Year in Review: Vacation!

I love those "Year in Review" photobooks that come around whenever the year comes to an end. Top 10 X, Y and Z of 2011, etc, etc. For being a busy bee, I've been to quite a few places this year (and eaten a lot of great things!). I used Picasa (Google's imaging organizing/ photo-sharing program) for all of these compilations... very simple program to use. Not a terrible amount of design versatility, but it seamlessly syncs my computer pictures --> computer-based application --> web albums --> Blogger. Give it a try... just select the photos you want and click the tool called "Collage."

Puerto Rico-SB 2011

Montauk- June 2011

More to come...

My three pet peeves of vacationing

Vacations are my fruits of life and I am blessed with family and friends that frequently do so. With the end of 2011 just around the corner, I went through my photos from this past year and found that I've been doing a darn well job of taking photos on my vacations. I think one of the more disappointing facets of vacation are when you come back, plug in your camera and find any of the following three situations:

(1) You didn't take enough pictures (Photo-stingy)
(2) You forget your camera and missed a good moment (Absentee camera)
(3) You don't appear in any photos because you were too busy snapping ones of everybody else (No Photographer left behind)



tourist with camera


All three of these are huge vacation gripes of mine. Obviously, for (1) and (3), this can be amended by shamelessly demanding pictures at every monument, gift shop, scenic spot and excursion site (as is always successfully done on my family vacation). If you wanna get in the shot, eliciting the help of fellow tourists is key. Especially those with large fancy cameras around their necks.

For (2), nearly every event, activity or excursion I've encountered recently had some sort of photograph pacakge you could purchase. Blinding flashes at the top of the roller coaster, hidden photographers behind the bushes. When my sister and I went on a ziplining course in Mexico, we got some great shots of us in the canopies, and there was even a video film package for purchase! Though the prices for these conveniences aren't cheap, GET THEM. You'll be glad you did.

"The Year in Vacations"... coming next!

Where are we going?

emily c.

Diptych or Triptych is a popular photography technique used to tie together several photographs to tell a compelling story. A glorified collage in some ways. But the photographs can also do a marvelous job telling of telling a story, but comparing or contrasting a certain subject matter, or providing different perspectives. The earliest use of the term was actually dubbed for those hinged two-panel tablets the Christian church used to commemorate members of the local congregation: the living on one side, and the deceased on another.


The above series of photographs were taken by my sister on an Apple iTouch from her airplane seat on our recent vacation to Mexico. The middle panel even earned a complement from our father, a man who is exceptionally stingy with any photography accolades. I really loved how the color of the wing looks so stunning, reflecting the colors of the sky and clouds. I used a very simple free program called Picnik to string the photos into a collage, and applied rounded corners and thicker borders. And I organized them side-by-side to depict a sequence of events.


Here are several other examples:

pixeldrew

A glimpse into: who's sitting here?

diwan

Providing two vantage points while standing in the same place.

sorina963

This one is titled: "Open and close"


Since snapping a picture has never been so easy on your mobile device, there are many apps out there that can combine your digital photos into diptychs and tryptichs: Picframe, Diptic, Photoshake. I think its a great way of transforming single photos you didn't know what to do with (perhaps you went a bit overboard during that photo-sess with your dog?) into a cohesive artsy piece-of-work.


Have any favorites of your own you'd like to share? 

These are...

As a person (New Yorker, I think I have finally caved in and admitted so) who thinks fast, talks fast, does things quickly, this is a chance where I can slow down and "capture" these moments. Or so, I'm told. 


The tools?
mobile camera
Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2
various amateur digital photo-editing, photo-sharing modalities