Go outside and look at your hand. You can say with a reasonable degree of accuracy that the light hitting your palm took 8 minutes to get there. How? Because we know the distance of the sun (~93 million miles) and how fast light travels (~670 million miles per hour). This means the light we see from the sun is actually light from 8 minutes ago. Light is a time machine that allows us to look back in time.

This thinking applies to all things. Every person you see is that person slightly in the past. Venus, the brightest thing our night sky other than the moon, is sooo 4 minutes ago. The greater the distance, the further we can look back. Now consider this image:

This mind-blowing view is of the Orion Nebula, and it’s the sharpest we’ve ever captured. It’s situated 1,500 light-years away, so it took 1,500 years for the light to reach us from that distance. Let’s put that into perspective – the image we’re seeing is actually the Orion Nebula 1,500 years ago. Where were we? In a bit of a rut, commonly known as The Dark Ages.

Click the image to grab the high-resolution wallpaper, or learn more about it here. 

Yesterday, I received a seemingly pleasant email from a curator at World Wide Art Books, a publishing company that puts out expensive coffee table books featuring artists & photographers from around the world. It was an invite to submit some work for consideration in their latest volume of “International Masters of Photography.” Well hey, that sounded cool. The catch? You have to pay anywhere from $880 to $6,800 (depending on how many pages you want) to have your work included. Wait, WHAT?

Yup. It seems you’re required to be personally wealthy in order for your work to grace the pages of their book that implies you’re an “international master.” First, I thought photographers were the ones who were supposed to get paid when a publisher wants to use a photo. Second, If you have to pay to get in, doesn’t that in a sense, make it just an really expensive business card? It’s like asking someone who’s good at their job to give up part of their salary for a better title. And, I’m guessing you’d still have to buy your own copies…

It’s actually quite smart in how deceptive it is. They make money because people will pay to take the shortcut. Easy beats free, right? Who wouldn’t want to point a book with a title like that, and say their work is on page 10? But a book like this calls into question the validity of the title. Are they really “international masters” if they had to buy their way in? No. These are just ads. And they completely preclude all the other amazing photographers who couldn’t afford to participate.

With the decline of print, and so many book stores closing, it should be obvious that there aren’t as many people buying these kinds of books anymore. It’s an old idea. You’re better off future-proofing your online portfolio and sticking with social media, or printing your own. It would certainly be more cost effective.

Reposting this photo after Twitter deleted the original photo. Sounds like they’re re-building it as it was, which is super encouraging. Taken with an iPhone.

Going though some old photos, i realized… I barely remember this day. I remember being on the flats, but have no clue what we talked about, or how she was feeling. Why? I was too busy with exposure times, F-stops, and filters. Documenting the experience got in the way of the experience itself.

Capture vs. experience. As a photographer, it’s your job to capture. You’re supposed to step back, raise a camera to your face, look through a lens and tell a compelling story. Get the photo, get the photo, and above all else, get the photo. Hell, it’s more than a job. It’s a religion. It’s just… what you do.

As a partner, parent, or friend, however, it’s important to turn this mentality off – to take part in and help create the experience. I have a hard time doing this, apparently, considering my inability to recollect an entire day in an amazing place. Yeah, it absolutely sucks seeing a potential photo pass you by, quietly taunting you as you stand there without your camera, your phone tucked deep in your pocket. But it’s more than made up for when you’re out there, actually living the experience, avoiding the confused regret i feel now.

So, as a reminder to myself and all other camera addicts, don’t forget the salt.

If you’re one of those people that like to keep a clean & minimal workspace, this one’s just for you. I combined a few of my favorite home brew textures with an isometric grid sourced from the ever bountiful Google Image search. Plus, they’re Retina friendly!

Download for Desktop, Tablets, or Mobile.

Holy smokes, it’s 2012. Step onto any train or bus and you’ll find yourself surrounded by a crowd of people, quietly fixated on little, glowing screens. In the last year alone, mobile web traffic has gone up 35% globally - and you don’t have to look far to see it. A quick check of Google Analytics a few months ago made that point ever-so-clear: a whopping 25% of my total web traffic is mobile. That’s 1 in 4 people! And my site looks like crap on the phone. Well, that is, until now. Go ahead, resize your browser. I re-did the entire thing so it looks nice at any scale.

