A Super Photo of Devil’s Tower

via pdnphotooftheday.com

Photos like this remind me how much I stink at photography.

What Does a Supernova Look Like After 400 Years?

via nasa.gov

It looks awesome, that's what it looks like.

The Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge

Having driven over the Hoover Dam during the construction of this thing, I say that pictures cannot do justice to the awe invoked by the sheer magnitude and engineering of the thing. These pictures, however, do come close.

The Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge

via Likecool on 11/9/09

The pictures of the Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge are amazing! The photos were shot in September 2009. Th..(more...)

Recently Discovered Never-Before-Seen Moon Landing Photo

For Fun...My Coworker

This dude sits one cube over from me.

Besides working with me, he designs and sells very cool t-shirts. Check them out!

Picasa 3.5 - A Fantastic Photo Program Just Got Tons Better

I've long been an avid fan of Picasa, Google's free photo organizer and simple editor. No other application comes close to ease of tagging, simple editing and exporting of images. Now they've added two long-awaited and very desirable features: facial recognition and geotagging.

Picasa's online companion, picasaweb.com, has featured facial recognition for many months now. I find the service rather limiting, however, and it lacks much of the social aspect of my preferred online photo site, flickr.com. Now that Google has ported that technology into the Picasa desktop client, I can enjoy the feature with abandon. Because I have a lot of faces in my collection to be recognized. Nearly 20,000 photos worth.

The other new feature, geotagging, isn't really new with Picasa 3.5, but it is a vast improvement from previous versions. It offers a nice big Google Map right in the window upon which to drop whatever photo you please. Very slick.

What makes everything nearly perfect is the Picasa2Flickr add-on that I use. By simply selecting the photos I wish to move online, then clicking the Send to Flickr button, the photos are automatically placed in the separate Flickr Uploadr application, ready for upload.

The nice thing about the Flickr/Google combination is that they share the basic tagging/geotagging functions. So whatever data I give a picture offline in Picasa is automatically recognized by Flickr. The one drawback is that Flickr doesn't recognize the facial data tags it gives when recognizing faces.

In short, thank you Google for finally adding these features to Picasa. You definitely beat Flickr to the punch on this one--and you have retained at least one solid fan.

Summer Travel Photos

This year I enjoyed a cool roadtrip in the southwest. Here's a taste of the (mostly) desert beauty.

Cathedral Gorge

Just for fun, here's a photo I took on a recent trip to Nevada. It's at Cathedral Gorge State Park, near Panaca, about 3 hours north and west of Las Vegas.

Flowers for Mothers Day

For all you mothers out there, I shot some nice flowers for you.
Happy Mothers Day!

Reflections of Christ

I was forwarded me this beautiful slide show featuring photos from an exhibit entitled, "Reflections of Christ."



From the website,

The Reflections of Christ photography exhibit is a collaborative effort on many peoples part to teach about Jesus. The primary goal of the project was to create photographs that could cast new light on our perceptions of Christ. I hope that through the words and actions of our cast, crew, and me I guess, that the reader will be aware of how we feel about Jesus.

The photography exhibit is currently on display at the visitor center at the LDS (Mormon) temple in Mesa, Arizona.

UPDATE:

I stumbled across an excellent review of the exhibit. Here's an excerpt.

As I think of the many exhibits of art and photography I've enjoyed over the years, exhibits that brought tears from viewers have been rare. Tuesday night was one of those rare and dramatic moments. How fortunate I was to be in Arizona this week, with just barely enough free time on Tuesday night to dash over to the Mesa Temple and see "Reflections of Christ."

As I walked through the gallery again, the message delivered by this majestic work of art was stronger than ever: Jesus Christ is real! He is real, as real and as tangible as any of the people in these realistic photos. His love is real, His triumph over death His real, His grace is real. And each of us will one day stand before Him, kneel before Him, and recognize Him as our Lord. When that moment comes, we will either recognize Him as our Lord whom we have sought to serve and already know, or as a stranger who was far from the thoughts and intents of our hearts. May it be the former! But in either case, we will see that He is real, more real than any scene in any photograph. So why wait? Why wait for reality to surprise us when we can accept it now - accept Him now - and prepare for that wonderful day when we are united with the Lord, our true and very real Friend and Savior.

Happy New Year

A clean white slate for two thousand eight.

Google's Picasa Set to Steal Momentum from Flickr

I'm a die-hard flickr fan. Far and away, flickr has long been the obvious choice for photo sharing, storage and organization.

I'm also a die-hard Picasa fan. As a desktop photo organization tool, it stands supreme, being far superior to Apple's iPhoto and even the new Windows Vista Photo Album (which is a very close second.)

Yet each application is lacking one critical element for a digital photo panacea: integration with each other. Of course, integration will never happen, as both tools are owned by competing interests (Yahoo and Google).

A while back, Google launched an online element to compete with flickr, called Picasa Web Albums. It integrates the desktop application with online storage/sharing. It was to be the perfect, all-in-one tool for digital photos. Unfortunately, Picasa Web Albums massively underperformed compared to flickr, which is light years ahead in nearly all aspects – community, capacity, ease of use and versatility. Flickr was seemingly impervious to all competition.

That may be about to change. First, as a result of being bought by Yahoo, flickr will soon require all users to sign in with a Yahoo ID. This means opening an account with Yahoo and dealing with the headaches of using the massive, unwieldy portal on a regular basis. It's not surprising that many flickr users are incredibly turned off by this.

But that's not all. Today, Picasa Web Albums recently increased its free storage capacity to 1GB. That's still far shy of what flickr offers, but it's a huge step in the right direction. It also incorporates many new handy tools, bringing it closer to parity with flickr in the versatility area.

Most importantly, the Picasa desktop application works seamlessly with Picasa Web Albums. Given that the online element is still many shades inferior to flickr, Picasa still isn't the panacea we're all looking for. But it's headed that way. Flickr had better look out and make some major advances soon. Otherwise, the way things are developing, they could be losing a lot of people to Picasa. Myself included.

Into the woods

into the woods
Originally uploaded by Senor Velasco.

Over the weekend I went for a little bicycle romp through the snowy nature trails of a nearby park. I've decided that I prefer the verdant green of spring and summer over the cold desaturated world of winter, but it was still a pretty ride.

Check out more icy park photos in my photostream.