Cole Rise

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This past weekend, along with my friend Naveen and his family, we drove up to the Point Reyes region. We wanted to enjoy the nice fall weather and have lunch at Saltwater in Inverness, one of my favorite restaurants. I love this part of Northern California. One of my favorite photographs I ever took was about a mile away from Saltwater.

Whenever I visit that area, I visit this beached boat introduced to me by Cole Rise, one of my photographer friends. I have been taking a photo of this boat called Point Reyes since. It is one of the most photographed marine wrecks on Instagram. It is no surprise that I took another photo this past weekend — this time with iPhone 13 Pro. I used the ProRaw format and later edited it on Lightroom CC and Photoshop. I am pretty pleased by the quality of the camera on this new phone.

This boat, built-in 1944, has been sitting on the sandbar in Tomales Bay for nearly 25 years now. It has been vandalized and, as a result, lost some of its visual appeal. It was in danger of being removed, but the fuss created by local photographers saved it from being moved from its final resting place.

This shipwreck is a reminder that in time nature consumes everything that came from it. All that is left are memories. I am glad there will be millions of images of this boat saved for posterity.

PS: AtlasObscura has a short write-up on this boat if you are interested in knowing more.

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Cole’s Quest

Cole Rise, a photographer and a programmer behind Lite.ly was one of the first people I interviewed for Pi.co, my interview series. And during our conversation, he shared his dream of building an exact replica of the Hasselblad camera, that went to the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission. My conversation with Cole … Continue reading Cole’s Quest

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Cole gets a Cannes Lion

A photo by Cole Rise, who is one of my favorite people and simply a great photographer has been picked as  Cannes Lion award  (Gold campaign) winner in the Billboard/Street Posters category. His photo of a friend standing in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado was part of Apple’s Shot on iPhone 6 campaign. Congratulations amigo — and thanks for all your great picture. By the way, Cole’s app, Lite.ly finds a nice home on the home screen of my iPhone 6.

It was only last week I pinged Cole and asked him about how they were printing such gigantic posters on the side of the buildings and on billboards considering that my iPhone 6+ photos show their imperfection on the iMac 5K. He pointed out that the trick has to do with DPI (dots or pixels per inch if you’re talking screens). A photo straight from the phone is about 8 megapixels at 72DPI. However, since billboards are so large and so far away, they can use a really low DPI, like 12-15 dots per inch, which is common when printing at that scale. “The photo looks great huge,” he explained to me in an email.

On an average sized 4K screen, however, will operate at around 130-140DPI, nearly double an iPhone photo. The pixels will be stretched and the photo looks like crap, in the same way a low-res photo or icon looks when it’s scaled up on a retina display. “Interestingly though, if your 4K screen is around 60” or larger, the DPI drops below 72 DPI, so the phone photos will start to look amazing,” he added.

If you have not read my interview with Cole over on Pi.co, our yourself a glass of wine (or a cuppa tea) and sit down savor the man’s nuanced take on photography and life.

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Stunning Stills from EyeTime 2014

A few months ago, Jeff Kenoff got in touch, wondering if I would judge at the EyeTime 2014, a Student Photography Competition in NYC. Unfortunately, due to prior commitments and time constraint I couldn’t do the judging for the event. Some of my friends like John Biggs of Techcrunch, Mark Kawano and Cole Rise, however ended up being judges on the competition. The talent at the competition was staggering. Just look at some of the photos that are in the winner’s circle and you will know what I mean. EyeTime 2014 is a contest to publicly promote the research, exploration and investigation currently happening amongst today’s emerging talent. For my money, Architecture in Limbo by Ben Tynegate is hauntingly beautiful!  Continue reading “Stunning Stills from EyeTime 2014”
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Take a peek at Pico

The internet is inevitable. I don’t mean just the hypnosis of your Instagram feed but how broadband and optical technologies allow everything to be connected. I’ve watched this grow since the mid-1990s, and today we are more connected more often in more places. The digitization of the physical world may have started slowly, but now we can find a digital heartbeat in even the most inanimate of objects. And it is changing how we live, work, create, consume, imagine, travel, and even cure ourselves. (more…)
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Cole Rise

Cole Rise is a San Francisco–based photographer and entrepreneur. He recently launched Lite.ly, an iPhone app that commercializes his Lightroom presets and Instagram filters. He has worked for both Yahoo and Apple, and he was a design consultant for Instagram. He was the founder of Subatomic Systems, Particle Progammatica, and Flagr. You may have seen … Continue reading Cole Rise