If you want to see how I made this (and how you can too!), visit my HDR Tutorial. I hope it gives you some new tricks!
I had a long day waking up at 5 AM to take a series of subways and trains up to Shenzen for some meetings. I had a Chinese VISA, which you don't need to get into Hong Kong, but I had to use to cross the official Chinese border after getting off the train. I didn't realize that it was a one-time use VISA, and I had to go to Shanghai the next day. This caused a lot of problems with the Chinese officials, a body of government with which I do not enjoy causing problems.
Anyway, after I got back to Hong Kong after a day in Shenzen, I was hot and sweaty and in the sort of meeting clothes that aren't great for being hot and sweaty in. But, everything about Hong Kong was still awesome and I had too look hard for things to complain about. The sun was setting, and I made it up to The Peak just in time for a shot.
This was a 5-exposure HDR shot at 100 ISO, and, of course, a sturdy tripod to get all the lights as steady as possible.
from my daily photo blog at www.stuckincustoms.com
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If you want to see how I made this photo, you can visit the HDR Tutorial. It may show you some new tricks!
India is a beautiful and magical place. I wish I could say my journey to get to this exact vantage point was the just as beautiful and magical, but it was not.
I really wanted a unique vantage point, and I was reticent to try to set up inside the complex with the teaming crowds. So, I talked my driver into taking me to the backside of the Taj Mahal because I had seen a river back there on Google Maps. We started circumnavigating the place and we came to the old trestle bridge. It was quite a long stretch to get across the river. The bridge was just barely standing, and everything about the dilapidated structure was sketchy. We were the only car on it, and it was hard to get around all the ox-carts, donkeys, and bicycles.
Looking out the window at the rusting girders, I asked our driver, “When was this built?”
He wobbled his head and said, “Eighty-three.”
Well, I thought for a moment. That doesn’t sound so old.
Then he turned back to me, “Eighteen Eighty-three.”
Read more here at the Stuck in Customs blog.
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Hey all! Come see the New Look on www.stuckincustoms.com !
This was shot in the final hours of daylight, near the southern tip of Argentina and the edge of Chile, just a glacier's throw from Antarctica.
In the morning, we woke up at 4:30 AM in -7 degree cold. I hardly slept 30 minutes the whole night. I was in a tiny 2-man tent with Yuri. The noxious fumes of our tiny prison reminded me, if you will, of the inside of a tauntaun that had spent its life consuming cognac and cigarettes. Furthermore, his snore had the sonorous bass and carrying power of a humpback whale with none of the beauty.
I started on one edge of these rugged peaks and moved around to this side, to get the view from the glacial lake. The spiked mountains there are Cerro Torre, and I was very lucky to see them without cloud cover. I understand they are covered up 90% of the time, so to have crystal clear air was fortunate. The glacier there, which presents on the right but really goes back behind many more mountains, is called "glacier grande".
I did a lot of other things this day too, including a 45-minute 1500-foot ascent up an icy trail that was not really a trail at all. Dima and Vulva (Vulva is one of the other Russian gentleman who joined us on the trip -- it's hard to pronounce with a strange V-W sound, but he seemed to respond when I called him "Vulva") went up the mountain with me in the pitch black, using only headlamps. I'll have more on that story later because it was pretty sketchy. But, alas, we were able to see Fitz Roy as the sun turned the tips pink. After that, we began the long additional 10km hike that brought us to this location. I stayed here watching icebergs float by until the last morsels of dusk remained.
(also, the Large size is recommended!) :)
from the blog at www.stuckincustoms.com
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If you want to see how I made this (and how you can too!), visit my HDR Tutorial. I hope it gives you some new tricks! I consider myself very lucky to have a network of great photographers around the world. I met most of them through Flickr, where we are constantly commenting and giving feedback on one another's photos. This has enabled me to meet up with great photographers wherever I travel, and they are great people to hang out with because they already know the prettiest places around where they live!
One of the people I was lucky to shoot with was Rebekka in Iceland. We met at a coffee shop in Reykjavik and talked about where to go shoot. We jumped in her car and drove a while until we reached a fjord. Nearby were these horses running around like wild beasts. They have no fear of humans, and we were able to go right up to them. Their hair is very long, and I'm sure it evolved from the hyper-cold whipping winds around the edges of the sea.
I don't shoot a lot of animals, because I find it hard to improve upon what other great animal photographers have done in the past. However, here is a tip for shooting animals. It's kind of a lame trick, but it always works. Use a wide-angle lens and get in close. It always makes the head look really big and cute. Humans love big-headed animals and it always makes them smile. Why this is, I have no idea... Note this trick also kinda works with babies.
Seriously, thanks to Rebekka for a great day tooling around the fjords of Iceland.
Oh, and yes.... I have pictures of Rebekka coming up at some point wearing her green-thing ... nothing too salacious for public consumption, I assure you... but in more of a "photographer in her milieu" milieu.
from my daily photo blog at www.stuckincustoms.com
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If you want to see how I made this (and how you can too!), visit my HDR Tutorial. I hope it gives you some new tricks!
After the crowds of Angkor Wat, it was nice to go find a remote temple in the jungle and be alone. This temple laid under the jungle, completely undiscovered for centuries.
The hallway and mysterious chambers seemed to go on forever.
from www.stuckincustoms.com
BTW, if you go to Angkor Wat and you want a good tour guide, contact "Eath Soratanak". You can call him "Tak". He can be reached at ratanak_eath@yahoo.com or at (855) 92 725 552. He speaks English almost as well as Sir Anthony Hopkins and has an accent somewhere between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Larry Flynt.
from my daily photo blog at www.stuckincustoms.com
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