Travel
These are all photos taken with my iPhone and then manipulated with Instagram. I then put four of the photos together using another app called Diptic. What I am learning is the role that iPhone and iPad apps can play in photography and also in photo manipulation. There's a lot to learn!Incidentally, how about going to one of my student's photo blogs? Holly is an excellent photographer would appreciate your stopping by: Holly's Blog
This photo was taken with my iPhone somewhere in southern South Dakota on I-29. It is grungy because the iPhone isn't all that good in low light, but it's made even grungier by an app called Instagram.
These aren't carp, of course. They're koi, the prettier cousins of carp. This photo originally appeared on my companion web experiment, scottshephard.posterous.com.Want to watch a very short video filmed, edited and posted with my iPhone? Click here.
In light of current events in Japan, I went back to my collection of photos. I hadn't really looked closely at this one before but I like it because the place conveys the kind of beauty and peace I found in many locations while visiting Japan. The images of destruction in Japan are wrenching. We might find comfort in the beauty of the Japanese landscape and character, but where do the Japanese go? Memory and photos will hardly suffice in the days and weeks to come.
This is a Greek kitten, discovered on a back street on the island of Mykonos. He/she is oblivious to my camera and refused to stand still for the photo.
Of course, when I look at my wife, I see more than the Caribbean, white sand and the inviting shade of a palapa. I see much of my past, my present and my future. But in this photo I see the Caribbean, white sand and a palapa.(Confession: I created this post in part so I could say nice things about my wife. And I wanted to be able to use the word "palapa.")
Photography does mean "writing with light." But you probably knew that. Did you know that if you ride on the back of a golf cart at night and expose the structures along a certain path at the Moon Palace south of Cancun, you get something like this? You do if you use a shutter speed of 1 1/2 seconds. Try it and see what you get.
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" hit the theaters in 1975. The sophomores in my world history class were born 20 years later. And yet, when I show a photo of this symbol of power of the Holy Roman Emperor in my history class, someone inevitably says, "That's the Holy Hand Grenade," which is what it was called in the Monty Python movie.This "Holy Hand Grenade" isn't unique - many royals had one in their possession. But this golden treasure can be seen with other spectucular crown jewels of a long-dead empire in Vienna, Austria.
The title of this post is from a statement made by Voltaire about the Holy Roman Empire, which was founded by Charlemagne in 800 AD. Even though the HRE may have had dubious value, the Emperors had great clothes and nice crowns. This is one of several in Vienna, Austria.Tomorrow, I'll show you the "Holy Hand Grenade."
Sometimes this blog attempts to be an artist enterprise but I'll have to admit that after over 700 posts, I'm running low on art. So today I am using this blog to document evidence of a lifestyle very different from our big-pickup-4-wheel-drive-our family-of-4-has-5-cars mentality.What you are looking at is a cute, yellow car parked neatly along a backstreet in Rome, Italy. If you saw the price of fuel and the size of back streets in Rome, you'd know what this car would be a smart choice.Notice that it has three wheels and that it's plugged in. How's that for efficiency?
If you get to the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia early in the day, you can have a wonderful wooden path all to yourself. But is an hour or two, people are sometimes three wide, which makes the paths a little less wonderful. Crowded paths are complicated by Asian tourists who walk on the left side and westerners like me (except for the British) who walk on the right side.Regardless of all of this, the Plitvice Lakes are amazing, as photos I've posted in the blog might prove.
This is a candid shot taken by an American photographer of a Japanese man studying a diorama of the destruction done by the atomic bomb to Hiroshima during WWII.Did I ever feel out of place while visiting Hiroshima? No. Did I feel any enmity from the Japanese I sometimes stood next to when I was at the Hiroshima Museum that day? No.I can't say how the Japanese man pictured here felt about United States' role in the destruction portrayed. But I do know that the Hiroshima Museum stands in part as a warning and as a lesson. The Museum and the Peace Center seem to say, "Here's what one relatively small bomb did. How can we prevent it from happening again?"I was uncertain about visiting Hiroshima. But I'm glad we did. . .