Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Currently: Buenos Aires |
 |
| My mom makes these ceramic scultures which dot our house. Many are inspired by French Gothic sculture found on Cathedrals. |
 |
| For one of her book clubs my mom read 'Line of Beauty' and put a purple post-it note on every page containing the word 'beauty' or 'beautiful'.
Tilt-Shift Tricks with tilt-shift photography have been making their way around the blogosphere. On a bellows view camera the lens can move independently from the film. Architecture photographers can shift the lens to get the vertical lines in a building to line up, as in this photograph of Shanghai by Robert Polidori. But you can also twist the lens totally out of whack so that only a slice of the picture is in focus. This has the curious effect of making the scene look like Lego Land, especially if the picture is of distant buildings, shot from above. Olivo Barbieri in Metropolis Magazine had a whole spread of city scenes done in this style. Brazilian photographer Claudio Edinger has a whole book on Rio with this effect. You don't need a large format camera to get this effect. Canon makes a $1000 tilt-shift lens that you can use on a DSLR. NYC Photoblogger Bluejake played with this lens on his blog a couple of years ago. There's a cheaper option called a Lensbaby which is a slinky-like lens where you use your fingers to push & pull the lens for weird focus effects. These photos of the Unisphere in Queens and a rainbow slinky were both taken with a lensbaby. Now it comes out that there is a simple Photoshop tutorial to create this effect. I basically involves blurring out the side of the picture. The results can be convincing. There's now a flickr group dedicated to this hack. I particularly liked these photos of downtown Sao Paulo [always a favorite subject for me] and Niagara Falls. |
 |
| Mom in Carmel |
 |
| Me & Mom still in Carmel. You'd think I grew up on the Central Coast to read this blog for the last week. |
 |
| Blossoming Pride of Madeira overlooking Carmel's beach. |
 |
| Funky orange lichen at Point Lobos Cool flickr link:Mumbai Faces |
 |
| Elephant seals at Piedras Blancas beach near San Simeon on Route 1. Luckily I had my new zoom lens with me that day. |
 |
| At the same beach as the elephant seals I took this picture in honor of my friend Luc and all European tourists who snap photos of squirrels. Luc was surprised when he discovered the phrase 'rats with furry tails' was not something I made up. Indeed a google search on the phrase reveals a decent number of hits, in which this post will soon take place. Madeira The Island of Madeira is the most enchanting place I've ever been. Here's a few pictures from flickr to remind me. It's hard to convey if you've never been:
valley with freeway |
 |
| Another view of Big Sur, looking south. It was about 5pm when I took this picture and the slanted afternoon light was great. |
 |
| Of course, people come from all over to visit California. Here is Big Sur, still, after all my travels, one of the most beautiful highways anywhere. The road was empty on a clear February day and a recent cold snap left an unusual dusting of snow on Cone Peak, elevation 5100ft. |
 |
| From Madrid to California, via London, to visit home, or at least where I grew up. The license plate is my mom's. It's a vanity plate; YOK2TOG--yarn over knit twice together--a knitting stich. The string of letters and number don't suggest a vanity plate but having a mid 1980s license plate design on a 2005 Camry must cause some puzzlement. Mom reports that very few people get it, but for those in the know... |
 |
| Atocha Train Station, Madrid. I left Morocco after 20 days and returned to Spain via some rough seas on the Straits of Gibraltar. The above picture is of Madrid's main train station (site of the 2004 bombings). The old station has been turned into this humid, tropical garden and wasn't a bad place to hang out on a cold winter day with sleet. |
 |
| In Chefchaouen, in the mountains near the Mediterranean, the old buildings of the medina are painted this brilliant, florescent blue. |
 |
| In Meknes, under the ruined ambassador's hall of King ______ were these catacombs. On this day lots of school kids were running about the columns in the darkness. This one posed for me underneath a shaft of light. |
 |
| La Tour Hassan in Rabat. The picture nearly cuts it off, but the minaret was left unifinished. I've been playing around with Flickr and uploaded a set of Sao Paulo architecture photos. Most of these were published on my blog last year. And random flickr coolness, Bolivian Newspaper Graphics, courtesey of Migel Centellas. |
 |
| The camel ride took our tour group into the Erg Chebbi, some sand dunes near the town of Merzouga. The area of sand is smallish--from the top you can see the town & mountains on the other side, but the dunes are about 500ft and impressive to climb. The drummer above, Addi, was one of three guys who led us out there on the camels, cooked dinner and then entertained us with their drumming. |
 |
| From Marrakech I signed up for a 3 day desert tour. The second evening we hopped on camels and went an hour into the sand dunes to spend the night in tents and see the sunrise over the Sahara. |
|
|
 | For more about me, please go visit my old geocities page. |