Today we wrapped up our “Colonial Cape Cod� workshop (I’m writing this in our little Radisson hotel room, just about to pack up and leave). Here’s a peek at Chris and one of our workshop participants admiring a pretty nice sunset on the National Seashore (taken with my 15mm fisheye lens):

As the sun got lower, the sky got even more interesting. Here’s one of the keepers from that group that I can show off because it’s my blog so I get to subject you to whatever I want:

If there is anything in the world I like more than slow motion, it’s… I have no idea, I love slow motion so much. I am completely addicted to that Discovery Channel show Time Warp.html and I frequently search for slow motion on YouTube and just watch everything that comes up (anything from Brainiacs is usually awesome).

For your daily dose of photography-related slow motion, I bring you a video of the Canon 5D shutter shot at 2,000 frames per second using (allegedly) a Phantom HD high speed camera.

Part One: Kites

Chris Benton is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He also straps his digital SLR onto a kite string and takes some of the most amazing aerial photographs I have ever seen. Chris combines a truly gifted eye for composition with a an engineer’s savvy for mechanical problem solving.

Using kites and remote-controlled camera rigs built by hand in his basement, Chris captures the world top-down, photographing everything from people and buildings to the patterns of nature. Watch this video from Make Magazine and be stunned!

It’s been quite a hiatus for me and for Single-Serving Photo. My last post here was back in February, and so much has happened since then! First of all, if you’re reading this, thank you for not deleting me from your feed reader or taking me off of your bookmarks list. I know I haven’t been the chatterbox I once was, but I don’t like to post link wrap-ups and two-sentence thought fragments just for the sake of putting something online.

Ritz Camera, while providing useful and satisfying services to some, has long been the target of my criticism. I find it laughable that free-minded individuals would pay Ritz’s extortionate prices for equipment and gain nothing but instant gratification from the ordeal. Their warranty leaves much to be desired, and though Ritz employees can sometimes be knowledgeable, there is definitely no guarantee of that.

Someone who would walk into a Ritz Camera (or their other brands, like Wolf Camera) and purchase a softbox made by some second-string manufacturer solely on the recommendation of an AP stringer who got the job at Ritz because the AP doesn’t even like them that much (no offense to AP stringers in general, here), is a fool. Plain and simple.