Fall is the time for rich colors. Stephen Blecher pushes the season to a splashy start with his photos from a hotrod show in Lakewood, Colorado on Labor Day.
See more of his photos by clicking on the one here. It sends you to his SkyDrive album. Enjoy these delightful photos while we wait for the trees to catch up.
You can also visit the galleries of our other guest artists by clicking the Gallery – Visiting Artists link.
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© 2012 Ludwig Keck
We were walking through the mall when we came upon a children's play area. Sunlight was streaming through a skylight like a searchlight beam on one of the rides. The photo illustrates the limited range in brightness levels that can be accommodated in a photo. To us the mall was brightly illuminated with the tiger in the boat just being in sunlight.
In the photo even the ceiling lights are just grey areas, while the tiger and the boat look bright.
The investigative types among my readers might be able to derive the time of day from the angle of the shadows. I will spare you the effort: the photo was taken about 3:30 in the afternoon. 
Here is how it looks in SkyDrive (only my own, location is not shared), Picasa, and Bing Maps as reached from “Map it” in Photo Gallery.
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© 2012 Ludwig Keck
Celebrating 100 years of service, the West Side Market in Cleveland, Ohio is both a historic site and a delightful shopping experience. With just under 30,000 square feet (less than 2800 m²), this market is modest in size compared to today’s giant supermarkets, many of which are twice this size. It is different, however, in that some one hundred independent vendors offer a wide array of produce, meats, baked goods, and more.
I took a few shots with my Nokia Lumia 900 phone. 
With a little bit of looking around, you can see the location (just scroll down) and you can find other views of this amazing place.
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© 2012 Ludwig Keck
Microsoft updated Photo Gallery – formerly known as Windows Live Photo Gallery. Besides the name change, the most notable new feature is “Auto Collage”.
Some four years ago Microsoft Research introduced AutoCollage, an amazing and unusual collage builder. Face detection and automatic identification of interesting parts of photos, and smooth blending and arranging of the component pictures, made creating collages easy and fun. This technology has now been brought into Photo Gallery.
Sadly, the tool in Photo Gallery takes no instructions from the user at all. The results are pleasant enough, but there is no chance to tweak or adjust the resulting collage. A minimum of seven pictures are required to make an “Auto Collage”.
I had a collage made in Picasa last Fall, so I used the same photos for an Auto Collage. Here, first the new Photo Gallery creation.
For comparison here is my Picasa collage. Picasa offers full control over placement, orientation, frames, size, and background, however, the components have “hard” edges. The results are quite different. Enjoy.
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© 2012 Ludwig Keck
My quest to master my smartphone camera continues. The Nokia Lumia 900 provides an amazing camera. Yet the differences from gear that I am used to are many. No viewfinder for one. Having to hold the camera at arms length makes aiming rather awkward for me. Without manual focus I have to rely on the little brain in the camera to decide what to focus on. I still can’t figure out what it sees, but I am making progress.
The camera can focus to about four inches, I have yet to prove that to myself. The shutter will happily operate at exposure times much to long to hand-hold successfully. That I have amply demonstrated.
Here is a photo, “snap” as my British friend would say, from today, taken under difficult light. The setting sun was just to the right of the edge of the photo. The camera did alright.
Most photo locations are right on, some are missed, like this one – maybe I did not allow the phone to acquire the GPS satellites. Not something I had to worry about with my “old-fashioned” photo gear.
The learning curve still looms steeply ahead.
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© 2012 Ludwig Keck
We have a new gallery in the neighborhood and as part of their “get ready” efforts they conducted a painting workshop. Here is a young artist hard at work and admiring his success.
For my “artistical” interpretation, click the picture to see the post at Silver Gallery:
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© 2012 Ludwig Keck
