This is MP3Monster's blog. The blog covers music, technology, photography and anything else Monster considers worthy of blogging about.Flickr Stats
Posted by monster in Photography, Website
Red Bull Air Racing Photos
Posted by monster in Photography
The big Picture - part of the Boston Globe’s website have some tremendous pictures of the Red Bull Racing Events here. Just one example of the amazing pictures …
NowPublic article uses one my pictures
Posted by monster in Photography
NowPublic has an article about how Maserati’s website has been hacked, and as part of the article they’ve requested to use one of my photos.
The article is here, the picture is : 
Real or Thomas Tank engine like models?
Posted by monster in Photography
The small beautifully detailed models in the Thomas the Tank Engine programmes have a strong place in my life now I’m a parent to a small boy. The question is, is the following image a small model like Thomas or real?
Despite looking very model like, this is in fact according to an article on Wallpaper (here) the photography of Naoki Honji, who creates the model like effect by manipulating the light and colour intensity of the images. Combined with the panoramic nature of the photos they look very model like.
The Wallpaper article provides more example of the images along with details of an exhibition of Honji’s work.
famous photographer Annie Leibovitz talks to Vanity Fair
Posted by monster in Photography
The famous portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz, probably best known the many for the recent ’scandal’ when having a photographic session at Buckingham Palace with the Queen has been interviewed by Vanity Fair. The article can bee read here.
In the iinterview she talks several of her best images including that of the Stones whilst at Rolling Stone magazine, Demi Moore for Vanity Fair and the recent Queen portrait.
Thanks to BOfH for the link
Hurricanes, as seen from orbit
Posted by monster in Photography
With the current run of Hurricanes hitting Haiti, Cuba and the United States a friend pointed me to some amazing images from low orbit, such as:
Hurricanes, as seen from orbit - The Big Picture - Boston.com
The Big Picture at the Boston.com website has a collection of amazing photos.
Amazing Skyscraper Photography
Posted by monster in Photography
I came across some amazing photography, I saw a version of the image below in a magazine news letter. The picture below is a genuine shot of the Dubai skyline taken from the Burj Tower which is being constructed. Once the Burj is complete it will be the world’s tallest building at around 800 metres, that is twice the height of the Empire State Building. It is worth keeping in mind that the oil princes in Dubai are competing with each other for the tallest and most elegant tower blocks.
Look carefully at the clouds to the left of the buildings, the cloud is blowing in from the right and you can see how the buildings are breaking up the cloud and creating ’shadows’.
This photo was taken by a guy called Jack Frost who is a seriously talented photographer and has lots more amazing photography here and blog here.
gigapixel shots of Yosemite Valley
Posted by monster in Photography
I came across a fabulous project from reading Robert Scoble’s blog - The Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Project. The goal is create a large scale gigapixel image of the valley walls to help research such as rock fall in the park. The work has been done with xRez. The XRez site for the Yosemite project is here. I have to admit that I’ve always liked Yosemite since I first saw photos taken by Ansell Adams, and having been there and tried to capture the glory of the place myself find photography in the area fascinating. To see how beautiful the valley is and the stunning detail of the gigapixel images checkout the Glacier Point photo xRex have posted here.
I recommend installing the plugin and looking at some of the high definition pictures the image detail is simply stunning. Here is a clip from a zoomed in view to illustrate …
And my efforts …
Chain Letters the Photo Way
Posted by monster in Photography
Photojojo have come up with an interesting and fun challenge. Rather than sending a letter and getting the people to send on the letter to everyone they know (a chain letter), this works by taking a picture with a picture in it, or retrospectively adding the picture digitally. Pass this on to friends who repeat the process. So eventually you have a photographic Russian Doll effect. It would be interesting to see how many pictures can be nested.
The full article and example can be found at http://photojojo.com/content/photo-projects/the-photo-chain/.
Hotel Chelsea NYC, Rock’s Vortex Of ‘Death and Destruction’
Posted by monster in Books, Music, Photography
Wired.com have got a neat little article here about the Hotel Chelsea in NYC. This notorious venue perhaps most famous as the location where Sid Vicious allegedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, but also the home for a raft of other sordid stories (and a few less sordid such as Arthur C Clarke’s writing of 2001). The hotel is now the subject to a documentary film and photo essay book.
Ansel Adams’s Yosemite
Posted by monster in Photography
The New York Times have created a lovely article on one of my favourite photographers - Ansel Adams. The NY Times have a some on Ansel’s famous Yosemite images, with a map showing the locations and some audio explaining the significance of the picture. To see the site go here. Therei is also an article on the New York Times site here.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have been to Yosemite, and you can see some of my photographic efforts here.
