A Venetian Daily Driver

The Venetian Lagoon is full of water vessels, and many of them are wooden and moved with human power. This specimen from Burano really caught my eyes. The brightly colored interior with the stained wood on the bow and gunnels looks sharp, and the warping, peeling wood shows what a long and tough life you expect on the lagoon.

Colorful, right?

Almost all of the small boats moored along the venetian canals are secured like this one: a loop of rope around a piling angled a bit towards shore. A nice adaptation that allows the lines to slide up and down for big tides. The funny thing is that you'd probably need serious climbing skills to reach some of the boats. This one just takes a short step from the walkway, but I saw many that were six or more feet below the seawall, or would require shimmying horizontally some distance to reach. 

I have some news for folks who like to read and look at photos on their mobile devices. I personally made a Hop Safari app for the iPhone and iPad. It's a great way to view my photos on one of the most beautiful screens you own. Get the free app here.

Tipsy Texan: Spirits and Cocktails from the Lone Star State

I was sipping a cocktail at my buddy David Alan's peachpollozza party when he told me he had finished his book. I got to flip through a pre-release copy, and it looks fantastic!

Who is David Alan? He is the Tipsy Texan. He is one part cocktail artist, one part beverage historian, one part mentor, and one part curator of an amazing private mixology museum. Forgive me if I have the ratios wrong.

David and his partner Joe have a hand, visible or not, in a lot of the best Austin bars. Hopefully you've already discovered Tipsy's online anthology of boozy tales. See you in a few hours.

As I was saying, David wrote a book called Tipsy Texan: Spirits and Cocktails from the Lone Star State. It's one of those hardcover books that has the cover photo actually printed on the cover rather than onto a dust jacket which will look really ratty the third time you pull it off the shelf and douse it in bourbon.

Unlike that cocktail book you got in college, the recipes here aren't transcribed from some liquor conglomorate's press materials. Tipsy won't trick you into balancing out gasoline-flavored rum with generic cola and lime concentrate. I have little doubt that David tweaked and perfected each recipe until the cocktail started pouring from his ears. Judging from the index, his ingredients are some of the finest craft liquors flowing from Texas distilleries. 

In addition to lovely prose and recipies, the book has been lovingly filled with photos by Aimee Wenske and Michael Thad Carter. If you love looking at fun photos of food and drink like I do, you'll appreciate the visuals inside. David personally crafted and styled each cocktail for the photos. They look delicious, and with the writing tell a great story about what we like to drink in Texas. You'll find plenty of material to build your own sunny Austin cocktail scene right at home.

The publisher was kind enough to provide me with all of these high-resolution photos from the book. If you like what you see, consider pre-ordering a copy. It'd be amazing to get enough pre-orders to spike a local author onto a best-seller lists. I've already pre-ordered my own copy on Amazon*.

*Moving Average Inc. is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Buying items through this link is much appreciated!

Floating Dream

When you think of Boston, you probably don't think too hard about what lives under her bridges. The history, the buildings, and the harbor easily pop in your head. But do you wonder what lives in the shadows with the spiders, tarry pilings, and fishing line tangles? I didn't. Yet I made one of my best Boston photos under a bridge. Even better, it was less than a five minute stroll from my hotel.

Discovering this colorful little rowboat marina made me quite happy. Were it not for the modern bridge design, you might not know what century it is under here. Discovering these beautiful wooden boats really made my day.

I made this photo by gorilla-podding my SLR to a railing and making a nice long exposure to dreamify the water and the boats. Finally, I gave it a single-exposure HDR treatment, applied some glow effects, softened the underside of the bridge, dodged and burned, added a film look, and applied a vignette.

What do you think? Do you want to take one of these boats for a tour of Boston as much as I do?

Google+ SXSW Photowalk with Trey Ratcliff

Have you ever been on a photowalk? The walk Trey Ratcliff organizes every year at SXSW is a classic. This year, a mob of at least 300 people met at Austin City Hall, walked up Lavaca, and then down notorious 6th street. During SXSW, Austin really keeps it weird, so the results were a lot of fun:

Werewolves, Darth Vader's second cousin, lost Astronauts, and hundreds of photo junkies. I even ran into Foodie is the New Forty! I'm filing this walk under "success."

Crossing Dark Waters

I flew to San Francisco a few weeks ago to participate in Google's Glass Foundry event. I made this photo next to their San Francisco office. Don't they have a nice view of the bay?

While I was playing with this photo in Perfect Effects 4, I stumbled across a filter combination which dropped almost the entire Bay Bridge except for it's lights. With a lot of Dodge & Burn action, I tried to enhance the effect, hopefully pulling the viewer past the street, and down the bridge.

For some reason, the result reminded me a lot of Scott Sigler's Nocturnal*; its version of San Francisco is full of shadows and hidden passages. If you like twisted stories about secret societies, hideous mutants, and serial killers, you might check it out. Skip it if you're squeamish.

*Moving Average Inc. is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. Buying items through this link is much appreciated!