It’s crazy that it was over a year ago that I was in Hawaii, and I was thinking about what to post I realized that I still had a ton of unprocessed brackets from that trip that could be fun to run through Photomatix, so that’s what I did! There is really nothing to shoot during the winter up here; snow makes for really gray and dismal looking HDRs, and beyond that it’s really hard to get motivated to go exploring around town when its -3° outside. So, to help make up for my inexcusable lack of posting I’ll post two shots here, both from Hawaii but that’s about where any similarities end. The first shot is from our walk across the interior crater of the volcano Kilauea-Iki. The volcano was active sometime in the ’90′s I think, but when we visited the lava had hardened into a black desert that enabled us to walk across it. It took the better part of a day to make the journey, and the landscape was truly alien. Along the way, and not surprisingly seeing as we were standing inside a volcano, there were many fissures where boiling steam would hiss up out of the ground. This seemed to be a good subject for a picture, and the dramatic clouds, as ever, add to the effect. The craziest part is that the volcano has erupted massively since we visited, meaning that most of the foreground in this shot is totally different now. I’d love to go back and see what changed!

The minerals that were in the lava that hardened give the rocks all sorts of interesting colors.

The next image is again from Hawaii, but in a stark contrast to the barren volcanic landscape, this shot is from the Limahuli botanic garden on Kauai. As you’d expect a botanic garden on a tropical island to be, the scenery was fantastic, with countless plants and animals that were foreign to me. As we got to the top of one of the hills, this fantastic view presented itself and, well, you know the rest!

After we visited the park, we walked along the beach and were able to see the mountains from a totally different angle. I'll post those shots some other time!

We finally got around to making a Facebook page for our site! The 3 of us will continually update and check it and we hope it can be a place for people to feel comfortable commenting, contributing, critiquing, whatever… we just want to interact with our friends and those who read our blog and like our work. You can use the right-hand sidebar object to like us, or you head on over to TAG’s Facebook page to check it out!

I’ve got a bunch more material and a lot of it is half-processed but have no fear, many more updates are in the future! I spent my free time today working on the Facebook page but hopefully soon I’ll be able to put up some new content.

*All that time I spent adding captions to my picture? Down the drain… Facebook decided I didn’t need captions so it just deleted everything I’d done. The pictures are still there, but all of the links back to the site are gone. I’ll fix that ASAP but it is a pain to go and find each one…

No image today, unfortunately, but I’ve been hard at work behind the scenes, adding a few more desktops to the new Desktop page, and doing some tweaks to the site. Most of the time I spent making changes to the Comments system. With close to 100 visitors a day, many of whom are unique but the majority of which are returning, it would be great to have some comments on our posts! I got a tip from some one who said it would be better if a name and email weren’t required to comment. I agree with this of course, and being rather new at this whole web thing still was unaware that I could change that so easily. So, for the time being, you no longer need to do ANYTHING except write your comment and it will appear! I say for the time being because I have no idea how this will affect spam. The site has received 20 comments that have been approved as legitimate people, and over 900 that have been automatically blocked as spam, which is sad, to say the least. We will see…. I am attempting to find the balance between making it easy for actual readers to post, and at the same time keeping the spam at bay. I have also re-labeled the link at the bottom of each post; it used to read “No Comments” which is rather confusing, as it was not obvious that to comment you needed to click this. Now it is much more descriptive. I will have a new HDR to post tomorrow; I have revamped the “What is HDR? A Quick Overview” page and have a new HDR to go with it. The new page will walk you briefly through the steps that I took to create it, showing before and after images, and be a bit more in depth than it was before. I think there are still  a few more I can dig up before I am really, truly out of material and will be “forced” to stop being lazy and get out there and shoot (which can only be a good thing.)

So with the first few weeks of school picking back up I honestly can’t think of a time when I’ve been busier than I am right now. This is good because it means new stuff is constantly happening and you never suffer from boredom (kind of a rare occurrence in LA but it has been rumored to crop up every once in a while). Lately my crew commitments to my colleagues’ various student films have eaten my weekends entirely and when I’m not squeezing 18 units out of 3 days of class I’m working an internship. Honestly, the only downside right now is that it’s really hard to find time to sit down and process images, not to mention going out and shooting new stuff. I understand we’ve been having steadily increasing traffic recently so I’m really going to make an effort to get some new material up in the next couple of days (or at least rework some older shots that deserve to be on the site but have yet to appear.) In the meantime, please check out the mind-numbingly amazing concept of HDR video that was recently demonstrated by SovietMontage…

I’m not dead, just disgustingly busy it seems. Haven’t been out to shoot in close to 3 weeks

But, park hopper on Sunday so I’m looking forward to my first attempt at some Disneyland magic, hopefully something akin to this little piece of gold.

Neat stuff right? Here’s hoping…

I’ve been swamped. It’s tough to find time to go out and get good stuff from all over and lately all I’ve been able to do is pop over to the lot on my lunch break and squeeze off a few shots of random stuff. Hopefully this weekend will present some opportunities to branch out somewhere new or revisit an old favorite…

Soon we will have our own domain name! When this happens I will repost the site on Facebook etc so people can see. It will make everything better in terms of Google finding us, and plus, having our own domain is just cool especially since it is so cheap these days.

I am headed out of town for two days and probably won’t do too much shooting or updating during that time, and Giacomo is headed to Italy for 6 weeks or so… I’m sure he will get some fantastic stuff while there. Andrew I’m sure will continue to post from LA, and when I get back I hope to explore some new parts of Atlanta to put up on the site. And when I get back, I will decide which lens(es) I want to buy; the Canon 100mm f/2.8L macro, 85mm f/1.8, and 50mm f/1.2 are all options I am considering. For now, time to go pack

UPDATE – I had some time in the Albany airport so I messed around with a few things on the back end. Categories now appear as links as they should, and the site is a better size. Working on more changes to come.

Hey everyone. We are three college students who got into photography in high school and have recently started experimenting with the HDR process. We were inspired by the awesome work on HDR pioneer Trey Ratcliff’s website, www.stuckincustoms.com . Trey has really brought HDR into the mainstream and caused many people, including ourselves, to consider the process one of the best ways to accurately show a scene. The three of us will regularly update this with our own unique High Dynamic Range images both ones that we have made in the past and ones we are in the process of creating. Be sure to check back frequently for fun shots and insights into our own worlds of photography, and if for some odd reason you have stumbled upon our budding website before looking at Trey’s, be SURE to head to Stuck In Customs for an engrossing visual treat.

Our site will improve greatly over a short period of time so be sure to check back. Thanks for stopping by and be sure to tell your friends about us if you like what you see!

-Tucker Bair, Andrew Stowe, and Giacomo Waller