Brooklyn Bridge and FDR Drive

This image is far from perfect. The vibrations from car and train traffic on the Manhattan Bridge present a challenge when shooting long exposures. I was using my beloved old Canon G10, which doesn't seem to have the sharpest lens when shooting in low light, and struggles mightily with noise. Plus, there's no clear view of anything from the walkway on the Manhattan Bridge - it's all obscured by a chain link fence on top, and iron gratings below, so getting an unobstructed shot requires poking your lens awkwardly through an opening and bracing your tripod strategically, then waiting for the traffic to die down long enough to get a crisp shot. All that aside, I do like the colors in this shot a whole lot, so technical imperfections aside, I'm sharing it anyway.

The Brooklyn Bridge and the FDR Drive, as seen from the Manhattan Bridge

Layer Tags →

Design superstar Marc Edwards of Bjango (makers of fine apps including iStat Menus) has a great post over on the Bjango blog about taking advantage of a fantastic new feature of Photoshop CS6: layer search. His tip includes tagging layers with information that makes it easy to filter and update multiple layers at a time. It's one of those things that seems obvious when you see it in action - in fact I feel kind of silly for not having thought of it myself. Anyway, I definitely intend to incorporate Marc's tip into my workflow, and you should too.

Prospect Park Photowalk: It's For the Birds

I'm often in the park on one of my many perambulations, and I see some really cool bird, and invariably, I have the wrong lens, or the wrong camera, or no camera (haha - as if), and I miss out on a cool moment. Well, today I decided I'd bring the long lens (well, at 70-200 it's not really that long), and deliberately seek out the birds for a change.

Remembering Paris

For no particular reason, today I got all nostalgic about our trip to Paris back in 2010. I like going back over my photos, with the distance a few years provides, and looking at photos that I might not, at the time, have considered all that interesting. Often, I find that I've changed my mind, or I see something new that I never noticed before.

More photos from the trip are on Flickr.

New Year's Eve Photowalk

According to my Nike+ Fuel Band, I've been pretty inactive for... well, the whole month of December. In a quest to end the month (and the year) on a strong note, I decided to go on what turned into a rather epic photo walk.

I started in Prospect Park, worked my way through Windsor Terrace and Park Slope, then headed towards the infamous Gowanus Canal (I hear it has gonorrhea). I then made my way over to Cobble Hill, and finally finished up in Downtown Brooklyn, where I hopped on the Q train and headed back home.

It took about 3 hours, and got me to within a few points of my daily Fuel Point goal. Here's to an active 2013.

2012 Journal

As we come close to the end of 2012, I thought I'd put together a collection of some of the notable moments in my life over the past year.

The first part of the year was heavily centered around my finally becoming a citizen of the United States. Other than that, babies were the other big thing this year - I went to no less than three baby showers. There was also a wedding, a 60th anniversary, a Grammy-winning artist, a comedian, some hip-hop, some classical, Las Vegas, and a mustache.

This is one of the things I love not just about being a photographer, but about the exploding ubiquity of cameras in our culture: much of my life is fairly well-documented, and looking back over my photos helps to remind me that despite the mundane-ness of my day-to-day existence (sleep, work, home, rinse, repeat), I have a pretty great life.

From the Vault

A little friendly reminiscing with my pal The Resident about some of the gems we worked on in the early days of the dotcom boom prompted me to do a little digging on some backup CD's(!) I have hanging around in my office. I didn't find the stuff we were reminiscing about, but I did find these two gems from my sketchbook.

"I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!"

This was probably drawn sometime around when I got my BFA at SCAD. Which means it was drawn on an Amiga 3000, with a mouse that resembles a brick, probably using Deluxe Paint.

"Fatman"?

I think this next image started life as just another sketch in my sketchbook, which I'm guessing I scanned and used to practice inking and coloring in Photoshop, which would date it several years after the Juggernaut sketch. The file was simply named "fatman.psd". I'd really love to know how I made that cool watercolor background in what had to be Photoshop 4 (not CS4, just 4).

The Waiting Place | Dustin Curtis

I didn’t realize this until recently, but the most destructive thing smart people do is spend their lives waiting. Even people with lofty dreams and aspirations get distracted by the inertia of ordinary events and subconsciously store their goals in the waiting place.
This made me see just how comfortable I've been - I'm not only in The Waiting Place, apparently I've taken up long-term residence there.
Source: http://dcurt.is/the-waiting-place

Is the GOP stealing Ohio?

Funny business going on in Ohio, beginning suspiciously close to the 2012 Presidential Election. At the behest of Secretary of State Jon Husted (R), an unverified software patch was installed on electronic voting tabulation machines in 39 counties to "assist counties and to help them simplify the process by which they report the results to our system."

Re. a sketchy election result from Georgia in 2002:

No one will likely ever be able to prove that the November 2002 election was rigged, but that infamous software “patch,” along with the anomalous election results from 100 percent unverifiable voting systems (which are still in use today across the state of Georgia and in many other states) has cast an everlasting cloud of suspicion over that election.

The more I read, the more this is making me queasy. Even assuming there's nothing nefarious going on here, it's still highly suspect that they waited to install this uncertified patch on these machines only days before the 2012 election.

Source: http://www.salon.com/2012/11/05/ohio_republicans_sneak_risky_software_onto_voting_machines/