orange. blob. blog. » Photography Masters Cup – 2011

Photography Masters Cup – 2011

Tim — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:08:29 +0000

A little late posting this one… only one year out. Towards the end of last year, I got a nod from the Photography Masters Cup awards for my abstract picture of Greenery…

The official title is the 5th Annual Photography Masters Cup awards – either way, they liked my photo of the cold looking stone, contrasted with the deep green of the bush. The photo was taken in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Thanks again to the judges for picking my photograph out!

Black and White Spider Awards 2011

Tim — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 01:26:54 +0000

A good email to wake up to this morning – my photo of Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse won a ‘nominee’ placing in 2011′s Black and White Spider Awards. This is a black and white conversion of the photo taken in the Beagle channel at the ‘end of the world’ at the southernmost tip of South America…

It’s supposed to be the most photographed lighthouse in South America, but it took us a couple of attempts to get out there – the first couple of days the boat trip was cancelled due to the awful weather. Check out the original post on Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse for more background to the image, and the lighthouse.

Popular Photography Magazine Runner Up

Tim — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:12:54 +0000

First up – Happy New Year!

Had some good news the other day – a couple of photographs that I took were recognised as runner ups in the Popular Photography 17th Annual Readers’ Photo Contest…

You can view all of the winners and runners up over at the Popular Photography Photo Contest page. There are some great images in the gallery!

The two photographs are Park Avenue in the Rain (taken in New York City, with a tilt shift lens) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (also taken with a tilt shift lens). Park Avenue was a runner up in the Travel/Places category, and the Guggenheim was a runner up in the Architecture category.

Both photos were originally part of a series of photographs of New York that I took, called ‘Manhattan – A Closer Look‘. The series looked at famous buildings and views in Manhattan, and were all taken with a tilt shift lens. You can take a look through the related blog posts to see more info about each of the photos, including the other photos in the series.

International Aperture Awards 2010

Tim — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 09:13:28 +0000

I had submitted a couple of photos to the International Aperture Awards 2010 – this one was selected for a Bronze Award…

It’s a photo of what seems like it should be a seat, in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The striking green of the neat hedge contrasted well with the surrounding marble, and added a patch of welcome colour in between the mausoleums.

The original photograph is below… and there is an older blog post about La Recoleta Cemetery too.

International Photography Awards 2010

Tim — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 03:26:56 +0000

I arrived home the other night to a flat-pack envelope…. interesting… unless con-ed have upgraded their billing notifications, I thought it was probably something worth opening!

I was pretty chuffed to find out that my series of Patagonia images (of the Perito Moreno Glacier) in Argentina was awarded 2nd place in the ‘Travel and Tourism’ category of the IPA 2010. I entered the International Photography Awards the year before also, and managed to get an honorable mention for my photo of the County Hall in London. The series of images selected are shown below:

The Perito Moreno series was a selection of photos that I took at the end of last year while traveling around Patagonia in Argentina. Truly incredible place, and I still find myself looking at the images and reminiscing! All the images were made with a tilt-shift 45mm lens which I took on the trip along with a Canon 24-70mm lens.

The Winners Gallery for 2010 is definitely worth a look through – some more great images in there. To find the Patagonia series, head down the very bottom of the page, under the Travel and Tourism category. Or you can shortcut directly to the Perito Moreno Series page.

I hunted around in the envelope for an Oscar-like statuette too, but sadly it looks like the 2nd placers don’t get one. Maybe next year…

For a detailed look at all the images in the series, check out my blog post on the Patagonia Gallery of Images, which has links to posts about the background to each photo, and some random facts about blue ice!

I also managed to pick up a few Honorable mentions this year – with Park Avenue Rain, Perito Moreno Glacier Trek, and La Recoleta Cemetery.

A big THANKS! to the judges for picking out my images for a placement this year in the Travel and Tourism awards!

