Every photographer who goes anywhere near Rockport, MA has to get a photo of the iconic Motif #1. This is a 3-shot HDR I took at sunset on a nice October afternoon.
Night on Piedra Road I, Pagosa Springs, CO.
Soft moonlight crosses the sky on the right, but it’s still dark enough to see beautiful stars above this barn in Colorado.
This is an 8-shot HDR photo of the Hoover Dam I took in February. I took this photo from the new Mike O’Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, which affords an incredible viewpoint of the dam for anyone willing to walk out on the sidewalk. Just don’t look down, especially if you have a fear of heights.
Inside the Gates Family Bridge, Cambridge, Vermont.
I took this photo at roughly the same time as my other photo of the Gates Family Bridge in Cambridge, VT. This photo was a 7-shot HDR.
Dog Bar Breakwater Lighthouse, Gloucester, MA.
My wife and I took a sailing trip in the Gloucester Harbor where I was able to take this photo of the Dog Bar Breakwater Lighthouse.
Taking an HDR photo from a boat is a giant pain. To get three clean shots, you have to time the up and down movement of the boat exactly. (The calmer the water, the better.) Even then, I had to do some heavy editing to clean up the movement shadows from the HDR processing.
A Seat by the Sea, Ogunquit, ME.
I took this nice sunset 3-shot HDR photo near Ogunquit, ME. There’s a small beach nearby, and when the lifeguard is on duty, they can watch the swimmers from this chair. It has a commanding view, and it’s a fantastic spot for anyone to watch the ocean.
How Steve Jobs Changed My World
(I originally wrote this for the uTest blog.)
My first experience using a Mac was when I was in college. I had a job with the university doing technical support, and they assigned me a brand new Blueberry iBook as my work computer. It was such a simple and elegant little laptop, and I was amazed at its build quality and design. But something was missing – the iBook had a handle on the back for carrying it places, but I was still tied to the wall by an Ethernet cable.
Apple had thought of this, and inside that little iBook they had included an incredibly cutting-edge piece of hardware that would let you use Ethernet wirelessly. This was new and risky – no other computer manufacturer was doing anything similar. In fact, this technology was so innovative that only one company made the base-station needed to create a wireless network: Apple.
When Apple launched the first generation Airport (itself a very elegant piece of hardware), I bought one immediately and set it up inside my dorm room. Then I detached my iBook from the wall, took it outside, and sat down on the grass in a nearby courtyard. Away from my desk, I checked my email. I surfed the web. I saw the future.
Eleven years later, I came home from work one night, picked up my iPad, and sat down on my couch. I asked the iPad to load CNN, and the wireless network in my house (a second-generation Airport) happily dispatched the request and delivered the result. The news stunned me: Steve Jobs, the man responsible for all this innovation at my fingertips, had passed away.
Before Steve Jobs’ return, Apple was a company that made respectable but odd hardware. They used a proprietary keyboard connector called Apple Desktop Bus. They used SCSI for their hard drives. Their networking was done with AppleTalk. None of these technologies were particularly bad, but none of them changed the world either. What Steve Jobs did for Apple was to force the company to push the boundaries of technology and hardware in a way that would change the world for their customers. The original iBook was a brilliant example of this vision. It combined innovative hardware (an 802.11b radio) with a wildly iconic design, included high quality components, used emerging standards for connectivity (USB), and sold at a price that every college student could love. It was a computer you could use anywhere and connect to anything. It changed my world.
Thank you, Steve. I hope that we can keep pushing ourselves and our civilization as well as you did.
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