Other interesting links:
Photography and The Law
Posted by monster in Photography
If you pick up photo magazines regularly you’ll know that they will devote pages to tips and techniques, interesting places to go take photos and so on. But I’ve never read anything addressing the issue of the law beyond the usual model waiver (giving you copyright to your photos that they appear in). So it has been good to read an article at photojojo (here) which describes in simple language the basic legal position of taking photos in public places. Although photojojo is American based the principles of their ‘10 commandments’ should be valid in most western nations, but they have made the attempt to also provide links to sites that outline the legal situation other English speaking countries (to have a list of sites covering non English speaking countries would make the ultimate reference for this sort of thing - particularly for when you’re on holiday in a country that maybe a little more sensitive).
Desktop Wallpapers & Screensavers - National Geographic Photography
Posted by monster in Photography
The National Geographic magazine has a reputation for having some stunning 
images. Well the good news is that they’re making some of their images available as Desktop Wallpapers and Screensavers.
Self Portraiture
Posted by monster in Photography
Many photography enthusiasts (myself included) first found our way to behind the camera as a simple act of trying to get out of being photographed and as a result discovered the pleasure of capturing images. Despite this, sooner or later it is good to have a picture of our selves, be it for a website etc. Given our sensitivity to having our picture taken, who better to get the picture than ourselves? Getting a self portrait does present a few problems. Fortunately there are a few websites that provide advice on photography, of those photodoto.com provides a nice page of suggestions on how to capture a good sharp self portrait.
Published photos
Posted by monster in Photography
A little while ago I was approached by Schmap travel guides seeking permission to use one of the photos I’d taken when I was in Las Vegas. I heard back today - the photo will be used, but as a result of a technical glitch the picture wont be in the guide until the next edition. You can see where the photo will appear in the guide by going here.
The photo they will be using can be found on Flickr here.
Picnik - online picture editing
Posted by monster in Photography
I was reading a photography magazine and came across the mention of an interesting site - www.picnik.com - it allows you do photo editing online. This includes neat integration info Flickr. As the article I read said, if you’re on the road and want to tweak and post some pictures - how much easier could it be?
Peter Lik Photography
Posted by monster in Photography
We’ve had an email today from Peter Lik’s gallery in Sydney announcing some more photos (an image one of the pictures can be seen below). Like his other work the images are just stunning, beautiful shapes and colour that can be seen in nature. For those not in the know, Peter was born in Australia started shooting the amazing scenery down under; but has over the last few years been shooting in the South West America and has garnered a raft of awards for his work.
We first came across Peter through friends, when they came back from Australia they gave us a book of some of his work. So when we headed to Australia, and again when stopping over on our way to New Zealand we paid visits to his gallery in Sydney (in the beautiful QvB), and been fortunate enough to be able bring back limited, signed prints of his work.
These small images don’t do any real justice to the power of the work, you have to see them in their full size (1 meter across or bigger). So if you’re in Australia or the USA we’d very highly recommend going to a gallery and seeing for yourself.
Video Editing
Posted by monster in Photography, Technology
With the Basingstoke Tappers’ show rapidly approaching and another year as stage manager it has been busy, busy, busy. With this year’s show I’ve also had to create some video clips. I have to say that I am very impressed by Womble Multimedia’s MPEG Video Wizard. Particularly it’s editing capabilities. The process of creating a MPEG file suitable for transcoding to DVD is a little more fiddly - although it does provide some default settings.
This batch of video clips I’ve been are actually stills assembled into sequences. Although there are cheap or free tools for doing this sort of work they aren’t easy or flexible in the results you can produce, particularly in areas such as transitions between images, manipulation of sequencing on the fly and previewing of results.
Statr for Flickr
Posted by monster in Photography, Technology
I came cross this cool extension for Flickr provided by http://linuxside.org which give you page view stats on a daily basis for visits to your Flickr pictures. An example of the results can be seen below.
If you have a Flickr website (ours is here) then its worth checking out.
Image Editing Freeware
Posted by monster in Photography, Technology
There a number of small picture manipulation tasks that don’t need huge great applications such as PhotoShop or PaintShopPro such as quickly creating DVDs of your photos, looking at RAW or JPEG information. There are a lot of smaller apps on the net that provide these sort of features for a small license fee, and a few that are actually free. Finding the free ones can be a pain, but someone has set up a neat little site - Photo-Freeware.net - Image Editing Freeware Download Source with links to the free applications and related useful information.
