View allAll Photos Tagged explored!
No, these are not my photos. I popped into Explore yesterday for some inspiration and benchmarks to guide me what is considered 'interesting' or generally, good photography - and this is what I found. These are shots from the first 3 pages I browsed (I didn't have to dig deep to catch the trend). The esteemed editorial team of Flickr (or what many believe is their super-intelligent computer algorithm) shows us the way to go. This is creative, original, artistically and technically exemplary and we should all learn: to be among the very best, you need to capture lo-fi images of Asian teenagers, or higher quality photos of... puppies and kittens. Occasionally, the unopened box of your new gadget is also top-class art. Lesson learned - I'm now out to capture my next masterpiece!
N.B. All copyright of the esteemed authors is totally respected and their works have been reproduced only once within Flickr for educational purposes and to spread the word how good they are. No changes have been made to any of the originals other than reducing size to fit into the space (and to prevent piracy by malicious art thieves). No money has been made in the process, but if any (even one) of the copyright owners asks me, I will remove the entire collage.
Uodate: Proof that it's not a machine algorithm but a human editorial crew (Yahoo / Flickr employees or external hackers, doesn't matter) - and they have a sense of humour! THIS composite image WAS in Explore for a while on the day I uploaded it - now, that's what I call sarcasm! :) ))
I've always admired the color and shapes of orchids, and for me, they make an interesting subject.
I place a YN560 in a 24 inch softbox cameral left at 9 o'clock and a YN560-II in identical softbox camera right at 3 o'clock for even lighting and then handheld a Strobie 130 fitted with a grid behind the flower at 11 o'clock for a little backlighting. All strobes, in manual mode, were triggered by a Yongnuo RF-603N.
Other plants, flowers, or fruit that I've photographed using strobes can be seen in my Strobe Lit Plant set. In the description for that set, I list resources that I've used to learn how to light with off camera flash. www.flickr.com/photos/9422
Other photos of mine that have been selected for Explore can be seen here. www.flickr.com/photos/9422878@N08/sets/72157618630302105/. How pictures are selected for Explore is beyond my understanding.
"The fall of a leaf is a whisper to the living." Russian Proverb
Thanks so much for my fourteenth EXPLORE! May 3, Highest #131
This shot was taken on the same day as Reaching (my last upload). This fence is located on a lane going to a Heritage Farm just a mile from us (which is a little tourist attraction), it was such a gorgeous day and the leaves of the trees were littered all along the fence, caught up in the wind. My first instinct was to pull out my Macro Lens (it always is as I adore it), however I pushed against this and went for my new Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens. I cannot put into words how much I love this bokeh magnet! HFF!
Undertaking this Project 52 has been one of the best things I've ever done. It's helping me grow, learn and develop as a photographer and I'm excited to see what each day brings...
Website | ODC2 - Parallel Lines
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From a very old collection of colorful pictures.
Finally feeling better after a nasty flu..
Moree-bound Explorer at Narrabri. The little plaque explains why the bridge is still yellow
- it appears to be a paint trial - started in the '70s.
Bi, Elemental bismuth.
Of interest to hobbyists are the pseudocubic "hopper" crystals that are always present on the laboratory produced specimens, they are not seen in but only the rarest of natural crystals. Hopper crystals are a unique crystallographic curiosity Just the edges extend outward from the center of the crystal leaving hollow stairstep faces between these edges. The hopper crystals form due to the disparity of growth rates between the crystal edges and the crystal faces.
My friend Michael Naimark is exploring new ideas for virtual reality experiences, in collaboration with Google and other researchers. To discuss this work, we got together with two other colleagues, Steve Gano and Jim McKee -- with whom we worked at the Apple Multimedia Lab in the eighties, pushing the envelope on related questions.
We started with a tour of the historic Sentinel Building in North Beach, home of American Zoetrope -- where Francis Coppola worked on many cinematic masterpieces like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. We checked out the underground screening room and sound mixing room where some of that work took place, then headed upstairs to Michael and Jim’s studios, for a wonderful conversation about the new VR frontier.
Michael and his colleagues are researching how people are represented in virtual reality. Their first experiment at Google’s “Big Chairs” Park led to some helpful guidelines on how to film people for VR, by using different camera angles and distances.
They’re also investigating ‘hyper-images’ that resemble a group of people, but that are shot at different times and composited together to create both ‘credible’ and ‘incredible’ pictures. To enable more experiments like these, Michael is developing ‘IMU VR’, a new type of camera that could make it easier for communities to tell their stories in VR. More on this later.
