How The Summer Was Spent, Part I

Well, I sort of left things hanging back in May with my last Indonesia post, didn’t I? I got home after all, but took quite a long time to recover from jetlag. For some reason going west across the dateline is very easy to adjust to. Coming back east was devastating. It took three full weeks before I stopped having severe narcolepsy in the afternoons (i.e. dead of the night, Indonesia time).

Much delayed photos from Gili Trawangan, Indonesia, last stop on my southeast Asia trip, way back at the end of May:

Then it was on to my aunt Peggy’s wedding in New Mexico in early June.

Spent a few days exploring New Mexico that week with my cousin Wayland and my friend Meredith. This was all new territory for me:

More coming soon.

catching up: 2007 Perseid meteor shower

Let’s go back in time a bit, to August 2007’s Perseid meteor shower. Some friends and I camped out in Yosemite’s Tuolomne Meadow to watch the meteor shower. I rented a spare camera and had all kinds of complicated setups shooting continuous 30-second wide-angle exposures of the sky, hoping to catch the meteors. And it worked, I caught quite a few in individual frames. The skies were spectacularly clear, the stars bright, and the meteors were pretty impressive to the naked eye. Unfortunately the wide angle lens is a cruel mistress, and few of the meteors are very impressive in the final picture. As usual, the ordinary starfield landscapes came out the best:

This was the best of the meteors, visible in the upper right:

The rest are here. You might want to play “where’s the meteor” in #11-16…

2009 Calendar!

Hello! Despite appearances I haven’t forgotten about this blog. Originally this was set up just to post updates from my trip to Asia. From this point on, it will turn into a general blog about my life and, in particular, my photography. There are several massive posts waiting in the wings, all about the summer of 2008 and what I’ve been up to. I still need to process some photos before I can post those. That’s because I’ve been consumed with processing all 13,584 photos from Indonesia and Malaysia! That job is finally wrapping up; one of the products of that work is this:

2009 Photography calendar, by Andy Radin

14 images from Indonesia and Malaysia.The rest of the photos, all edited and fixed, are here; (replacing the unedited proofs that had been there).  There are also a few videos in the mix there – some of the diving videos from Sipidan, Borneo are favorites of mine.

On a process note, I’ve used zazzle.com for the past two years’ calendars and I’m still very impressed. First of all, the print quality is excellent. Nicely saturated color, attractive glossy paper (the rear cover is matte), very accurate guides for bleed area, and a very simple, logical interface for managing layout of photos and text. I’m particularly thrilled about the lack of color management problems – just upload sRGB photos, and the gamut, contrast, and brightness all seem to match my calibrated monitor perfectly. The previous services I’d used for calendars could not do this simple task. Maybe the general state of the art has improved since then, who knows. Anyway I give zazzle a hearty A+.