I was surprised and delighted to head over to ImageKind this evening and find one of my pictures featured on their home page!

Jim Goldstein is running a competition over on his blog. Leave a comment and you are entered to win a week’s lens rental from BorrowLenses.com. There has been a lot of buzz on the internet about this company recently and their prices look great compared to the local sources I’ve looked at so I’ll likely give them a try next time I need glass that’s too expensive or esoteric to justify buying.

Here’s another of the skyscraper images I shot during a 30 minute wander around downtown Houston on Saturday. This is the Wells Fargo tower and can be found about 4 blocks from the Chevron tower whose picture I posted earlier. The entrance to this building has a wonderful horizontal bronze ring about 20 feet above ground which offered a great frame to the shot.

This image is a 6 exposure HDR processed in Photomatix and Lightroom.

We just got back from an enjoyable 3 day weekend in Houston where we visited the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, the Houston Children’s Museum and the Houston Museum of Fine Art. We also spent about 30 minutes driving around downtown on Saturday morning with me hopping out of the car to take photos for a few minutes every so often.

This image shows the infamous building previously occupied by Enron and now the home of Chevron. The circular walkway at 2nd storey level made a great frame when the scene was shot with a super-wide lens. To get this perspective, I had to stand in the middle of the road but thankfully there was not significant traffic at the time we were there!

Rumour has it that the cherry trees in Washington DC are blooming this week so here’s a picture I took a few years ago when I was lucky enough to be there on a business trip at the height of the spectacle.

I skipped church on Sunday (sorry!) to help out at a beginners’ exposure class being offered by the Austin Photography Group at the Capitol. After the class, I dashed back to church with my gear and managed to capture three shots inside the sanctuary between people leaving and all the lights being turned off. Here’s the first. You can find the other two on my photoblog here and here.

In case anyone is wondering, I’m making a conscious effort to post different pictures to the photoblog and Flickr so you may like to look at both places. There is some overlap and I will be adding old favourites now and again to build up the photoblog content but it’s not intended to be just another mirror of my Flickr account.

I took my D90 with me to San Diego for the last FRC support trip and got some reasonably good images. Here are a few of my top picks from the 850 shots I took over the 3 days of the competition.

You can find my gallery of favourite images here if you would like to take a look at some of the others.

I spent 4 days in San Diego a week ago at another FIRST Robotics Competition. This event was smaller than the previous one I attended in Cleveland and I was even less busy with official Luminary Micro support work so I had a lot more time to watch the matches.

During this time, I played with my Powershot G9. I had found out the previous week that it was capable of shooting time lapse video (yes, I had read the manual but I guess I forgot this since I reckoned it was another totally useless feature) so I shot some of the matches and the crowd reaction in 24x and cut it together into a little video on Vimeo. I also uploaded this to Flickr as an experiment now that they support video in addition to stills.

I really think this makes a rather effective intro to the competition and gives some impression of the excitement of the event. If you want a less frenetic version, I’ve created a set of my favourite FRC images on Flickr too.

FIRST Robotics Competition, San Diego from Dave Wilson on Vimeo.

The Flickr Getty Collection has just gone live. I was rather expecting to receive an email telling me whether or not the images I submitted were accepted but this wasn’t the case. It seems that all 10 images I uploaded made it into the collection so we’ll see what happens. You can see my contributions here.

PDN’s Photo of the Day blog usually provides an interesting and diverse collection of images but today’s entry really caught my eye.  Rather than the usual single image, this is a collection of 14 portraits taken by Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographers between 1939 and 1945. Well worth a look.