It was great to reconnect with my colleagues and brainstorm these ideas together. It felt like the good old days, and the creative juices were flowing all over again ...
Learn more about Michael Naimark’s work:
View more photos about Virtual Reality:
Ice Cold
Shot for Strobist Sunday 6/6/2010 - Theme Liquid
This is my first strobist sunday entry. I had a 430 exII camera right on the table beside the glass at 1/64 power. I had a 580 exii aimed at a tablecloth behind the glass on full power. Both without modifiers; I'm kinda lazy that way sometimes :(. Triggered both using Cybersyncs.
See large on my blog.
My contacts here on flickr are all over the place, group wise, so I couldn't think of a great place to post this. That said I am really excited about attending a virtual workshop on lighting starting on Friday June 11th and wanted to make sure I told you all about it as well. It is free if you watch it live and is a part of a project Chase Jarvis is working on called Creative Live. The workshop is being taught by Zack Arias. Check it out if you are interested in that sort of thing :).
From what I understand, in addition to the hours convenient to US viewers they plan to replay it at a time convenient for Europeans as well (though I can't locate the tweet where I thought I saw that so that may not be case).
Fujifilm X-E1; Fujinon XF55-200mm @ 55mm; 1/500 sec @f/4, ISO 3200;Adobe Lightroom 5.2 and Nik Software Silver Efex Pro 2
Today, I embarked on an adventure with a group of hikers and explorers, and we spent the day exploring miles of slot canyons, many of which were new to me, and most of which were unnamed and relatively or completely un-photographed. All this in places most Californians are unaware exist at all, much less in their own state, even less their own county!
We were joking about how we could all go back home and when friends asked us what we did over the weekend, we'd say, "Oh, a bunch of Indiana Jones type stuff, you know…" To which they would respond, "Haha yeah right, that boring, eh?" Well, here's a small bit of proof for the doubters! Haha.
The more we explored, the more slot canyons we found. We soon felt as though we were in the midst of a massive living organism, the arteries and veins of which were the slot canyons. In a way, that's a good metaphor. Slot canyons exist in the desert, and are entirely formed by rain - the fewer than 5 inches of rain that falls in an average year. These rains feed an entire desert ecosystem, much of which depends on those rains for opportunities for resupply or reproduction. Often, it is not the average rain that creates them, but rather one massive deluge from a thunderstorm lasting mere minutes which creates the powerful and violent flash floods which rage through these arteries in the rock, filling them with water, rock, and mud in seconds. If you've ever seen a video of a mudslide, you can get a small idea of the sheer power of these flash floods. Often after a single flash flood, a canyon may be scarcely recognizable in places because of the transformation. The flood will raise or lower the floor of the canyon, change the shape of the walls, move boulders around, and more. All in just minutes.
Perhaps most incredible, however, was not the canyons at all, but the strata they were formed inside of. The entire area was composed of wildly varied layers of conglomerate, sandstone and mudstone, which were layered in strata with layers of stone pebbles embedded in them arranged vertically or on various steep angles of say 45-80 degrees! Further, the layers were curved or wavy. Now, gravity only goes one way, straight down. So you need to realize what this implies: that this entire area was soft mud, all at the same time, at one point in time, and then that mud was violently pressurized, forcing it into these shapes, before the waters receded and they dried, forming the stone we see today. Only then could the flash floods even begin their work crafting these masterpieces.
The light that fills these canyons makes them incredibly varied and beautiful to behold. The key to the colors is very simply reflected light. The sun shines directly on upper and exposed areas of the canyon, which then reflect that light in a bright golden color into the shaded areas. Each time the light bounces off a canyon wall, a portion of the color spectrum is lost, which has the effect of making each opposing wall reflect a different hue, with the walls working their way through the color spectrum from warm oranges to cold blues.
The human eye can see at least a portion of this effect, which makes a walk through these canyons in good light a thing of beauty to behold. Usually, most people don't take the time to allow their eyes to adjust to the light and really be mindful and present to observe the colors, so they miss out. This is why it is important not to rush through but to take your time and really be observant and in the moment, rather than rushing to much to see what is around the next bend.