Patagonia Gallery of Images

Tim — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:06:26 +0000

Finally got around to creating a dedicated gallery of landscape images from my trip to Patagonia in Argentina. It’s a relatively small gallery of 8 images, showing a few of the best images…

Feel free to click the image above to to to the gallery online, and you can also take a look through the individual blog posts about some of the photos:

ICE
Crampons
Grouse on the Glacier
Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse
Perito Moreno Glacier Trek
Moreno Glacier Argentina

Photography Masters Cup – Nominee

Tim — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:49:45 +0000

Happy to say that two of my images were positioned as ‘Nominees’ for the 4th Annual Photography Masters Cup. Entered this collection quite a long time ago (they’ve just opened the 5th Annual entry) so it was a pleasant surprise to receive the email…

The two images chosen were both in the ‘Architecture’ nominees, found at this link on the Color Awards Site (click ‘Nominees’ to the right if it shows the Winners view). There’s quite a few nominees listed overall, so you have to scroll down to the ‘T’s… next year I’ll remember to adopt my photographic name. Anyone know any names beginning with multiple A’s?

One was the ‘Flatiron’ Building in New York City, shown above. This was taken as part of a series of photographs, called ‘Manhattan – A Closer Look‘. All the photos were taken with a tilt shift lens, and in this case I intentionally overexposed the background / sky, to make it pure white… almost as if the Flatiron wandered into a studio for a photo-shoot.

The other image nominated in the Masters Cup (again in the Architecture category) was the Reflection of St Paul’s Cathedral, shown above. This one is quite an old image (taken in 2008) on a walk around London in a search for a new angle!

There’s also more info about each photo (and their subjects) on the links above… Also well worth having a look through the rest of the Color Awards website – a lot of great work listed in the different categories, and congratulations to all the winners!

New York Times – A Moment in Time

Tim — Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:33 +0000

The New York Times’ Lens blog built and launched the interactive gallery for all of the different pictures collected for the ‘A Moment in Time’ project…

They launched the interactive gallery over at their ‘The Moment You’ve Waited For’ blog post. Clicking on the graphic launches the gallery where you can click on piles of photos, stashed around the world. It’s an intriguing way of presenting all the photos… and hard to ‘hunt’ for something specific, but it seems like a great way to make sure that people spend time browsing all the different photos and countries that took part.

The image that I blogged about at ‘A Moment in Time – Grand Central Clock’ appears in the gallery at the link here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/03/blogs/a-moment-in-time.html/#/4bdf87450bca253c3600046e

Also noticed a couple of other photos of the clock – this one included. Out of curiosity, I checked through the photos that I took, and saw one from a couple of frames earlier where the person has his hands up ‘holding’ the clock. It looks like they switch places a couple of frames later, and in the picture above, the photographer is leaning up against the Information booth on the right hand side of the photo.

Moments in Time… almost collided I guess.

There are loads of great pictures in the collection from around the world (I’m not even going to pretend to have looked at even a fraction of them) but there was one from the New York region that grabbed my attention here. Something about the V shapes, and the blown out tree, with the slight blur of the NYPD car.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
3.2 seconds at f/4.5
ISO 100
45mm (tilt shift)

Facebook and PhotoShelter

Tim — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 02:24:31 +0000

I’ve been stepping up my activity on PhotoShelter recently – adding custom slideshows for my facebook fan page and allowing buyers to choose prints in a variety of different formats using the ‘self-fulfilled’ option…

My work is mostly travel-related photography focusing on landscapes, architecture and travel scenes. I’m now able to offer signed prints through my website and allow buyers to easily order the prints to their specifications. Recent projects include a look at New York icons and buildings, called ‘Manhattan – A Closer Look’. This series was also featured on PDN’s Photo of the Day. I love to travel and love photography – so it’s been fantastic to combine the two!

There’s a number of reasons I’m glad that I stumbled across the PhotoShelter offering a couple of years ago, and why I’m still making adjustments and changes using their ever-growing list of features. I’ve done a couple of reviews previously – one early PhotoShelter review here, and a PhotoShelter review update here – where I’ve mentioned some of their SEO tools and toolkits specifically for photographers.

Here’s a run-down of why I use PhotoShelter:

Archive

It’s always a good feeling – even if your off-site hard disk backup hasn’t been refreshed in a while (hey, it happens!) – all your most important photos are sitting securely on PhotoShelter’s storage system at their highest resolution. If the worst were to happen, downloading the original archived files to the computer again would be pretty easy.

