Erik's Blog

Last week a sprout of grass sticking out of a bricked town square caught my eye, particularly the shadows it made, so I took a picture of it with my iPhone camera. I liked the photo so much that I decided it might make a worthy subject for a real camera outing, so some days later I took a few more photographs. What’s really sad is that the sunlight in these photos is from noon. That’s how low the sun is in the sky, and how long the shadows are, these days.

Feel free to make your own profound metaphor about Nature resiliently fighting back against human Urban Progress. Or don’t.
(more…)

What happens when a photographer walks around town on a windy and sunny day with, not a still camera, but a video camera? Photographs…that move.

On my walk yesterday I had quite a few American Beauty moments¹ where something as simple as a flower dancing in the wind made me stop and admire Nature. When I filmed the first few clips, I didn’t know how I would put them together, but by about the fifth one, the idea for this video was formed.
(more…)

I’ve been wanting to make this particular timelapse video for a long, long time. Oddly enough, it was a Viagra commercial I saw the other day that played a candle burning in reverse (obvious imagery) that made me finally decide to do it. I used some birthday candles that we’ve been using for Nora’s birthday parties, which, by chance, are “sparkler” candles that not only relight themselves when extinguished, but also send off sparks every so often. The camera was set to take a photograph every three seconds, so the majority of the sparks were missed, but several of them where captured. What surprised me about them was the obvious rotation of the burning projectiles, resulting in squiggly lines of fire in the photographs. Behold!
(more…)

I had never really drunk much alcohol before going to Denmark as a naive 20-year-old. There in Scandinavia, I fell in love with the two main lagers available, Tuborg and Carlsberg. Upon returning to my homeland, now of legal drinking age, I sought them out, only to find no sign whatsoever of either brand. Once, shortly thereafter, I was on a business trip in Chicago when I entered a bar that had a neon Carlsberg sign. I rushed up to the bartender and asked if they really had Carlsberg, but he told me that hadn’t had it for a couple years and that the sign was left over from some publicity from ten years earlier. Apparently Carlsberg had stopped exporting to the US just before I’d learned of its existence.
(more…)

The brainchild of my blogrollmate, Lance, he and I and three other people he knows are participating in a photoblogging project that we call Obiter picta. From the About page (as a lawyer, he couldn’t resist the Latin play on words):

Obiter dicta are incidental words, things said in passing. Obiter picta is a collaborative photo blog updated Tuesday through Friday. The participants’ contributions are not coordinated in advance. Any consonance or dissonance perceived in the themes, content or composition presented here is coincidental.

(more…)

There is really only one obligatory photograph that must be taken when you visit Bordeaux, the one on the covers of all the tourism guides. It’s of the Place de la Bourse taken from the other side of the reflection pool. They have a large, maybe 20m x 40m reflection pool between the Place de la Bourse and the river that is maintained with about a centimeter of water. It’s pure high-grade photographer catnip.
(more…)

Lots of walking on Sunday exhausted me, so I went to bed very early. When the 7:00 Monday morning baby feeding time arrived, I was ready to get up and start my week early. I could see just a hint of light in the east, and something about the clouds told me that it was going to be a lovely sunrise.

My intervalometer, the gadget that attaches to my camera to tell it to take a photo every five seconds, broke about six months ago. It just stopped working consistently. The new one that I ordered came in a few weeks ago, so I’ve been itching to try it out.
(more…)

While in Burgos this past weekend, I watched this old man make his way across this open square. Normally, in my experience, canes for the visually impaired make little clicking sounds on the ground as they are swung back and forth feeling the landscape. But this one had a big rubber stopper on the end. Initially it make me think that it was really a cane for support, but he never put any weight on it, and swung it around in front of him. When he got closer, I took his photograph.
(more…)

A little while ago, I had an idea for a cool photography project to visualize Nora’s growth, one that hopefully won’t involve peeing on electronics. My idea is to take a photo of Nora at six months old on one side of our sofa, and then take another picture of her at one year with her slightly to the right of her previous position. Ditto for 18 months and 2 years. Then, I can photoshop them all together to have four versions of Nora sitting together on the sofa! Cool, huh?
(more…)

During our evening walks in the Extremadura summer heat, I enjoyed taking my camera along and capturing the beauty of the sunsets across the huge horizon-to-horizon sky. Here are a few pictures that didn’t make the cut for my previous HDR post.

One of the cool thing about taking an entire fortnight of vacation and spending much of it outside in the evenings for an astronomy enthusiast is that you get to see one complete half of the moon cycle, from new moon to full moon.
(more…)