Millennium sunset

Do you ever feel like you will never get your photos processed and shared?  Yeah, me neither :-) .

I was going through one of my old London photo batches taken over a year ago and thought I would give this shot a go.  It was sunset and I was shooting along the River Thames with Mike Murphy and John Esslinger - both locals and great photogs you should follow.  We were next to the Tate Modern, shooting here at the Millennium Bridge.  As you can see the sunset was pretty awesome.

For some reason though, I never got around to processing this pic, and now that I have, I rather like it.  It’s just that I have so many and I try to mix things up for you all, so you don’t get burned out on one place.  (Ok, so I don’t get burned out on one place.)

Anyways – here it is.  Better late than never, right? (And yes, I realize this photo isn’t perfectly centered/aligned.  Call that “artistic license”.  Or maybe the bridge is skewed a little.) 

The lobby at The Grand Wailea

When I travel, I try to make a habit of getting up for sunrise at least once.  It’s just better.  You get great light most of the time, and everyone else is asleep.  But I admit, it’s hard to do, especially when traveling east.  It’s hard enough losing time due to time zone changes.

But when I travel west it gets much easier of course.  In this case, I was in Hawaii a few weeks back and getting up there was easy.  In fact, I got up at 3am the first morning!  That’s a little too early, but my body thought it was 8am.  Oh well, the challenges of time zone changes.

Anyways, since I was up before sunrise I figured I should get out and shoot some, and the hotel lobby at the Grand Wailea in Maui is just gorgeous.  Anytime there is water running, I get pretty fired up.  During the daytime the sun is just too bright to make this shot work, but before dawn it looks pretty awesome!

Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin

This is the main aisle at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland.  I loved this place.  It’s just incredibly beautiful, inside and out.  And although it’s a bit of a cliché to take a shot up the aisle like this, I do it anyways, virtually every chance I get (unless they don’t allow photography, of course – which oddly happens in some churches).  It’s never original or ground-breaking in any way, but it’s worth doing if only to have it in your collection.  Funny though, I don’t see many folks doing it.  I wonder why?

If you want to see the exterior, you can check out this shot I took during an awesome sunrise.  I just reread that post and guess I was feeling a little spunky when I wrote that one!

On the cover of Celebrate Austin

Just a little self-promotion today - I was published on the cover of Celebrate Austin!  I am very honored to be featured here, and also have the good fortune to have several of my photos grace the pages of this publication - including one of my iPhone shots! 

For the uninitiated, Celebrate Austin is a hardbound visitor guide to Austin which is featured in over 30,000 hotel, motel, resort rooms, B&Bs and corporate housing rooms city wide.  It’s a great book and a fabulous guide to the city as well.

If your travel plans ever take you to Austin, be sure and check out the book! It will be in your hotel room!

Thanks Celebrate Austin!

Sunset on the Panama Canal

I was in Panama City, Panama a while back and had the opportunity to get out and shoot around sunset one evening.  I grabbed a cab from downtown Panama City and headed out to the Amador Causeway, which stretches out into the sea a bit and provides a nice view back toward the town in one direction and a view towards the Panama Canal in the other direction.  I chose the canal view.

Having arrived early, I grabbed a quick dinner and then as the light began to change, I hurried up and started walking along this little bay.  What you are viewing here is technically the Pacific Ocean (Panama City sits on the western side of the country) though it’s known here as the Gulf of Panama.  This is the mouth of the canal, so to speak, and the Miraflores Locks begin several miles from this point, way around the bend to the right.  You can always spots ships lining up, getting ready to change oceans.

Miraflores Locks is probably the most popular place to see the canal, since it is closest to Panama City.  While viewing the canal is something worth doing, viewing the actual movement of the ships through the canal is pretty uneventful.  It’s slow, for starters...and it takes a while.  But it’s fun to say you did it - and I did!