Last Sunday, The Girl and I attended the Maker Faire.  What’s the Maker Faire, you ask?  Well, it’s a lot of things.  Mostly it’s a bunch of oddly creative people making oddly creative things in oddly creative ways.  It’s sort of like what would happen if Burning Man crashed into Cirque du Soleil while Cirque du Soleil was busy ingesting a county fair.

There are robots.  There are Legos.  There are cars that run on trash and walnut shells.  There are victorian houses on wheels, and giant copper snails and tesla coils and furry cars and fire trucks that shoot fire and lots and lots of people in top hats and corsets (sometimes at the same time).

And of course, I took pictures.  Lots and lots of pictures:

Because I had the chance to do lots of photographing with real cameras during March and April, I kind of forgot about the camera on my phone. But when I Bluetoothed photos from my phone to my computer today, I realized there were enough for a post. Heck yeah!

For those of you who are new to our blog: I post pictures taken with my cellphone every month (or two), and every now and then Patrick posts a few of his own cellphone pics (taken with a much fancier cellphone). Click here to see previous cellphone pic posts (opens in a new window). No claim is being made here that these cellphone pics are of high quality, nor is any attempt made to tone down their junky weirdness. Nor are we implying, as Patrick mentioned in a previous post, that we would ever take your wedding pictures with our cellphone cameras. Unless you wanted us to, of course.

So, back to March and April: I can hardly wait to show you more photos taken with real cameras, but what with one thing and another it’s taking a long time to get those done. The cellphone pics, on the other hand, take almost no time at all to import and process. I pick random presets from my Develop Presets folder in Lightroom and just slap ‘em on and that’s all there is to it. Makes me feel like being a photographer is easy, for a few minutes anyway.

TO SEE THIS MONTH’S EXCITING SELECTIONS PLEASE CLICK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE PHOTO BELOW.

Not long ago, I traveled to Joshua Tree National Park and took thousands of pictures. But ever since I returned, I’ve been buried in wedding photos and unable to find time to contemplate all the marvels of the desert as captured by my camera. The life of a photographer is one continual effort to catch up.

Catching up often means working frantically to process photos I’ve just taken for a paying gig in order to gain time to process photos from a past non-paying adventure. Catching up usually means moving backwards in time. My sense of time has gotten quite wonky from living this way (and it was weird to begin with).

To add to the confusion, I’m not fully conscious of the details of what I’ve photographed until I look at the pictures later. At the moment the shutter clicks, I’m thinking about exposure, composition, the flow of events, the overall story of the subjects in front of me, the next direction the action is likely to take. It’s not until I am manipulating the photos on the computer screen, alone in a darkened room, that I see what was actually happening. It’s almost always different from what I thought was happening.

I’m not sure what any of that has to do with the photo below, which was taken on a dry lake bed near one of the entrances to Joshua Tree National Park. I suppose I’m trying to explain the feeling I get when I look at this photo and realize just how many bullet holes are in that rusty old refrigerator, and how much sand has built up inside and around it. I didn’t notice those things when I took the picture because I was too busy trying to properly expose the sky and compose the shot and plan my next ten shots and figure out if I’d have enough battery power left for a long sky exposure that night and who knows what else.

Not that it would’ve mattered whether or not I noticed the bullet holes at that moment. It would not have been an earth-shattering discovery; that refrigerator has obviously been there for quite some time, being shot at and collecting sand.

There’s something I’m trying to say here but it keeps eluding me; plus, I feel like maybe I’ve said it before. At moments like these, I’m ever so glad I can just show you a picture.

I’m always looking for cool new photography-related technology, and I just stumbled across a neat little flash-based widget called Closr. The idea is that the software allows you to view high resolution photos without having to actually download the entire thing, which can take a while even over a fast connection. For instance, the file size of the photo below is 5mb. The actual size, if printed at the native resolution, would be about 48 x 32 inches. Not particularly small.

All you have to do is go to the Closr site, sign up, and upload a photo!

Try clicking the full screen button in the upper right corner. Pretty cool!