Recently in Photography Category

Tash, the blogger at Palos Verdes Daily Photo, has been documenting life on the Palos Verdes Peninsula for about a year as part of the City Daily Photo network.

Tash describes herself as "almost an LA native," moving to Los Angeles from Yugoslavia in 1970 when she was 12. She grew up and became a Boeing engineer and married a man from the hill and moved to Rancho Palos Verdes in 1987. She shares her home with a teenage son, a golden retriever and a couple of cats.

Here's our Q&A with Tash:

When and why did you start the blog?
I started the blog in May of 2008. I found out about blogs from a close friend about a year before that who started a dog picture & haiku blog. At that time, I didn't have anything I wanted to post. In spring of 2008, I searched for information on my home town in Yugoslavia (now in Bosnia) of Tuzla, and found the Tuzla Daily Photo and the City Daily Photo community. After following a few of the City DP sites for a month, I decided to start a PVDP to show off this part of the world in photos.

A photo a day is kind of a big commitment. Do you shoot every day or do
you have archives you pull from?
I shoot every day and take a lot more photos than I could possibly post since the "rules" for CDP posts are one photo a day. Also a lot of the photos are in the snapshot category so they never make it to the blog.  Usually I post the most recent photos but at times I do pull from archives if the subject for that day feels appropriate. Blogging does take a lot of time, from taking the photos, to selecting what to post, and then to looking at other blogs and making comments. I have done it for almost a year now and do find
it very rewarding to connect with people from all over the world.

Do you set out to shoot something specific or do you just carry a
camera and wait for inspiration?
The camera is always by my side since the changing light or an interesting shot can be found at any time. (I get a bit of flak for that from family and friends.) But I do also go
to shoot specific subjects. I've been interested in Palos Verdes historical buildings and those I will go out and shoot specifically. Also, the coastline photos, I will make a special effort to go shoot interesting clouds or sunsets.

Do you have a favorite place to take pictures?
I really enjoy taking photos is at and around Malaga Cove Plaza because of the history
associated with that area. But there are so many other beautiful views on the hill that I enjoy so it's pretty tough to choose just one spot.

What has been your most popular post?
My most popular posts were unusual photographs of sunsets - a more recent one of the a dark road (PV Drive East)  with the full moon in the front and a colorful sunset caught in the side mirror of my car, with a car's headlights heading toward me.

Is there anything you've posted that you later regretted?
I have posted a photo of a wall with interesting colors and shadows that had the name
of a ubiquitous coffeehouse. I immediately got two very negative comments and replaced the post. Blogging is a balance of individual expression and what the blog visitors like to see, so I do shy away from unpopular posts or subjects.

What kind of photo equipment do you use?
For now, I've been very happy with my high end point & shoot Canon PowerShot SX100 IS (8.0 megapixels). I've learned from a couple of really good CityDailyPhoto
photographers (Dusty Lens from Minnesota's Twin Cities area and
Babooshka of Ramsey Daily Photo) and later from reading books such as
The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby to shoot in highest pixel
mode and invest in a large memory card. Maybe next year I will upgrade
to an SLR. The point & shoot cameras are just so handy and easy to
carry around, so it will be a tradeoff between convenience with low
cost and quality with high cost.

Do you have any tips for budding photographers?
To improve one's photography, nothing beats looking at other photographers work. I
mentioned two blogs already, but some other amazing ones are Arona
Every Day, Seattle Daily Photo, and Helsinki Daily Photo. However,
blogging is only one part photo - the other part is the write-up that
goes with the photo. Some of my other favorites are A Yankee in
Belgrade DP, Birmingham, Alabama DP, South Pasadena DP, Pasadena
Adjacent, Altadena Hiker, and two other South Bay blogs: Creative
Vignettes and Taste With the Eyes. My other tip would be to just to take a lot of photos, of the same subject, from slightly different angles or location -- because the best photo may not be the one that
initially seemed to be great, and with digital photography, mistakes are free!

What is your favorite thing about the Palos Verdes Peninsula?Location, location, location and the natural beauty of the place. I really do20
feel very fortunate to be able to live here. I think that it's a
wonderful community to live in.

What drives you crazy about living here?
I really don't like all the development that seems unchecked that is going on, especially the non-residential development since we have a lot of empty retail space already. I am grateful for the Land Conservancy Organization that's preserving at least some of the original landscape of the peninsula.

Do you sell your photos?I am very much an amateur photographer so I'm not sure anyone would want to buy the photos. But if there is anyone, I'll be happy to sell them.

Name three blogs or Web sites you love.
City Daily Photo (a portal of all 800+ daily photo bloggers), Big
Orange Landmarks, who is
"exploring the landmarks of Los Angeles, one monument at a time" and
Astronomy Picture of the Day. But
there are so many more blogs that I think are noteworthy and these can
be found under My Profile - Blogs I Follow.

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Anyone using Google's Street View map feature to scan one downtown Pittsburgh street is bound to do a double-take. Two 17th century swordsmen doing battle? An escape from a building using knotted sheets?

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The project was Kinsley's master of fine arts thesis project at Carnegie Mellon University.Kinsley and Hewlett found themselves exploring surveillance, virtual reality and Street View through art. "We were interested in ... playing with -- and subtly questioning -- the notion of reality in something that we perceive as a factual representation of our world," said Kinsley.

You know how people - maybe you, even - get stuck taking a hundred photos of their cats and dogs? There's nothing wrong with that, but what you need is inspiration. If you haven't already surfed through Flickr's Interestingness page, you're missing out on the most creative of photos on the 'net. Even if you're no camera wiz, Interestingness is still, well, interesting to click through. Think of it as the Wikipedia of photography. There's tags for the South Bay and just about every city within it. Look at our part of the world from different points of view.

Shuttertalk and Photojojo are great resources for propelling you deeper into the craft of photography. Both Web sites are dedicated to serving camera fiends with the best in tips and tricks, do-it-yourself gear and projects and Photoshop guides. The two sites cover everything from road trip and vacation photography to pointers on how to shoot for your eBay auctions.

Once you've got a memory card full of personal art, maybe you'll want to alter your photos a little bit - lay on some text, resize them, add a sepia tone. Nothing too crazy. But say you don't have Photoshop, or iPhoto, or even Microsoft Paint at your fingertips. Picnick is a free online-based photo application that offers most of the basics without clogging up your hard drive space. You can also save and share your photos directly to Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket or MySpace.

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Well, it is.

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A free basic membership allows uploads of up to 100 megabytes. A paid pro account allows for unlimited uploads.

There are more than 4,000 photos in the group. A few hundred or thousand more wouldn't hurt.

Today is Pinhole Day, so what better time to check out some fascinating photos from around the world, all — you guessed it — taken by a pinhole camera. A site devoted to worldwide Pinhole Day explains the early form of photography in which even a watermelon can be used to capture an image. The site also includes directions to make your own pinhole camera. Now you just have to get a watermelon.

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