Modern cameras really excel at capturing these color subtleties. However, you might not realize this because they generally try to "compensate" for the "too warm" or "too cold" colors, by automatically adjusting their white balance to cancel out the effect in an effort to maintain color neutrality. Further, they are programmed to expose the scene to an average value of 18%. This is great for creating a balanced exposure, but it all but ensures that the contrast of the scene will not be ideal. With bad contrast, the human eye is unable to correctly judge colors, which makes for a bad image and viewing experience.
So as part of my post-capture workflow, I manually adjust the color spectrum and black and white points to bring out the best of the color spectrum and contrast that was present there and accentuate it in a way that the human eye can easily appreciate.
This also gives me an opportunity to bring my artistic vision to the scene so that I as an artist can show you what I visualized in the field. My goal is rarely (if ever) to bring you a robotic representational image that is enslaved to some Japanese engineer or programmer's (the people who made the camera) algorithmic interpretation of reality, but rather to bring to life a pre-visualized work of art that conveys what I felt there in that moment.
I feel that it is extremely important to differentiate between representational photography and fine art photography, as the two are to photography as objective journalism and subjective fantasy novels are to writing. Each has its place, but while one is limited to the conveyance of literal facts, the other allows us to bring our creativity and humanity to bear in order to show others a world as we envision it in our mind's eye. This is the role of art in photography.
It is through art that photography can transcend its limited existence as a technical capture medium, and ascend to a higher one as a medium of creative expression. When photographers say things like, "I am just in the right place at the right time," or "I'm just operating the camera, nature or fate makes the scene," they mislead viewers and do humanity a disservice by eliminating artistic interpretation and creative vision – the vital human elements – from the equation. If a drone could have been programmed to make the image, why was a human needed at all? Humans bring creativity and imagination to the table, and those very things make the image and give it emotional meaning and relevance.
As a result, the fine art world often fails to take photography seriously as an art medium, and who can blame them when we have a lot of self-professing robotic machinery operators producing and selling images, and placing emphasis on automated technology rather than inspired artistry? An artist with a camera can and should use it in much the same way a illustrator uses a pen or a painter uses a brush, and should not be ashamed to do so. This is the role of humanity in photography.
Explored Jul 27, 2014 #90
Predjama Castle near Postonja in Slovenia, it has a series of caves beside the castle which resembles the cave system described by Tolkien in Rohan´s "Helm´s Deep".
© Copyright: All rights are reserved/Derechos reservados.Do not use, copy or edit any of my photographs without my permission.No usar, copiar ni editar alguna de mis fotografías sin mi autorización
completed by the VERY talented Bigcrustyape!!! I totally LOVE this!
Flickr Explore #421 - 21 May 08 I REALLY must thank Nathan for this and everyone for all the favs!
"In exploring we discover. In discovering we see. With seeing we are aware. With awareness there is potential to act without causing disorder."
(12.5 weeks!)
My friend Michael Naimark is exploring new ideas for virtual reality experiences, in collaboration with Google and other researchers. To discuss this work, we got together with two other colleagues, Steve Gano and Jim McKee -- with whom we worked at the Apple Multimedia Lab in the eighties, pushing the envelope on related questions.
We started with a tour of the historic Sentinel Building in North Beach, home of American Zoetrope -- where Francis Coppola worked on many cinematic masterpieces like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. We checked out the underground screening room and sound mixing room where some of that work took place, then headed upstairs to Michael and Jim’s studios, for a wonderful conversation about the new VR frontier.
Michael and his colleagues are researching how people are represented in virtual reality. Their first experiment at Google’s “Big Chairs” Park led to some helpful guidelines on how to film people for VR, by using different camera angles and distances.
They’re also investigating ‘hyper-images’ that resemble a group of people, but that are shot at different times and composited together to create both ‘credible’ and ‘incredible’ pictures. To enable more experiments like these, Michael is developing ‘IMU VR’, a new type of camera that could make it easier for communities to tell their stories in VR. More on this later.
It was great to reconnect with my colleagues and brainstorm these ideas together. It felt like the good old days, and the creative juices were flowing all over again ...
Learn more about Michael Naimark’s work:
View more photos about Virtual Reality:
The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the State of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world.
A global power city, New York City exerts a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment, its fast pace defining the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural and financial capital of the world.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of which is a separate county of New York State. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898.
New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the country's largest city since 1790.
(Wikipedia)
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We spent a week in New York City in May, aiming to explore the city beyond Manhattan and enjoy vibrant moods of this never-sleeping megalopolis.
Walking is arguably the best way to explore the city, and combined with large subway system one may spend weeks still not having visited and seen everything.