(tt) Tristan Tom - Photographer bio picture

{Welcome!}

I'm a San Francisco Bay Area based photographer shooting mostly portraits and lifestyle type stock images. This blog follows both my personal and professional life.

Please feel free to leave comments on anything you see and be sure to check out my galleries as well. If you'd like to connect with me for more information, please use the Contact link.

Thanks for visiting!


portrait gallery // dream gallery // rss

Can’t or Won’t?

353454452_TN3rN-L Cant or Wont?

From Rudy’s Can’t Fail café in Emeryville (owned by the band Green Day).

An old truck

348135665_ZmLHT-L An old truck

Time is all that matters

This is a great lecture on time management by the late (and great) Randy Pausch. I highly recommend it to everyone:

More:

Randy Pausch May 18th, 2008 graduation speech

Randy Pausch “The Last Lecture”: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (2007)

“The Last Lecture” book on Amazon.com

A post from the Wordpress iPhone app

This is my first post from the iPhone Wordpress app. It seems to work fairly well and even allows you to post images taken with the iPhone and preview the post before publishing. Cool stuff.

I’m absolutely loving Wordpress and will never return to a custom blog. I may change my blog design from time to time to achieve a different look and feel, but it will always run on Wordpress. It’s just so much more extensible and robust.

photo

The Dark Knight rocks!

wallpaper_pod_800 The Dark Knight rocks!

I caught a 10:20PM show of The Dark Knight last night and it rocked! Wow!

Over 30 minutes of the effects sequences were filmed in IMAX and they look absolutely splendid-shallow depth of field, super high resolution, beautiful and very realistic for the world the film lives in.

One of the problems with most effects movies is what I call “the Star Wars effect”-the depth of field is too long in the effects shots, like in the Star Wars prequels. While watching Hellboy 2 last week (a movie I hated) I couldn’t help but notice in the effects shots that there was too much depth of field-you could see everything from near to infinity, which is actually distracting because there is so much going on on the screen, you don’t know what you should be looking at so you check out of the scene. The Dark Knight is not like that.

Christopher Nolan did a perfect job capturing a totally compelling mood and story for the film. Everything from the dark blue look to the entire movie, to the totally boss score to the performances of the ensemble cast was right on.  Heath Ledger is amazingly awesome as The Joker. He totally steals the show, which is saying a lot for his performance given that he was up against the likes of Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Cain!

What makes this movie so good is that it never strays from being about the story (and the effects serve that story well). The script is so well-written, it delves deep into themes less cursory than ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’ which would be too predictable. Think chaos vs. order, anarchy vs. conformity, establishment vs. the individual.

The Dark Knight is one of the best superhero movies ever.

Pictures from my iPhone 3G

I bought the iPhone 3G over the weekend and am really liking it so far. Although getting one was a total pain-I waited several hours in line, it was worth it!

While the iPhone 3G camera is nothing to write home about in terms of specs., and I don’t think it has been upgraded at all from the first generation iPhone, it’s really great for snapshots. And, it can be a powerful thing to have a camera that goes with you absolutely everywhere. The trick is not to email them from the iPhone because that slims the images down. To get the full resolution images out of the iPhone, I either use Image Capture on my Mac or SmugShot to upload them directly to my SmugMug account.

Just like fun old cameras like the Holga, Diana or Polaroid SX-70, the iPhone cam needs a lot of light and the images are often not that sharp. It is a phone cam after all. But it’s great for these toy camera type of images (with a little bit of Photoshop post work thrown in):

332089010_2gGtk-L Pictures from my iPhone 3G

332088914_X6QBk-XL Pictures from my iPhone 3G

332089164_DD27U-XL Pictures from my iPhone 3G

Snapshots from Southern California

I was in Southern California over the July 4th weekend. Here are a few urban images from my tiny point and shoot camera that I carried with me everywhere (for that snapshot ethic):

Gate 24 OAK

reflections street photo

225

Elevators

Ranch 99

Costco

Video how to - viewing EXIF information in images

This is a short video ‘how to’ on viewing the embedded EXIF information in images using either Photoshop or the Preview application in OS X: