The Austin City Limits festival begins with it’s new grass on Friday at around 4pm

Blue skies and a thick, carpet-like grass in front of the Livestrong stage

Concert Goers take a break between shows on the lawn

Blue skies above the ACL wind vane sign inside the park.

Day 2 – the rains begin, and they are HEAVY

Day 2- The lawn starts to get a bit brown – but it’s still OK

Day 3 – the soil from underneath the lawn seeps up and it’s really soupy

The areas close to the stages become mosh pits full of standing water and trash

Some don’t seem to mind the conditions and take full advantage of the situation

This area is what I referred to as the Shamu Splash Zone

These shoes promptly went in the trash after the festival!

Final Note – even though the lawn looks like it was totally trashed, the officials at Zilker Park were able to salvage about 98% of it. The park reopens today, Oct 30th 2009!

I took part in the inaugural fashion week by shooting backstage portraits for the Sew Sister and Friends show at Qua, which also included designers Mange la Mode and Cyberoptix Tie Lab. A couple of the notable models were Austin Fashion Week Model of the Year: Reader’s Choice Christian Ramirez, and NFL wide receiver Limas Sweed.

Mange La Mode

Ties from Cyberoptix and undergarments by Sew Sister

Christian Ramirez, winner of the Best Male Model, People’s Choice for Austin Fashion Week 2009 backstage wearing Sew Sister before the show.

Limas Sweed, University of Texas sports hero and currently a Wide Receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers

Mange la Mode

Models wearing Sew Sister’s line of women’s lingerie

Some interesting info on Bboy City:
If you are familiar with show America’s Best Dance Crew, several of the best bboys on that show have been in Austin at some point for bboy city either to compete or judge the events (including members of the winning crew from Season Two – Super Cr3w).

Also, there’s a great documentary film called Inside the Circle directed by Marcy Garriott that follows the lives of Romeo and two of the most popular dancers at Bboy City, Omar and Josh, through many of the Bboy City events (I also make random cameos in the background taking photos). This film premiered at the SXSW film festival in 2008 to rave reviews and recently aired on MTV. It’s available on DVD as well.

Enjoy the rest of the Bboy City photos!

Marlon of Havikoro (winners of Bboy City 16) practicing Footwork before the event begins

Toprocking in a practice circle during a break

Headspin battle in a cypher – contestant #1

Headspin battle in a cypher – contestant #2

Shorty of United / Knuckleheads California doing Flares

Little Kid Freeze

Knee Slide

Misa footwork

Marlon suspended midair during the Havikoro / Masters of Mayhem final

Toprock

Footwork

Bboy Elusive Freeze

Happy Headspin

Elbow Airflare

Gravedad Zero (Mexican Crew) – Group Routine

Bboy Zeshen of Havikoro (winners of Bboy City 16)

Rhythm Attack (Chinese crew) – flips

Rhythm Attack (Chinese crew) – splits after a flip

Bgirl Misa invert freeze

If you’ve never been to a bboy jam, you’ve been missing out. At the Bboy City 16 finals, the energy was intense, the dancers’ moves were on point, and the competition was fierce as hundreds of people crowded into the Parish to watch some heated bboy battles.

The level of skill this year was really high, as two great international crews entered the crew battles – Rhythm Attack from China, and Gravedad Zero from Mexico. There were also the usual suspects from Texas and some out of state crews as well. In the end, after a long, hot, energy filled night of dancing, world famous crew Havikoro came out on top.

Enjoy the photos and check out more pictures from Bboy City here!

The Parish club – the venue for Bboy City at least 3 times now

Bboy Kirk from Havikoro doing modified 1990s

Bboy Marlon from Havikoro brings his unique flavor to the dance floor

Joel from Havikoro doing a flip while battling the Mexican crew Gravedad Zero

Turtle toprocking while sporting his best ninja turtle outfit and looking happy as always

Bboy Elusive doing footwork right before he kicked my camera lens!

Tory Harvey getting down in between battles

Bgirl Misa doing an air freeze during a cypher

Genie Windmills by Mando from Rhythmic Rockerz

Bboy Recon Inside the Circle as the crowd watches

Stick Fighting in Motion

Jump Kick – Bruce Lee Style

Martial Arts Weapons

I recently got the chance to photograph all three conferences at South by Southwest 2009 (Interactive, Film, and Music). All in all it was a great experience and totally worth the late nights going to concerts and film screenings. I’m glad that so many people got to enjoy Austin during the week of SXSW and it was great to be a part of something special.

Inside the Austin Convention center on the opening day of South by Southwest

The Alienware booth at the gaming convention at SXSW Interactive

Tony Hsieh of Zappos gives an inspirational keynote speech to a completly packed house at the Austin Convention Center during SXSW Interactive – his speech was amazing!

