Spin Ink

Bumped into an old friend(Matt) when I was in Wilkes this past week. He came up the next day and we went out on the Parkway to take some pictures and catch up. It was a Saturday so there was a lot of traffic, and a detour around Price Park and Price Lake. We ended up at Beacon Heights after a failed attempt at Yonalassee, because the trail was now a preserve.

This is now the background on my desktop. Originally, this image was just short of being a 360 panorama. I say ‘just short’ because somehow managed to take 15 pictures instead of the 16 I need for a proper 360. This image is just a crop of a much wider image. So, I can make 3 and 4 screen panaramic wallpapers, but I just don’t think there are many people running 3 and 4 monitors. This is the impression i get from my site statistics. If I am wrong, let me know.

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I was at Merlefest from 10am to ~11pm everyday of the festival except sunday (2pm-6pm). When I got home, it was all I could do to charge my camera and download my pictures from my camera. So, my plan to make a post highlighting each day of the festival went right out the window. I will however be writing a review of the festival and my wonderful experience doing photography for it.

Over the course of the festival I took 1,793 pictures, ~775 of which are currently in my Merlefest 2006 Photo Gallery. After my exam today, I will begin the painful process of color correcting all of them. I will also be thinning the herd and hopefully get it down to around 600 to 700 of the best images. If you would like to use any of my images, all I ask is for an email letting me know, proper credit, and a link back to my site.

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Has it been a year already? Tomorrow is the first day of the world’s greatest bluegrass festival, Merlefest. I will once again be doing photography for the festival this year and I can’t wait! I would like to thank Christie Hutchens and Sherry Dancy of WCC for this wonderful opportunity. I will be doing my best to get my pictures posted each day of the festival for those of you that won’t be able to make it out. Also, I hope to be able to write a few comments about what I did and who I saw each day of the festival.

This year’s Merlefest line-up is going to be fantastic. Personally, I am most looking forward to seeing the following artists:

• Doc Watson
• The Avett Brothers
• John Cowan Band
• Jerry Douglas Band
• The Duhks
• Béla Fleck & the Flecktones
• Peter Rowan
• Tony Rice Unit
• Gillian Welch

I am also looking forward to being introduced to some musicians I have yet to hear. At last year’s Merlefest, I saw the The Avett Brothers brothers and The Duhks for the first time and I really enjoyed them both immensely. I can’t wait to see them again this year. For those of you who have yet to plan your day, here is a link to the Merlefest 2006 stage schedule.

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Over the last 6 years or so, I have taken 10’s of thousands of pictures. I have photographed a wide variety of things; portraits, landscapes, studio, macro, panoramas, the living, and the dead. I have taken my camera from sea-level to ~6,000ft. In each image, a moment is captured and frozen in time. Some were in incredibly sharp focus, while others were abstract or over exposed. I am not a professional photographer, but I play one on the Internet. I have had zero training, and my concepts of lighting, composition, and technique are my own. I know what I like, and I do my best to capture it with each image I take.

When someone asks me, “Of all the pictures you have taken, which one is your favorite?”, I have no trouble telling them exactly which one is my favorite. Without a doubt, it is this image. I’m sure many of you are thinking, ‘What? that one? Huh?”. Granted, its technical merit is poor at best. The image isn’t properly framed, It looks like I may have moved while the shutter was open, and the depth of field is all wrong. All of that aside, It is the best photograph I have ever taken, as far as I am concerned.

(more…)

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The eZine, PureMusic, has a great interview with Leonard Podolak of the Duhks in this months issue. They found the pictures that I took of the Duhks durring last year’s Merlefest and asked if they might use them. Ofcourse, I was more than happy for them to use my images. It was really nice to see my images being used to illustrate an interview with Leonard.

Perhaps the Duhks themselves will check out the interview and find their way to my website. I actually got to talk to Jesse and Tania at last years Merlefest, after their last performance. They were both really sweet and unassuming. I gave them my website address incase they wanted to check out the shots I got of them. I really look forward to seeing them at this years Merlefest, and hope to get a chance to talk them again.

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As I look through the statistics for my site, I have noticed that ‘Dual Monitor Wallpaper’ has been the most popular search query every month. Previously, I had thrown together a very simple script on SpinInk.com to handle these images for me. This worked fine for a while, but I wanted to find a better way to present these images eventually.

Today, I finally took a few minutes to take all of those images and add them to a specially configured album in my gallery. This should make the images much easier to browse and download for everyone. I thank all of you that have sent me email regarding these images. It is the support of all of you that keeps me motivated to create these dual screen backgrounds. I will add more images to this album soon. Enjoy.

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I recently saw a post on Digg.com about the ‘Great Images in NASA‘ website. Now I have been linked to this site before, but I never stayed for long. This time I felt inspired, so I thought I would browse through all of the pictures and see what I could find. There are thousands of images! It took several hours to go through them all, but I made it through them and I have downloaded my favoites and I then posted them to my gallery.

Many were black and white, some even featured the old-school ‘Red Baron’ style planes. While I do not really keep up with NASA, I really enjoy their images, I find them inspiring and very interesting. NASA makes these images availabe in very high resolution on their GRIN(Great Images in NASA) site.

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My good friends Sam and Christie recently visited the NC Arboretum to check out the Bonsai Exhibit. Click the following link to see all of their pictures: Christie & Sam’s Pictures - NC Arboretum Bonsai Exhibit. - The following images link to my gallery.

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It is that time of year again, at this moment, the festival is in full swing and I am the first person to have any pictures from this years event on the internet. Im just that fast. Please go check them out on my Merlefest Photo Gallery.

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I have been meaning to do this for some time. Now, here it is… Hi-Quality Panoramic backgrounds. They are 3200×1200, but linux/windows/mac can scale them down for you automatically.

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