A Chapel Hill Landmark
August 14, 2010 by Kivus · Leave a Comment
One of the tips that Scott Bourne gives is in his Going Pro podcast is to try to market your photography to your local market. I guess it’s should not be surprising then that, as a North Carolina resident, I have sold more copies of my Old Well picture than any other of my images. I took some other shots of the Old Well that day, but my HDR technique at the time was lacking. I didn’t take dark enough exposures to get all the detail in the sky. Also, if I really wanted to make this image stronger, I would process it with software that has better anti-ghosting than the version of Photomatix. The Photomatix 4 Aperture plugin & new Nik Software HDR product cannot come soon enough.
The End of the The Tell
July 31, 2010 by Kivus · Leave a Comment
Last night was the last performance of local Chapel Hill band The Tell. Though the band got together in the middle of 2005, I only started going to their shows in the past coupe of years (when I started being in classes with the drummer). I admit that when I first heard them (via a CD from said class member) I wasn’t exactly pumped to see them live. I decided I’d be a good classmate and support them anyway. Over the past few years, I’ve changed my opinion on them, and a few of their songs now reside comfortably in some of the playlists on my iPhone.
Regardless of my initial opinion about their musical style, I won’t offer anything but praise for their talent. From lead singer to drummer to keyboardist to the guys on the guitar, these guys can flat out play. The Chapel Hill music scene will be worse off with The Tell no longer playing.
Normally these Snapshot posts only feature one image, but I’m making an exception this time. This photo comes from the last song of the night, the last song for The Tell:
I Saw Ramona on Franklin Street (Well, Kind Of….)
July 16, 2010 by Kivus · Leave a Comment
As I was walking down Franklin Street last night, I saw what looked like a particular blue-haired girl a little further down the street (okay, a chalkboard drawing of a blue-haired girl…work with me here). I turned to Elyssa and, with probably a little too much excitement, said “That’s Ramona…Ramona from Scott Pilgrim”. “Ahh..yeah, that is a comic book store” she replied. She asked me if I wanted to go into the store. “But I’ll feel like I’m cheating on my comic book store” I said, and then went in anyway. The store was quite different from Ultimate Comics, where I normally do my comics shopping; it seemed like this store’s focus was much more on graphic novels than individual issues. There was one thing I did notice as I was looking at their comic wall and observing their staff picks: “Alicia” (whoever that is) really knows good comics.
Meet the New Well (Desktop), Same as the Old Well
May 4, 2010 by Kivus · 2 Comments
Old Well (Chapel Hill) - © John Kivus, 2010
I recently went into the Carolina campus to take some HDR pictures of the Old Well. Though I did get some HDR shots that looked good, I decided to further experiment with them. There was one particular shot that I really turned up the intensity on. After I created a really intense HDR, I then applied Topaz Simplify to the photo in order to get the look above. I immediately made the resulting image the desktop on my computer. Since I’ve had the image on my computer (about 3 weeks at the time of this writing) I’ve had a fairly decent amount of requests for the image either to use as a desktop or as a print to frame. Since I’m following Trey Ratcliff’s model of trying share my images under Creative Commons, I’ve created versions of this image in popular resolutions to use for desktop images on computers, cell phones, and iPads.
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