Inside the Paramount Theater before the showing of “Number One with a Bullet” for the SXSW Film Conference

Giant South by Southwest banners hang in front of the Austin Convention Center

The band 3oh!3 performs at Stubbs during the SXSW Music Conference

Thao with the Get Down Stay Down perform at the Parish during the NPR party at the SXSW 2009 Music Conference

Talib Kweli performs at the Scoot Inn during SXSW 2009

Well, it turns out there is, and it’s called High Dynamic Range Photography. This type of photography takes multiple photos taken at different settings and averages the best parts of each photo. The result is a new photo that has a higher dynamic range and more information – that is you get more detail out of the extreme white and black areas in the photo and everything in between.

There are many tutorials online on how to do HDR photography, but this is the short version of the the basic and most common technique:

Take a digital camera and put it on a tripod. Frame the scene and set up the camera for bracketing (taking multiple photos at different exposure settings). You want to take 3 photos, one at normal settings, one at +2 exposure, and one at -2 expsosure settings (consult your camera manual – I know most canon digital cameras do this). +2 means twice as bright as the photo at normal settings, and -2 means twice as dark.

Take 3 photos and import it into an HDR program such as Photomatix (available here. You will have to adjust the final image a bit to your desired settings – you can make the photo lighter or darker within the program. I won’t go into the details here because you can just read the tutorial within the software. Photoshop CS2 also has an HDR function if you already own a copy of that. Once you are done and the software does it’s magic, you’ll have a single image that is the result of merging 3 images together. Enough talking – here is a look at my first HDR image. This is the view outside of my living room window in Austin, TX.

Photo taken at normal settings – notice how the buildings are dark and there is a large white spot on the right with no detail.

Photo taken at -2 exposure settings – notice how the buildings are extremely dark but we can see much more detail in the sky – all of the clouds are visible.

Photo taken at +2 exposure settings – the buildings are properly exposed, but the sky is totally white and we can’t see the clouds or the sky at all.

Resulting image #1 – Notice how the sky has all of the details of the darkest images, and the foreground with the buildings and the city have the details of the brightest image. Using the HDR technique, I effectively brought out all of the detail that you could see with the human eye.

Resulting image #2 – This image is an example of what HDR can do at it’s most extreme settings. Saturation, strength, and contrast were turned very high on this one, giving an extrordinary amount of detail and a very artistic, surreal looking photo with an almost oil painting feel to it.

For more info, a Wikipedia link to HDR Photography can be found here.

Visit this HDR Flickr group for more examples: http://www.flickr.com/groups/myfirsthdr/pool/

Here is a link to an in depth HDR tutorial using Photomatix: http://www.vanilladays.com/hdr-guide/ via Vanilla Days.

Enjoy!

The view of my office building from above

Downtown Austin

The Dell Diamond

Water Treatment Plant

Cookie Cutter Housing

Lake Travis

The cockpit

More photos at http://www.pbase.com/supertsai/flight

Here are the pics I got today.

Available as a stock image – Click here

Available as a stock image – Click here

Available as a stock image – Click here

Available as a stock image – Click here

Available as a stock image – Click here

All of my Demolition stock images here

Since Austin is “the live music capital of the world” it seems that the city decided to commission different artists to paint replicas of Gibson guitars to be placed around the city – and they look great! I’ve been running around town taking stock photos over the past couple of weeks and have noticed these guitars everywhere. Naturally I’ve been taking photos of them…

UPDATE 10-30-07 – I have posted more Austin Art Guitar action from around town. click here to check it out.

Austin City Hall – Music Capital of the world guitar. Available as a stock image – Click here

Austin City Limits Guitar – ACL Crow. Available as a stock image – Click here

Transparent Guitar in concert. Available as a stock image – Click here

Gecko Guitar. Available as a stock image – Click here

Fire Tree? Available as a stock image – Click here

Colorful – Available as a stock image – Click here

Picasso looking Guitar – Available as a stock image – Click here

Disco Guitar? – this is one of my favorites. Available as a stock image – Click here

UPDATE: Click here to see the 2nd set of snow day photos taken the next day

Not many winter storms here in Texas. Available as a stock image – Click here

AKA the lonestar State. Available as a stock image – Click here

It isn’t so much snow that sticks around – it’s Sleet.

The snow pretty much melts away and then reforms as ice

No plant – not the grass

bushes

cacti

or the palms could escape the ice

cars

and trucks were both trapped by the ice

everyone stayed indoors today – check out the size of those icicles. Available as a stock image – Click here

when the sun went down, the ice and snow still wouldn’t let up. Available as a stock image – Click here

no metal surface was safe from being iced over – the cars are still stuck. Available as a stock image – Click here

Tomorrow we’ll probably still be stuck at home. Available as a stock image – Click here