While finishing up my photographic bio, I was copying and adapting my introduction from my flickr Top 40 book.  So I decided to see how the top ten photos in my flickr Top 40 have changed in the past three years.

2006

Original Rank: 1 Current Rank: 5 Original Views:  455 Current Views:  1881 Camera: Kodak DX3600

My most used tag on flickr - portrait.

And my most interesting photos continue to shuffle around!  Here’s the latest top 10.  You’ll see that this photo, which had become my 2nd most interesting photo at one time, is now off the top 10.

Continuing my spotlight series with Mai.

People tend to really like my portraits of Mai, some of them are among my most viewed photos on flickr.

A little series I’m starting with my favorite portraits for a particular person.

Dina facts:

• Real Dina smiles are great smiles
• Family is really important to Dina
• Dina’s closest friends are practically family (see above bullet)
• Dina’s pretty awesome on the piano, she doesn’t play for us often enough

Danielle’s family came to visit so we did what we always do when company comes, we went to Washington, DC. Seriously, I don’t really know what else to do. If it were Florida I would have taken them to the beach. In NYC I’d take them to Manhattan and either just walk around or go to a show. But around here I don’t really know what to do with visitors. Inner Harbor is really too small for just an hour or so. And not everyone likes the museums from DC. So if you know something to do around here, let me know.

I have as of a few months now, I have two 50mm prime lenses - the Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro and the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II.

I wanted to compare them to see if one is clearly better for another. After all, if I’m going to use a prime lens, why not use the best one? Before we get to the photo comparisons, let’s take a look at the other factors.

I wanted to see how I’ve changed as a photographer so I went to my first ten photos uploaded to flickr.  The two biggest changes are that I am now really into portrait photography (although mostly natural portraits) and not quite as much into photoshop.  My first two pages are mostly photoshop-manipulated photos.  The next ten or so pages are photos documenting my life.  I got to do some exciting stuff like going to NYC for the second time (but with a lot more time to look around) and also was busy documenting my life as a college student.  I’m still into documenting my life and activities I participate in, but I’ve become more sophisticated in my techniques.  I now know about shutter speed, aperture, and ISO and I strive to use them to get the best photos I can.  I came to appreciate light and how it can work for and against the composition.  I also learned when to use flash and when it’s useless.  Before I thought no one would want to see an unaltered photo, hence the focus on the photoshopped photos.  Then I looked through photography books and learned about street photography and documentary photography.  I’ve grown quite a bit from the old days and here’s the proof.

For the first time since moving here, I found out about Otakon ahead of time. Unfortunately, the economics didn’t work out we didn’t buy tickets. But I did go to hang out outside Otakon on Saturday to get some photos. Lessons learned:

• Remember what you learned in Hawaii and don’t be afraid to approach people. This is especially the case with Otakon. The cosplayers have spent a long time working on their costumes, sometimes up to a whole year. They want to show off their costumes. So go up to them and ask to photograph them.
• With a 1.6x crop factor camera like the Canon 400D, 28mm is not wide enough. It’s very, very crowded at Otakon. They had something like 19 000 preregistered attendees. I missed out on getting some awesome shots of costumes such as this one where the girl on the left had an amazing bottom part to her costume, but I couldn’t fit her and her friend in without backing up a lot more
• Buy tickets to Otakon! I missed out on a bunch of costumes because they were walking into the conference too quickly for me to intercept them at the door. So attend so you can see all the costumes

And now here is my photo essay on Otakon 2009.

Nam’s parents came to visit on Sunday and I captured some good shots of Nam. Here’s a small selection.

I wanted to share some of my latest flower macro photos.