Mississippi River Photos from the iPhone 12

I recently got an iPhone 12 Pro. It's the first time I've really had "new" and "current" equipment - my normal camera is about 15 years old, and I'm generally a "use what you've got" sort of photographer. When I was out along the banks of the Mississippi River with my boys last week, I started playing with the wide angle lens and a few of the effects.

Here are a few images that are straight from my phone. I always at least gently edit my images, but these have not been cropped or had any density/contrast adjustments. The most I did to them was adjust the exposure as I was in the process of making the photo; I did nothing in post.

[click image to enlarge]

River Tree


Rail Bridge


Washed-Out Ash


Rower


Rain-Splattered Beaches


Tiny Waves


Driftwood


Driftwood and Ice


Frozen Pebbles


Trees

The "silvertone" effect in these images makes the images a little too painterly for me: click on and zoom in to some of the larger images to see the over-sharpening happening at the edge of higher contrast areas. But I like the overall contrast it provided, although the middle values get a little lost (which kills me a bit as a photography professor who's always preaching about proper tonal range).

We'll see if I end up playing around more with my phone in a professional manner...

Bryant Lake Bowl Drone Video

You've all seen this. I know I'm late to the party. But I just HAD to make sure I shared this here, as it's fantastic.

Direct link: youtu.be/VgS54fqKxf0

This was posted on YouTube less than a week ago, and as of posting here, it has 1.2 million views there, as well as more on Facebook and Twitter. (As of 2 days ago, the Star Tribune was saying it already had a total of 2.8 million aggregate views. One of the original versions on Twitter has 6.8 million views as of today.)

This may be updated over time, but here's a link on the Bryant Lake Bowl website that shares some of the media attention that the video has recieved:

A drone video shot in a Minneapolis bowling alley was hailed as an instant classic. One Hollywood veteran said it “adds to the language and vocabulary of cinema.”

NEW YORK TIMES

KARE 11

FOX9

The VERGE

NEW YORK POST

PIONEER PRESS

GIZMONDO

BROBIBLE

DIGITALTRENDS

NEWS18

MSP MAGAZINE

INDY100

IRISH EXAMINER

BELFAST TELEGRAPH

GAMESPOT

BBC

I've been seeing it EVERYWHERE on social media:

"Guardians of the Galaxy” filmmaker James Gunn tweeted the clip to his 800,000+ followers, saying he wanted the filmmakers "to come with us to London later this year when we shoot Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3." And Elijah Wood commented "HOLY SHIT" in his retweet of the video to his nearly 1 million followers.

Nice work, Rally Studios! (Jay Christensen cinematographer, Anthony Jaska director)

Curtains Create Pinhole Camera

There are many instances of pinhole cameras being formed in darkened rooms to project the outside on a far wall. (Abelardo Morell has done work like this for example.) Two days ago, someone on Reddit shared what was happening with their curtains, and it was pretty fun:

That's the street below being projected sort of "accidentally" on his ceiling as a pinhole camera would do. Here's a video of the street below "moving" on his ceiling:

The curtains in my room create a "natural" pinhole camera that projects images of the street below onto my ceiling from r/woahdude

Click here to see it on Reddit if that embedded video doesn't work.

My New Headshot is Live

The Hamline DMA ("Digital Media Arts") website has been updated, and my new headshot is in the faculty section along with the 3 other great professors I teach with.

Click here for a larger view.

Here's a link to the DMA faculty page for more.

Online Teaching Update

My first fully online class is still going well! It wraps up NEXT WEEK - it was a full 3 credit class held online over 8 weeks instead of the normal 14 to 16 weeks.

I've been finding notes from recording my lectures laying around:

I have 1 more short video to record, but I'm up over 9 GB of lecture recordings already.

One of the biggest things I did to help myself out was print out weekly graphs to help keep track of a few things:

That's basically a version of my usual attendance log, only I printed a page for each week (instead of just 1 page/semester). And then I could note when I updated the class website, when I reached out to students, who had the projects turned in on time, who I needed to contact near the end of the week to remind them about upcoming deadlines, etc. It basically made my job easier being able to just glance over a sheet to see who's done what, and it allowed me to make sure I was getting info from (and giving info to) everyone.

Next year, I'm planning to make at least 2 adjustments to those weekly pages: first, I'll make the "boxes" maybe twice as wide (for more space to write and because I never came close to filling up a page). And second, I'll put large rectangular boxes at the bottom so I can label the columns. But these have worked great and saved me a lot of headaches.

Here's last week seen in my book.
(I create a new "book" for each semester.)

Here's a post from last month as I was preparing a lot of lectures and getting ready to kick off this online class.

An Inspiring Thought About "The Queens Gambit"

"The Dawn of the Color Photograph"

I've been checking out photo-related books from my local library over the last 14 months. I recently learned about Albert Kahn and his undertaking of hired photographers in the book "The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet" by David Okuefuna.

I had never heard of Kahn or his contribution to the world just after the advent of color photography. Here's a bit about Kahn and this book from BookForum.com:

In 1909, two years after the Lumière brothers invented the Autochrome process, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn initiated a twenty-two-year project (brought to an end by his ruin in the Great Depression) to photograph the world in color. Known as the Archives de la Planète, this astounding body of work, some seventy-two thousand images, captured life in more than fifty countries, many during moments of profound upheaval. Kahn’s hired photographers sat with French soldiers in the trenches, walked through a Smyrna razed in the Greco-Turkish War, and witnessed Emir Faisal’s campaign to free Arabia from Ottoman control. But the archive is particularly remarkable for its documentation of lands and peoples once little seen by Western eyes. The collection boasts what may be the earliest color photographs of the Taj Mahal and the Egyptian pyramids, as well as striking portraits of Kurdish women in northern Iraq, dancers from the Khmer ballet in Angkor, and itinerant Mongolian hunters on the steppes near the Russian border. But does the past change when we see it in color? In many instances, the vivid palette brings the images closer to our present moment, making the world—and the distance of history—frighteningly small.

His goal wasn't to have his photographers make "art," but more to simply "document" the world. As the book states, the images his photographers produced "were not works of reportage or ethnography, nor an attempt to produce works of art. The aim was simply to record human beings in all their diversity, living humble lives worthy of respect."

Here's a bit about some of Kahn's project from 2007 on BBC Two:

Direct link: youtu.be/nWeU5OexIls

Billboard Shoot

I had my first image on a billboard about a year ago, and now I have another one. Here's a photo that St. Thomas More Catholic School shared on Facebook recently:

On top of Green Mill Pizza on Grand Ave in St. Paul.


The file used for the billboard.

That was a socially-distant photoshoot I did for them about 3 months ago. They've also been using this image a lot from the same shoot:

They have that image as the "cover photo" on their Facebook page...


... and they've been using it for their "virtual info nights" as well.

Always fun doing things I'm less comfortable with! And by "fun" I mean "mildly terrifying." At least kids are always easy to work with...