My GoPro Survived

Posted by Kevin Taylor - May 22, 2013 - Photography

One of my friends owns a new Mustang Boss and wanted to race it at a local SCCA event. I loaned him my GoPro Hero and he attached it to his front bumper, somewhat to the left of center.

When his turn came to race around the pylons, he was doing great until he got a little gung-ho with the accelerator pedal and spun off the track. Wham! He smashed dead center into a telephone pole – not hurting himself but caving in the front of his new Mustang.

The Mustang was declared a total loss, but my GoPro wasn’t. It only suffered a crack on the case lens area, and the case latch broke. The video camera itself was fine; it recorded the entire crash, which is something my friend didn’t enjoy viewing!

Cameras are not Human Eyes

Posted by Kevin Taylor - March 26, 2013 - Photography

Mossy Boulders in Roaring Fork, Great Smoky Mountains

Photographers know that cameras don’t take photos that accurately represent the colors, lighting, textures, etc. of a scene. By “accurately represent,” I’m referring to what the human eye sees. The human vision system is incredibly complex, and cameras can’t reproduce the subtleties in images that we see with our own eyes.

Currently I’m working on an iBook about the Great Smoky Mountains. I’ve taken a number of landscape and nature photos that will be incorporated in this book, and I want these photos to faithfully represent the “real” Smoky Mountains. Realizing that my cameras only can produce “facsimiles” of the scenes I chose to photograph, I have tried, through post processing, to approximate what I really saw when viewing those scenes in person.

I wanted my viewers to get the feeling that they’re in the Smokies, viewing a scene in real time. My criterion for this was to create some depth in my photos and adjust their lighting, color, contrast, and sharpening to match what I remembered in my “eye” view of the scenes. While post processing my photos I was careful not to over-process them, since that certainly would take away from I saw with my own eyes.

Here’s a sample of my personal “eye view” of a scene. This photo, taken in April 2012, is the beginning of the trail that leads to Grotto Falls in the Great Smoky Mountains. I post processed it to the point where I believe it’s a very close rendition of what I saw in April.

KevinBruceTaylor Trail leading to Grotto Falls 620x413 Cameras are not Human Eyes

Grotto Falls Trail

Looking at the photo, I get the feeling that I could step into it and begin my 2-1/2 mile uphill hike to the falls!

camera, human eye, photography, post processing

Guy Kawasaki Speaks at TAP2013

Posted by Kevin Taylor - January 22, 2013 - Photography

Link to Keynote presentation

Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop.com, founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures, and former chief evangelist of Apple, is the author of twelve books including the popular Enchantment, Reality Check, Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, and his recent book, APE (Author-Publisher-Entrepreneur). His latest book, APE, co-authored with Shawn Welch, is a comprehensive guide to self-publishing. It’s a timely and valuable resource for authors, especially those who are new to the vagaries of self-publishing.

Kawasaki was a keynote speaker at TAP2013, held on the January 8 – 11, 2013 at the Rosen Plaza hotel in Orlando, Florida. TAP2013 was the premiere training conference on the emerging fields of digital content creation, publishing, marketing an monetizing. The conference was designed for authors, photographers, multimedia designers, educators and others who want to learn contemporary techniques in the publishing world - especially digital processes in self-publishing.

As a follow-up to the first conference, a second TAP conference has been scheduled for April 8 – 10 in Las Vegas, in conjunction with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show. The conference continues with training seminars on the many dimensions of self-publishing.

Guy Kawasaki, Self Publishing, Tap2013

Rare Clouds Over The Great Smoky Mountains

Posted by Kevin Taylor - January 15, 2013 - Travel

On October 31, 2012 I was hiking on my way to take photos in the Tremont area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I just happened to glance upward – and was amazed to see cloud “stripes” rolling across the sky. They were moving from North to South.

It almost was an other-worldly experience! I enjoy photographing cloud formations, but these striped clouds were something I’ve never seen before.

The clouds were moving rather quickly, but I managed to take some shots. I realize that the photo here looks like a “Photoshop special,” but actually, it’s an accurate representation of the real thing (including the deep blue sky)

I was lucky to get the photos. I had temporarily forgotten one of the photographer’s basic rules: Always scan your immediate environment for creative photo potential. In other words, even if you’re on a mission, keep you eyes pealed in front, to the sides, in back, up, and even down!

Back to these unusual clouds. How did they form?

We know that clouds are formed when the sun warms the earth (includes trees, plants, bare ground, etc.) and then evaporates surface moisture. This moisture rises, meets cool air, and then condenses the moisture to form visible cloud droplets (that is, the clouds themselves).

OK, that’s fine, but why are the striped clouds in this photo shaped unlike any other cloud I’ve seen?

They fit the description of something called “morning-glory clouds.” However, this rare type of cloud originates from the condensation of moisture rising from the crests of ocean waves, thus producing a series of the wave-like clouds.

Since the Smoky mountains are some distance from the Atlantic Ocean, it’s unlikely that ocean waves are responsible for the clouds in this photo.

Here’s an idea: Since the Smoky Mountains are named for the condensation that rises from the many trees and plants, maybe the many individual mountains in the Smokies are like ocean waves: Their peaks are the crests that produce the wave-like condensations – which in turn rise into the sky and form the cloud waves I photographed.

Well, maybe that’s far-fetched, but it seems (somewhat) reasonable to me. If you have some ideas or scientific information about these unusual clouds, let me hear from you.

clouds, Great Smoky Mountains, photography, Tremont