Andrei Zmievski

I’ve just uploaded some photos taken over the New Year’s eve period. One album is from a pre-party at my friends’ place, and the other from the awesome Sea of Dreams event at the SF Concourse center. I had a lot of fun shooting both events, and a lot of it was due to my new camera acquisition - Nikon D3 - with its absolutely amazing performance in low-light situations.

I’ll have more to say on D3 in another post, but for now, check out the photos. A selection of Sea of Dreams ones can also be seen on Flickr, or even better - on Flickriver.

I tested Vu photoblog under IE 5+ on Windows today and noticed that it had a layout problem with the content area being really wide. Somehow it didn’t like absolutely positioned full-width and height element. My CSS-mojo wasn’t up to dealing with it today, so I cheated. Hey, don’t tell me you never cheated on CSS layout. Anyway, photoblog is back to normal.

I’ve been kicking around the idea for a daily photoblog site, in the spirit of Sam Javarouh’s [daily dose of imagery] and Shahin Edalati’s foto, since.. well, since I started following those photoblogs. I figured that I had enough photos accumulated to post one each day in addition to shooting new ones.

Back in November of last year, I started doing Project 365, where each day I take a few photos and then post one to my Flickr set. It’s an interesting exercise, but can be demoralizing when you realize that it’s almost night time and you haven’t taken a single shot yet. The goals of this photoblog, however, are different: I simply want to post a daily quality photo, independent of when it was taken, and make the presentation somewhat better than what Flickr allows.

Getting the actual site built has taken a while, but it’s finally here: Vu. I called it that for a couple of reasons: it sounds like view and vu in French means seen. All the photos are hosted on Flickr, so you can always click through to the image page via the “on flickr” link. The design might evolve slightly, and I’ll add a couple of cool extra features, but I’m very happy that it’s up and running and that I can share some of my favorite photos.

I hope you enjoy it.

Glowing spires

I recently returned from my first trip to Hong Kong. I’ve never been to that part of Asia before, so I wanted to check it out and also attend the Rugby Sevens tournament. My friend Chris organizes a group of folks every year for the Sevens trip and he’s been telling me it’s a lot of fun, so I decided to join this time.

Guess what? It was more than a lot of fun. It was fantastic. I spent half the time exploring Hong Kong and Kowloon and the other half at the Sevens watching the game, drinking beer and Pimm’s, and marveling at the dressed-up fans (it was basically Halloween meets sports). Wait was there another half there? Maybe, I don’t remember, because Chris is a dangerous person to party with and I was running on maybe 5 hours of sleep a night.

In any case, check out the photos and see if that kind of stuff appeals to you. If it does, book your ticket now.

I submitted a photo for JPG Magazine’s Entropy theme contest and would appreciate it if you would take a moment and vote for me by clicking on the image below.

Update: Fixed post to remove javascript that was not appearing correctly in RSS feeds.

Submitted to JPG Issue 10: Entropy. Is it a good fit? Vote Now!

I submitted three of my photos for JPG Magazine’s issue 8 contest, one for each theme that they have. If one of my photos wins, it’ll be published in the next issue among other winners. Please vote for me and help me win!

Study in red (part 1)

I was in New York this summer to give a talk at the NYPHP Conference and stayed an extra day to hang around and visit a couple of places that I have not seen before, such the re-opened MOMA. I shot some photos there and some on the streets around Washington Square Park. The results are on Flickr.

Finally, I have finished processing and uploading the photos from my trip to St. Petersburg, back in May. Apologies to those who have been waiting for them.

The photos from the Moscow part of my trip to Russia are now up on the site. It’s taken longer than I expected to process them. This is partly because it was the first time I shot everything in RAW format in order to be able to adjust exposure and white balance easier. An unintended consequence of this decision was that I spent way more time on each photo than I usually do, tweaking things to be just perfect, and doing this for a good portion of 600 photos just takes a while, even with the help of a WhiBal. I’ll have to figure a more streamlined approach to processing.

The photos from St. Petersburg will be coming up a bit later.

My friend Joachim is going on a trip around the world. He will travel through Europe (briefly), India (for two months), Southeast Asia (for a month), and will end up in San Francisco some time around the end of February. And he is blogging this experience. I can’t help but feel envious and also wonder at the same time whether I could leave behind a job, sell most of my property, and embark on such a trip. Best of luck to him.