I was invited to come shoot some nighttime photography as part of the local Des Moines area Flickr Group. You can see most of my shots from this outing at: Downtown at Night Photo Album.

You can check at all the participant’s photography by visiting: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1014797@N22/ or watching the slide show below.

I’ve added some new photos to the gallery to show off downtown during the summer time. I hope you enjoy!

I found out about this event this week and signed up. As of this posting there are still 20 slots open. If you love exploring downtown and photography, this should be a “no brainer” for you.

MEETING LOCATION: Begin at New gardens on the West side of State Capitol, end at Doozies Bar and Grill in Embassy Suites
MEETING TIME: 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM, July 18th.

A Message From The Walk Leader, Brandon Burnett: “I hope you’ll join me and a bunch of fellow photography enthusiasts for a evening photowalk in Des Moines. We will start at the new gardens on the west side of the Capitol at 6:30 and work our way around a variety of interesting areas in Des Moines’ East Village and some spots along the Des Moines river. I’ll try for a walk of about 1 mile and we should end up at Doozies Bar and Grill in Embassy Suites around 8:30. We’ll be walking with some of the most photogenic light of the day and with a wide variety of subjects. ”

Brandon Burnett is the owner of Burnett Digital. He has over fifteen years of photography experience and does commercial, portrait and stock photography. He has taught classes at the high school and community college level.

Register here: http://worldwidephotowalk.com/attendee-registration-form/?bid=610

Searching for just the right photo on Flickr can sometimes be a little tricky. One designer takes a unique look on how this can be done using our solar system as a model.

Tag Galaxy is a Flickr tool that visualizes image browsing utilizing tags and planetary constellations to show their related tags. You just type in your keyword, for this example, I used Des Moines and that keyword becomes the sun and keywords associated with it spin around it like planets.

One of the fun parts is that a click on any other tag other than the main tag will combine the old tag with the new tag to include only pictures that have been tagged with all tags.

You keep drilling down until you find what combination you are looking for and the pictures are then presented on a globe. Clicking on the central “star” will close in on that star and fill it with exactly 235 picture thumbnails. The planet can be rotated with the left mouse button and zoomed with the mouse wheel. A click on a preview image will load that image in front, another click will load information about the picture like the name of the artist, a description and a link to the Flickr page.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing around this past weekend trying to teach myself both new photography techniques (high dynamic range photography) and learning more Photoshop CS3 skills. I designed a couple of images for my computer desktop that I wanted to share with you. Both are available at Flickr and can be downloaded in the following sizes: 1900×1200; 1344×840; 1280×800; and 1024×768. I hope you enjoy them, they are some of my first attempts and I know I have a learning curve to conquer.

You can download them at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10563628@N04/sets/72157613539506625/detail/

A couple of weeks ago, I snapped this image in an ally behind 4th Street. In playing around with HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography, I kept looking at this photo and wondering what it did all mean. Question one, why is there a second floor door that opens onto the edge of the building? Question two, why did Java Joe’s paint over the word “SHOP” in the photograph. Question three, why is the floor above Java Joe’s empty, this would make a cool loft space?

Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to join a group of local downtown photographers from Flickr for a downtown photo shoot. The outing was organized by Don McLaughlin, who goes by Don3rdSE on Flickr. I got the chance to meet eleven other passionate photographers at Java Joe’s that morning, where we discussed what the days plans were. We would be leaving Java Joe’s around 8am and would break up into smaller groups and were told to take photos of anything downtown that we found interesting as a photographer.

My group included myself, LizzardJoe (Elizabeth) and Fearless Fagin (Eric). We headed west on the skywalk system as far as we could go. Due to the cold temperatures we tried to stay inside the sidewalk as much as possible. After a couple hours of photography everyone was going to meet back up at Java Joe’s to talk about and share some of their photos.

Don set up a new group pool on Flickr for us to add our photos in. I would suggest not only taking a look at that group, but also the links to the individual photographer’s photostreams. Each of them takes some really amazing work and is truly gifted.

You can check out each of the individual’s participant’s and their photostreams on the next page.
Read the rest of this entry »