photons beaming, the skyline gleaming slow river flowing past the silver arch night sky brooding frosted wind blowing soft music playing over the car stereo — 12/4/09 – 2
Author walljm
walljm
I have been writing on the web since 2000. I am a christian , a photographer, an occasional poet, a recovering dreamer, an occasional philosopher, a software developer, an autodidact, and I resemble the INFP personality type.
Joe McNally Photography- On location with the Nikon D4 from Joe McNally Photography on Vimeo. A BTS look at several shoots by Joe McNally, for the Nikon D4 campaign. All footage shot on Nikon D4 and D7000 cameras.
Ok, so I’ve implemented redirects for most of the old urls, which should continue to work. I’ve added a number of customizations and tweaks. If anyone runs into anything odd or frustrating, please feel free to contact me via a comment on this post or email via jason at walljm.com. let try this again
dissociative phrases slip in and out foggy dew, fog lifted, foghorn, leghorn. ;) creative buzz, cackling energy welling glad to be free. free of the fog. there it is again, chase the pent up rush. ideas in a fuss, hear the thrush! now focus. crisp. clear, feel the clarity, contrasty, images, razor sharp, like a knife. now soft, fluid like water. oh bother. chase the convolution harry it like a cat and his mouse or a bird and his prey wait. where was i again? — 12/3/09 – 1
for reasons unknown, the server that runs walljm.com and the rest of my web properties ran out of memory and was unresponsive for the last couple days. its back up now.
I’ve been offline here at walljm.com for nearly three years. In that time I’ve moved away from Saint Louis, settled in near Washington, DC, changed jobs (but not companies), and gone back to school (lets give it up for cdia!). So a few things have changed around here. For the first time, walljm.com is no longer being run by the custom cms I built in college, and is instead running on the nifty wordpress platform. Truth is, I just got tired of doing my own support. Things are still a little rough, and hopefully as time goes by, I…
Ten Things I Have Learned Milton Glaser makes several very insightful observations.
It occurs to me that the word Evolution is often used in contexts that it does not strictly describe. This is because the word Evolution carries with it so many broad connotations. For instance, in a recent excerpt by Jason Kottke on Altruism in Economics the author of an article in Ode Magazine writes this The theory is based on the premise that humans evolved in small groups with strong social contracts and plenty of contact with strangers. Cooperation within the tribe was advantageous so long as free riders were punished. It was also the best gambit on encountering strangers.…
Lately I’ve had a lot to say. Quite paradoxically, this means I’ve spoken less. Words, like many things in life, need context to have meaning. That context doesn’t end with its typographic neighbors, but extends to the time of day, the place, the number and particulars of the persons to whom they are given. Words are a gift. For some, a precious and finite resource, saved up to be given at times most appropriate. I was thinking about introversion today, among other things, and as is my want, my thoughts turned inward. It seems, for good or ill, my self…
dawn on a spring morningsky blue and nascent greendogwoods white with flowers blooming in white light clearly seen.
Ok. I’ve been working on my HDR’s lately and I like this one. Its vibrant, rich, deep. I has balance. I like the way the skyline on the right is balanced with the sort of industrial look on the left. I’ll admit, stl never looks this pretty. :) but we wish it did. and hey, I’d hang this on my wall. This is an HDR and a stitched panorama. I took two sets of 3 photos 2 stops apart and stitched them with Autopano Pro, processed the HDR with Photomatix, and color corrected and finished it in photoshop. The final…
This photo is my favorite of the three. Unrelated to that statement, these photos have a barren quality to them. The saturation and hue of the rose/gold and blue/grey sky and stone seem to suck the life out of me a little. part of me appreciates that for some reason. do you?
The day we took these shots, it was cold. The light was grey, the sky overcast. For brief moments, the clouds would part enough to give us skies like these, but that did little to lighten the mood of the photographs. I shot up with this photograph, because i was trying to convey awe. Not of the statue, but of the place I think. Cemeteries remind me of God, because they remind me of death, and death has never held much fear for me, only the expectation of meeting Christ. Critically speaking, I think i should have moved a little…
This is the first of three compositions, color and bw taken last weekend. It falls short of what I had hoped compositionally, but it does have merits. just… i haven’t thought them up yet. ;)
Washington Times – EDITORIAL: Obama’s abortion war “Only three days into a new administration, the president of “hope” and “change” revealed that, in this enormous matter at least, he will not be a new leader who will work towards a kinder, gentler, more unified America. Instead he is immediately exacerbating old wounds in the body politic: He is simply a wolf in sheep’s clothing. ”
Mexico City Policy – Voluntary Population Planning What it does: "The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2151b(f)(1)), prohibits nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive Federal funds from using those funds "to pay for the performance of abortions as a method of family planning, or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions." The August 1984 announcement by President Reagan of what has become known as the "Mexico City Policy" directed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to expand this limitation and withhold USAID funds from NGOs that use non-USAID funds to engage in a wide range…
This is the last of this series. The image works better wider. And, I think works better with the contrast between the warm and cool colors, the orange and red clouds in front of a deepening blue sky. There is both a feeling of intimacy created by the vignetting and a feeling of expansiveness created by the wide angle lens’ effect of stretching the clouds as they get nearer to the corners. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there somewhere worth musing on.
This photo is a cropped version, and done without HDR. I wanted to see how it would differ. Its a small variation. Its interesting that the cloud in the middle of the photo stands out so much. Too much in fact. Its a distraction you don’t see in the previous two images. The vignetting here makes the image feel more intimate, where the HDR version two images back is much more open ended.
I went blue with this one. There is no HDR here. The idea was to emphasize the evening. The deep blue in the sky reminds me of the song Silent Night for some reason, and I keep picturing a manger scene somewhere. The word “deep” keeps coming to mind. I like the way this is framed. I strengthened the vignetting purposefully. The semicircle of orange in the sky creates concentric circles pulling your eyes to the farm houses on the horizon. The photo isn’t so much about the houses though, as it is the funnel effect of the transition from…
I’m going to try and start writing some kind of analysis with my photos, just because I think I’ve become a little lazy and because I’m trying to develop and think about why I take a photo. The process of thinking about what the compositional elements mean will hopefully exercise the mental muscle and work its way into the process before I actually take it. :) so here goes:
This is an HDR processes image, using the RAW file I created 5 images spaced 1 f/stop apart. The hope was to even out the sky and deepen the gradients in the clouds, which it did.
The first thing that hits me is the bigness of the sky. I put just a narrow strip of horizon and shot up because I wanted as much sky as possible, but I still wanted to anchor the image to a specific location.
The brilliance of the color is fanciful, though not by much. The scene was almost that bright and vibrant. The photo was taken Christmas day, just outside my parents house, which sits on the edge of town, next to a corn field.
The silhouetted houses in the background add a rustic vibe. This is country. Its simple, but grand.