Website Integration

To me, this is of huge importance; being able to make the ‘archive’ and ‘e-commerce’ components integrate fully with the main website. It means no awkward jump in look-and-feel between components. Consistency. I’m a regular reader of Smashing Magazine, which made me realise that I could take a stab at my own web re-design. The results are what you see on my current website.

After building the ‘front end’ of my newly designed website, I could then apply the exact same look, feel and branding to the PhotoShelter archive component of the site. If you’d like more info about the re-design, I created what was meant to be a short article (but turned out a tad large) about customizing my WordPress blog, my website and the integration with PhotoShelter here.

I think its hugely important nowadays for websites to be seamless and well integrated – PhotoShelter lets me do just that! Now, even if people hit google search results and go straight through to my PhotoShelter site first, they still see the same branding and cohesiveness… (is cohesiveness even a word!?)

Social Media Tools (and Facebook slideshow integration)

There’s a whole bunch of Social media tools and features built into the PhotoShelter system that allow you to easily post galleries and photos to facebook, flickr, or twitter… Take this example below – where people can click a link to buy the image directly from the article, and also get their own embed links for their use – which will link straight back to your portfolio.

Best of all – how many times have I been thankful for this feature? – you don’t have to worry about the watermarking. I normally post pictures at a small resolution to social media sites and I was worried about uploading the ‘full size’ to PhotoShelter. Luckily it’s easy to set up a customized watermark in whatever style or size that you want. The watermark then automatically gets applied to the photos when other people view them. Your original photos are left untouched, and you don’t have to faff with anything fancy in Photoshop.

There’s also a great write-up by David Calvert on the PhotoShelter blog about customizing your facebook fan page with PhotoShelter slideshows. That tutorial inspired me to set up a facebook fan page for my travel photography (long overdue), and to set up a slideshow on the custom ‘welcome’ page with some of my images. Again – the PhotoShelter system makes everything so customizable that it’s easy to set up a gallery of images that you want to appear in the facebook slideshow, but that you might not want to appear in the list of galleries that people see through your website.

‘Soft’ side of PhotoShelter

I touched on this briefly in my updated PhotoShelter review – it’s not all about the ‘product’ at PhotoShelter – I also get great information from their ‘A Picture’s Worth’ blog, as well as attending their free webinar sessions on anything from monetizing your PhotoShelter galleries to setting up Google Analytics for your site. There’s also the free toolkits that they produce, like the SEO Cookbook for Photographers or a guide to designing websites for Photography Buyers, through to the recent Social Media Guide for Photographers.

All in all, it makes you feel like part of a local community!

In summary…

I use PhotoShelter to:

- Sell signed prints to buyers, who can buy online at any time of the day
- Offer coupons and incentives to buyers
- Keep a secure offsite copy of my most valuable photos
- Market my photos through social media and slideshows using the same source photos
- Integrate the e-commerce needs of my site with my ‘front end’ website and wordpress blog
- Use their free resources – like the toolkits and blog posts…

Yep – I’d recommend to a friend!

PopPhoto Magazine Runner Up

Tim — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:42:46 +0000

First post of the year, so Happy New Year to everyone reading this!

Discovered by mistake the other day that one of my photos had won ‘runner up’ in the Popular Photography Magazine’s 16th Annual Readers’ Contest…

I just happened to be looking through their weekly email, and noticed that they’d announced the winners and had an online gallery – I was looking through the different photos, and then had a pleasant surprise when I was faced with my Empire State Building picture, taken during Earth Hour 2009, with a tilt shift lens.

You can see the full gallery of winners and runner-ups at the Popular Photography gallery.

I was also pretty happy to start the new year with my first photo that’s made it into print in a magazine. You can see the image second down on the left, in the grid of runner-up images. They always say to start small… so I guess that image fits the bill – I actually missed it the first time I was looking through the magazine to see if they printed the runner-up images!

Anyway, it’s a good start to the new year, and the image was then also featured on their Photo of the day – Photo of the Day, Jan 8th 2009, which you can see in the screenshot below.