big_pixel_pusher's photostream  

When Kathy and I visited Washington D.C. in October of last year, one of the things we wanted to see was the Dr. Martin Luther King National Memorial which at the time, had been built but not yet dedicated. The sculpture of Dr. King faces the Tidal Basin. He seems to be gazing directly at the Jefferson Memorial which is quite fitting. The black stone wall that surrounds the memorial has been etched with famous writings of the slain civil rights leader. Kathy asked one of the visitor guides if we could use our tripods - fully expecting them to say no but the answer we got was "sure, go ahead". Wow! This must be the only memorial in Washington that allows tripods.

This is the West wing of the Smithsonian Castle which is located on the national mall in Washington DC. Designed by architect James Renwick Jr. this impressive space was originally envisioned as a lecture hall. With its abundant natural light it was also considered to be ideal for use as an art gallery. Today it holds a wide variety of exhibits from the Smithsonian's vast collection.

This is a 10 shot HDR shot with my new fisheye lens. I used my gorillapod to stabilize the camera and was hoping the guard wouldn't come in and stop me. The smithonian generally does not allow tripods in their museums.

This was from the 2011 Whittier Car Show held in August. As I mentioned on a earlier post, the organizers decided not to allow low riders at this show, and will instead hold a low rider - custom car show next year. So of course since Kathy and I love photographing low riders we were bummed. After we had walked around for a while she noticed several low rider owners had parked there awesome cars just outside the show limits so of course we spent a lot of time there.

This was probably the most spectacular of all the cars I saw this day, and I took quite a few HDR sequences of it. While I usually choose low angles when shooting cars, in this case given the spectacular flamed hood, I extended my tripod nearly to it's maximum height to better capture it. The only disadvantage was I was unable to look through the viewfinder. I'm 6'-5" tall but my camera was at least 7' above the ground. I took a couple of test shots to be sure I framed this up properly before capturing this sequence.

"...nowhere together with you is better than anywhere apart"

Playing around with the iPad camera connection kit and Nik Snapspeed for iPad. total edit time about 2 minutes.