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  Please support me in the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer - last year we were able to raise $6.9 million for the Alberta Cancer Foundation - hopefully we can raise even more in 2010!

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• Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
  

I was asked to share how I got that Bike Blur photo yesterday. It’s really simple, once you know a couple of tricks.

Today was the annual Kickoff event – the home opener for the U of C Dinos football team, combined with a party welcoming students to campus for another year. This year, the whole family went to the game, and we had a blast. Also, this year was different because it was the first time in a long, long time that I was able to score the free tickets offered to students…

We had to leave at half time, because it was just too much sun for The Boy™ to endure, but the first half of the game was a great one. When we left, the Dinos were ahead 10-8 over the Golden Bears. Sounds like the second half was exciting, too, with the Dinos holding onto the slim lead to win the game. Whew.

I lugged my camera and Flip on the Ride to Conquer Cancer, to document some of the ride. It was a pretty epic bike ride – the hardest thing I’ve ever done – but was well worth it.

Thank you to everyone that supported me in any way – it definitely made the pain of the ride easier to push through.

Full resolution photos are available on Flickr, and I apologize for my severe lack of video production skills…

a wonderful way to celebrate earth day.

Now, please excuse me while I go warm up the Hummer and crank up the furnace…

I love Creative Commons. Because I tagged my photos with a CC license, a small and local magazine found some of my photographs, and was able to use them in a recent issue. I didn’t make a penny, and it didn’t cost them a penny. But they were able to find good images for what they needed, and I get to say my photos are in a magazine. Win/win.

Alan’s working up a 5 Card Flickr Story project to show at Northern Voice, and it’s a really fun little application to explore simple visual storytelling. Any photo on Flickr tagged with 5cardnv is sucked into a pool, where 5 photos are chosen at random and presented as a mini story. You can “keep” any of them, or roll the dice for a fresh batch, until you’re happy with the frames of the story.

Nancy White’s been playing, and saved a screenshot of the output of her mini story. Which she then uploaded to Flickr, and tagged as “5cardnv”. Where it is then placed into the pool of photos for random selection for new stories. Recursion in visual storytelling. Gotta love it.

I’d upload my 5-card-story containing the recursion to Flickr and tag it as 5cardnv, but I’m afraid something would implode due to excessive recursion.

Taking a photograph is more about capturing light than documenting a subject.

A simple bottle of pilsner, when placed in the bright morning light, comes alive with refractions, reflections, and shadows. It doesn’t hurt that the bottle is so beautifully designed in a clean and strong 50’s aesthetic with thick green glass and a stylized painted label.

It’s a little strange this year. I haven’t had to struggle to get a daily shot yet. Hope I’m not jinxing it…

I’m actually really happy with the project’s photos so far, and it’s fun to see the recurring themes both within the first month, and compared to the first month of 2008. About the same number of photos of the Bow River in Bowmont. Photos of coffee/muffin breakfast taken on almost the same day of the year. It’s kind of cool to see constants, and how they change over time.

I’m working on my third year in a photo-a-day photography project, and there are days when it’s pretty near impossible to think of something to shoot. On days like that, you need an assignment – someone to give you a topic or subject, and you go hunting for (or staging) a photo to meet the assignment.

So, I cobbled together a simple web page to randomly generate assignments.

If nothing else, it might spark some ideas for you to create your own assignments.

If you use the utility, I’d love to hear about it! If you post to Flickr, throw a tag of “assignmentr” on the photo.

click the image above, or, if you don’t want the embedded QuickTime version, there’s the slideshow on Flickr.

The 2008 366photos photo a day project wrapped up last night. I don’t have anything deep or profound to say about it, other than I’m really glad Alan talked me into doing a second year (after doing 2007/365 the year before). I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, but it’s been fun. It’s been hard – I knew it would be, but there were a few times where I almost dropped the project. It’s been surprisingly rewarding. And it’s been inspiring, watching the other people who have taken on the project for the year.

I had initially planned on stopping after this year, but now I really don’t think I can stop. Time to get 2009/365 started…

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