Martin Guitars factory photographic details

Ingrid Michaelson @ WXPN Free at Noon at World Cafe Live

My Photo of the Week series is backlogged a bit, so I'm posting these here now rather than adding them to that queue. See them in color here.

Portland Blues Festival, 2013

Philadelphia Cycling Classic - June 2, 2013

These are all shot with my Nikon D90 and 70-300mm VR lens, and processed in Snapseed on a Mac. See images from past races here: 2010 | 2011

My photo on davidbromberg.net

A photo I took last month was selected to be used as the background image on David Bromberg's website!

Aimee Mann @ The World Cafe Live at the Queen

I had my first opportunity to try out my Fuji X-Pro1 with a Nikon lens (using a Novoflex adapter) last night at the Aimee Mann show in Wilmington. I originally bought the adapter because I wanted to use my Nikon 10.5mm fisheye with the X-Pro1, but I haven't had the opportunity to do so yet. Given that we had balcony seats, I took my Nikon 135mm DC f/2 lens (rather than the Fuji 60mm that I used at the David Bromberg Quartet show last month) for the extra reach and large aperture. The downside to this lens, at least when attached to the Fuji, is that it's manual focus only. I was worried that it would be hard to get images that were in focus, but it ended up being okay. Sure, it's not as easy to manually focus as with my FM3A, but it's certainly more than useable. I hit focus about half the time, which doesn't seem to be so bad given the circumstances (i.e., long lens, large aperture, moving target, handheld from my seat). While it's certainly a bulkier lens than you'd usually want to use regularly on a small-bodied camera like the X-Pro1, it wasn't too unwieldy.

This has me thinking more about the just-announced 55-200mm Fuji zoom. I wonder how it would have autofocused in these conditions (especially in the low light)? At 200mm it's 2.5 stops slower than my 135mm, but with stabalization it should be fine in reducing camera shake, although there would still be motion blur. If Fuji released a telephoto prime (somewhere between 135mm and 200mm) at f/2 or f/2.8, I'd be all over it as an awesome lens for concert photography.

What recognition matters?

On the left is a screenshot from David Bromberg's Facebook page; I took a photo at his concert last night at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, PA, and sent it to my friend Mark Cosgrove, the guitar/mandolin player in David's band. Mark asked me if they could post it on their Facebook page. I gladly agreed; I'm honored that they liked the photo.* In the first 5 hours, 165 strangers had "liked" the photograph, 18 people had "shared" my photo on their Facebook walls, and there were a number of very complementary comments.

On the right is the PsycInfo information on my most well-cited article (Le & Agnew, 2003...Our Investment Model meta-analysis; PsycInfo is the primary database for psychology journal articles). This paper was published a decade ago (coincidentally, exactly 10 years ago this month), and to date has been cited 153 times. I haven't gone through to talley up how many of those citations came from (a) me (probably about 10-15 of those are me citing that paper in my newer work), (b) colleagues I have done research with (maybe another 40 of those citations?), or (c) researchers in my field that I know personally (another 40 of those?). My guess is that there are about 50-60 people in the world who have stumbled upon that paper in their own research, without knowing me, and decided they like that paper enough to cite it in their own work.

Fifty people in TEN YEARS. Or 165 people in 5 hours? It's no surprise which one is more satisfying...

Update #1: In the time it took me to write this post, 7 more strangers liked my photo, but, to my knowledge, no new papers citing my article were added to PsycInfo.

Update #2: After a couple of days, the photo has been shared around 35 times and liked over 345 times (as far as I can see). 

*As an aside, at the last minute, on the way out the door, it dawned on me that taking my camera might be a good idea. I didn't know if photography would be allowed at the Colonial, but after seeing all of those people trying to take shots with their phones, I realized that with my X-Pro1 I'd be much less annoying/disruptive than everyone else trying to snap shots...

And then there were three...

Read more about this story here (and click on the images to embiggen).

Winfield 2011, in photographs

An intersection of two of my favorite things: (a) photography and (b) music festivals (especially those featuring acoustic music and bluegrass). Check out this amazing spread from Urban Nature, a photography magazine I just ran across. These are from the 2011 Winfield Festival (click here to enter the album).

The images below were made by Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee.

Photo galleries up

Ever since Apple announced that iCloud is replacing MobileMe, I've been meaning to migrate my images over to this website. I finally got my albums made; click here or see the list below to access them: 

• Best of (my favorite black & white and color shots)
• Collections (people, animals, flowers, other)
• Events and trips by year (2011, 2010, pre-2010)

Magnificent TdF 2011 images

photo credits: Koen van Weel / Veeral Patel / Joel SagetThe Boston Globe just ran a two-part series with some of the best photos from this years Tour de France. These are absolutely fantastic images and truly inspiring (as a photographer, cyclist, and traveler). I'm totally breathless.

Click here for photo set #1.

See photo set #2 here.

I've been watching the Tour for about ten years, but it still always amazes me (a) how tough the riders are, (b) how close the fans get to the riders, (3) how high the mountains are, and (4) how beautiful France is. We were in Paris for a week a couple of years ago, but I'd really love to travel all around the beautiful country.

The prologue for the 2012 Tour starts in Liège, Belgium, on June 30th. Can't wait 'til then!

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As an aside, maybe NBC will get their act together in the next year and work out all the bugs in their streaming service. While it was really convenient to be able to watch from your computer, it was exceedingly frustrating to have the video cut out or freeze at all the critical moments of the race.