much richer social media experience and easier access to information that they would probably find very interesting.

In hopes of getting my mom (and others like her) over these entry barriers and to shed some of the stigmas associated with Twitter for newcomers, here is my first Mommatorial: 5 Twitter Fears, Conquered.

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Smoking Super Perigee Moon

My shot of the super perigee moon – the biggest since 1993 – looking east over the Phoenix sky on March 19, 2011. This moon was the closest a full moon has gotten to Earth in nearly 20 years, although I really couldn’t tell by looking at it…and you can’t really tell by looking at this photo. And despite not capturing the change in appearance of the moon on this rare event, I like the effect the light cloud cover had on the moon in this shot, and I’m glad that I stood on top of that hill for an hour and a half taking pictures on my Saturday night.

Photo details:

  • Exposure: 1.3
  • Aperture: f/8.0
  • Focal Length: 55 mm
  • ISO Speed: 1600
  • On a tripod
  • Time: Shortly after 7pm

Lessons learned from my worst sun burn

A tribute to Leslie Whitfield and survivors everywhere.

Sunscreen. It’s smelly. It’s expensive. It gets in your eyes. It clogs your pores. And for white-ass people like myself, it’s a lifestyle. I put it on my face every morning, apply another coat before day-time runs and pretty much drain the bottle if I’m going swimming or attending an outdoor event.

Yeah, I’m that guy: holding everybody up so I can run into Walgreens and raid the Coppertone section; huddling under a hat, a blanket and an umbrella during a perfect day at the beach; sweating bullets in long sleeves during the scorching desert summers.

And don’t even talk to me about tubing on the Salt River. Sorry. Stuck in a tube in the sun for four hours just doesn’t work for me. You go ahead though.

But despite my photo-paper-esque skin and affinity for the shade, I do love the sunshine and can’t get enough of the practically year-round blue skies we get here in Phoneix. And that’s why I’ve been single-handedly keeping sunblock industry execs wealthy for the past two decades. Because if I don’t wear sunblock, I will get burned. Badly. It’s that simple.

Continue reading Lessons learned from my worst sun burn