some new stuff....finally

i seem to be on a one-year cycle for updating this site...but finally there are several new images to the original galleries (they're all set to play at the front end of the home page slideshow if you'd like to view them all at once).

tree & sky from the abstracts gallery

 also, with the iPhone 4's release and then subsequently last year with the 4s, many of us iOs-ers woke up to realize that we had a pretty good camera in our pockets. i've been spending a lot more time with mine, and have started getting some pretty decent stuff.  with that in mind i've set up a new "iPhoneography" gallery and loaded eight images to start.  some of these have been tweaked a bit with a few of the apps i use, but all-in-all this little phone's 8-megapixel sensor, decent lens and great image processor makes a pretty good point-and-shoot!

12 skylights from the new iPhoneography gallery

the sparrow series

this is from a series of images i took a few years ago at a friend's home.  he has a beautiful pool with two copper fish fountains on the side opposite the deck.  that spring two sparrows had built their nest inside one of the fountains and their babies were freshly hatched at the time of our arrival.  

to capture the scene, i placed my camera on the deck-side of the pool, set the motordrive to high-speed and fired off bursts, trying to time the arrivals and departures. was a remarkable scene to witness over the few days we were there...and although we never looked inside to see the little ones for fear of freaking out the parents, there was never a doubt they were in there - what a din!  we're not sure what the outcome was - the family was all intact when we left but the last two springs we've visited, the fish has remained vacant....but the sparrow population is as robust as ever.  see larger versions of this series here

Dang, this is a great little camera!

i sometimes feel like i'm in danger of just selling all my heavy-duty nikon bodies and lenses and simply going with my.....iPhone 4.  Not really, but it's always with me, takes remarkably clear and crisp photos and the number of apps that are available to tweak or polish an image after the fact are astonishing.  here are a couple of recent examples of what this little device is capable of, one mine and one from a friend.

tonight we went over to a local outdoor shopping center to run and errand and on the way back to the car looked up and saw this semi-abstract scene that made me think of a "burning bush".  no (real) camera, no problem - out with the iPhone and here's the image....with NO manipulation after the fact.

the second image came to me last week from a friend who has been traveling in west africa with his wife.  he has a great eye and will sometimes wander with a video camera, but when it comes to stills, the only thing he carries is his iPhone. here is one of several shots he sent me last week and then with a cool little app called instagram i was able to convert it to black & white,  crop it into a square format and add some contrast and a black border:

 

new site!

well, it only took three years but i'm finally ready to pull the trigger on the new h3images site, which until now has been kindly hosted by my brother-in-law using a bunch of ground out html and flash code that took me months to launch and was almost impossible to update without significant brain damage - thus the reason nothing new has been put up since mid- 2008.  this blog, which has always meant to be the "about" section of the site was hosted separately through the squarespace platform and linked to the old site.  it's all tied together now.

another problem with the old site was the galleries dependence on flash technology.  the galleries in the new site aren't flash driven, so they'll work on most mobile devices that don't or won't run flash.  the home page for the new site is still in flash, but mobile devices will be redirected to an html 5 alternative gallery where the images can be viewed in a slide show....a little klugy, but a heck of a lot better than the error message from the old site.

the site is still a little thin on content, and some of what's been put up is from the old site....just haven't had time to generate a bunch of new stuff.  the goal will be to add four or five images a week, so it shouldn't take long to get some meat on the bones.  i may be the only one that reads these posts, but if you're subscribing to the feed, the new site is actually live, it just hasn't officially been announced - you can get to him by clicking the 'home' button above or going to either h3images.com or billhughlett.com

Update on Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 10:44PM by bill

i forgot to mention - the flash show on the home page can be controlled by the viewer - mousing over the image will reveal a strip of all images at the bottom of the large image currently being played.  the slideshow is set to cycle through 16 images, spending about 8-seconds on each.  there is a timer in the upper right corner of the image being played - when the circle completes, the next image transitions in.

New and Ongoing Show at Caprice Kitchen

This post is way overdue, but I have a nice assortment of 11 images hanging in the Caprice Kitchen in Ballard, 1418 NW 70th, 98117 / 206-371-2886.  This is a really nice neighborhood restaurant that serves dinner Wednesday through Sunday and brunch on Saturday and Sunday.  

Chef Anne Catherine builds the seasonal menus around visits to local farms and neighborhood markets - it's a shameless sales pitch on my part, but one I find very easy to make from personal experience.

Following are a few images from the show, along with a brief story of each.  The pieces hanging in the restaurant are also for sale so contact me if interested.  Enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions.

Eventide | Morning Glory: October, 2008 - White Sands National Monument.  I'm not much of a camper but discovered that the only way I was going to be able to take advantage of the sweet light in the evenings or at dawn was to reserve one of 10 campsites in the entire monument.  it's about a half-mile hike from the parking lot, so I dragged my one-man tent, sleeping bag and about 40 lbs of gear and had an incredible three days and two nights there.  These two images were taken at dusk and just after dawn respectively

  

 In stark contrast to the kind of serene beauty found at White Sands, is the more chaotic beauty of the lower west side of New York City.  A friend who lives in Manhatten and I spent an evening walking the streets with our cameras and tripods in January 2010.  This image (Meatmarket) is of a wildly painted and graffiti covered meat packing plant just off the Hudson River Greenway.  It's actually a combination of five that were taken at various exposures and merged to get the full, almost surreal dynamic range (see this post for more of an explanation)