How? Well, honestly, I sorta cheated. I’m secretly a web nerd who used an amazing responsive-layout CSS boilerplate called Skeleton, a side project of my friend Dave Gamache, which made it easy for me to design & code for every screen size. Now, if you’re not a web nerd, and find yourself thinking “responsive B-S-wha?”, you’re in luck – there are a few of options out there that make it easy to build your own mobile-friendly portfolio without knowing a lick of code.

Here’s a few general rules to follow when choosing a portfolio site.

• Avoid Flash portfolios!
  They require a plug-in that most mobile phones don’t have. Plus, they’re sooo last decade.
• Keep the design simple. 
  The site should take a back seat to your content, and should easily scale down to fit within a tiny screen.
• Quality, not quantity. 
  Fewer & big is better than many & small.
• Ask yourself “Is it easy to get from one image to another?”
  If you find yourself clicking or tapping too much, the answer is probably no.
• Vertical scrolling is faster than horizontal scrolling.
  Unless the mobile version of the site supports a gallery mode that lets you swipe left & right, stick with what the browser knows how to do best – up & down.

I found 5 mobile-friendly portfolio options that fit this criteria fairly well:

1. Super Skeleton WordPress Theme 2. Hatch WordPress Theme 3. 22Slides 4. 4ormat 5. FolioHD

Hopefully, the next time you’re casually chatting about your work, you’ll have something to show at the dinner table. These five are the best i’ve found so far. If you know of any others, let me know in the comments.

Fired off the last few shots in long exposure before hopping on the plane home from maui. 120 film + Hasselblad.

Riding the November breeze on the alkali plain. Wendover, Utah 2011. Some new black and white work. So excited to finally get this one out there!

Prints are available here: http://shop.colerise.com

Here’s the result of a little weekend tomfoolery. I had always wondered, so i figured might as well finish the job.

The potential for “focus-later” photography is very exciting – Photoshop can only go so far to correct unintentionally blurry shots, and the idea of letting anyone re-focus your image after-the-fact opens up a new door to get spatially creative. So, when my 8GB Lytro finally arrived, i was jumping at the bit to take it up a mountain to see how it performed. Here’s what i learned…

Focus: Pretty easy. 
Lytro, much like an iPhone, lets you tap to focus on the view screen. Yep, there is some focusing involved, but let’s call it “weighted focus.” You tap to tell it where you want most of the focus to be, and it handles the rest. It’s certainly not precise in any way, but it’s pretty straight-forward to use without having to read the manual.

Macro: Impressive. 
Getting up close is not a problem, and the depth of field is super shallow. Sweet. Macro seems to provide the better example for the “focus-later” feature.

Image control: Limited.
Lytro doesn’t have shutter or aperture control. It seems to rely on a best guess depending on lighting conditions, which is awesome for some, but limiting for serious photographers.

Zoom: Awesome, but hard to find / use.
Lytro has one heck of a range, from 45mm all the way in to 300mm, or 8x optical, which lets you get in real close without actually being close. This works really well when you’re trying not to scare deer. The act of physically zooming, however, is slow, taking multiple swipes of the finger across the top of the viewfinder. Not so great when you need to zoom in quick before the deer runs off. Note: I had to read the manual to figure out how to zoom, only after overhearing someone say it had a zoom feature.

Low-light performance: Not so much. 
Even with it’s F2.0 aperture, the photos are pretty noisy in low-light conditions. The ISO automatically adjusts for you, as expected. The photo above is taken at ISO 3200.

Resolution: Sooo small… 
This puppy outputs photos at 1080×1080, or about 1.2 megapixels. Quality-wise they’re not to sharp either, but I wasn’t expecting much from a camera defining a whole new category of consumer photography. I’m sure it’ll improve with the next version.

View screen: Low resolution, super hard to see in daylight.
Oh dear, this thing’s hard to see outside. It’s like trying to take photos with first generation iPod Nano, and that’s probably generous. After a couple hours of use, switching back to the iPhone’s retina display was shockingly refreshing, like jumping into a cold pool after the hot tub.

In short…
Cool new toy! It’s pretty, simple to use, easy to hold, the technology works, and it’s easy to share. If you’re looking for quality, wait for the next verison. I want this on my iPhone.