Last November we took a scuba diving trip to the Maldives. While we spent most of the trip on a liveaboard boat, we did spend a little bit of time visiting a couple of the Maldives’ wonderful islands. One of those islands was Dhangethi, which is a popular stopover for liveaboards carrying divers and other tourists. Unlike many islands in the Maldives, Dhangethi is not a resort but rather is a home for the locals, and while it still has the usual souvenir shops found anywhere tourists go, it also has little streets with real homes and real people.

This is one of my favorite photos from recent years because it really captures the beauty of the Milky Way from a remarkable location. My cousin (the very talented Allison Otto) and I had been scoping out good weekends to take Milky Way photos from somewhere in the Colorado Rockies, but our schedules never quite aligned to make it happen. So when my wife suggested a trip to Aspen on one of those weekends, I already knew it would be a good opportunity to see the stars from nearby Independence Pass. While Aspen is certainly beautiful, Independence Pass is a marvel and one of the most spectacular passes in Colorado.

Take a look at my recent post from Stockholm. Did you notice anything unusual about the colors, or did it look like a regular evening photo with a rich blue sky and warm city lights? Of course color is wildly subjective, so there’s no way to know for sure how you see the photo, but hopefully it looked “normal” to you. Why this sudden interest in colors, you ask? It’s because I did something different with my Stockholm photo – something new. I posted it using a modern color space, breaking free from a convention that’s been dictating digital colors since 1996. Keep reading to find out what that means.

Sometimes you want something in your photos, but you have a hard time finding it exactly. For me, I wanted to capture the essence of Stockholm but I had a hard time finding the right place to see it. Stockholm is an amazing city, with a breathtaking combination of modern Scandinavian architecture mixed with classic European castles and buildings. But Stockholm’s most notable feature is also its most striking – the entire city sits on an archipelago of 14 islands next to the sea.

Just 8 years ago, Google launched Google+ – a bold yet quixotic social network that was Google’s answer to Facebook. By 2011 standards it was an admirable attempt at creating something different and new, especially with clever features like organizing your contacts into “Circles” for easier control over sharing with different groups of people. But Facebook’s network effects were just too strong, and Google+ never really stood a chance. Now, in just a few days, it will be shutdown forever.