Author: Chris Marquardt

As a photographer and educator he helps great people travel to the edge of the world to tell amazing visual stories and have amazing experiences. As an author he loves to dive deep, no matter if it's about film photography or in an entire book just about wide-angle. As a podcaster he explains how things work. As a consultant he helps businesses understand how to boost their visual presence in a world that's becoming more and more saturated with pictures. As a producer he enables business and individuals to pour their visions and ideas into pictures, sound and video. As a traveler he enables people to come with him, no matter if in person or through the images and stories that he brings back home.

Apr92017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

AirPods – My Verdict

Personal, Tech

When the AirPods were finally out in December 2016, I got my order in for the first batch. The cabled EarPods always fit my ears well, so they've got that going for them. While they don't cover all use cases, they worked well for me and so my expectation for the AirPods was to do pretty much the same, but without the cable mess. I have two main things to say about the AirPods: they are probably the most convenient and comfortable pair of earphones that I've ever owned. Seemingly endless battery life if you're willing to give them a quick rest in their tiny charger box after several hours of listening. And I've had several occasions where I was walking around the house searching for them, just to realize that I was wearing them all along. they have one really big quirk that's...

Apr72017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

You go, Mastodon!

Personal, Tech

Another social network. Open. Decentralized. Getting a bit of hype lately. I'm there. Dipping my toes in. As chrismarquardt@mastodon.network - giving it a fair shot. I'm a fan of open and decentralized, so I wish it all the best. You go, Mastodon! Ping me here.

Mar222017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

Anchor, stop crippling your success

Podcasting

Anchor.fm just released version 2.0 of their app. They claim it's a new form of radio and I have to admit, it's quite nice and it lets you build your own virtual radio station. It lets you record snippets and publish them to your own station. You can add music too. And you can make a call-in to another station which the owner of that station can then put on their own station. I was planning to use Anchor as a side-channel to my main podcast (TFTTF) - to release a daily photo tip for my audience and answer questions that they submit as call-ins to my Anchor station. In addition I wanted to re-use my Anchor content on TFTTF. Here's why that might fail: a) Anchor lets me export my own content, but the export quality is horrible. In fact it sounds so bad, it doesn't even com...

Feb252017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

🇬🇧 Peace of Mind: My Travel Tips

Travel

For some people travel causes a lot of anxiety. What if you forget to pack something? What if you miss a flight? Many what-ifs.. even with me. For example I have a habit of double-triple-quadruple checking if I have my passport. Over the years I probably made almost every mistake there is when it comes to travel. But I've come up with a list of things (and stuck to it) that have one goal: peace of mind. Make a travel checklist Biggest one first. Sit down for 20 minutes and in your mind, go through different situations on your journey and think of what you will definitely need. And what you can do without. Use any simple tool at your disposal to capture these points. I use the reminders app on the Mac and iOS because they sync nicely. My list contains things like: toiletries, ea...

Feb252017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

🇬🇧 Siberia ahoi

Photography, Travel

I took this shot of ice bubbles on Lake Baikal in Siberia last year when we did a photo tour there with a group of great people. Tomorrow I will take off for yet another photo tour to Siberia and during my preparations that feeling of standing on top of the lake for the first time came back to me. Lake Baikal is the oldest, clearest, deepest and biggest body of liquid fresh water in the world. In fact it holds 20% of the world's liquid fresh water. TWENTY. EFFIN'. PERCENT. It's 395 miles long, 49 miles wide and at its deepest point it is 5,387 feet deep. That is over one mile of water. And I've been told that it's so clear, that in summer, if you drop a coin from a boat, you can watch it sink for a whole minute. That's insane. Insane and very exciting when walking on top of it...

Feb212017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

3D sensing is coming

VR/AR/MR

Google's Project Tango was the first to market and others will follow in the consumer space very soon. 3D sensing is a critical component of the future of computing. It will not only allow facial recognition on a completely new level (e.g. you won't need finger print readers anymore), the spacial awareness of the devices will change pretty much anything. Think interaction. Think entertainment. Think mixed reality. Image recognition won't have to rely on a 2-dimensional photo, but can use actual depth, which will in turn make recognition reliability almost perfect. Gesture recognition is another piece of the puzzle. The moment your device can tell what your hands are doing, you'll have a new user interface. Touch that virtual computer screen that's hovering in front of your face ...

Feb172017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

Art. Yes, it’s Art.

Personal

When years ago I found the first episode of Cowboy Bebop, I had to watch them all. In Japanese, with English subtitles. I had tried an English dub, but it lost so much authenticity in the voice acting, the original was better. Cowboy Bebop left a profound impression on me. The episodes, the stories, the music, the depth. Here's a video about Cowboy Bebop that was just released by Channel Criswell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkXFBPGZpTM Here's a take by someone else who has also been deeply touched by it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip5CpjXR4CI Here's another take on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Z8cDkP86g Watch the series if you can.

Feb172017 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

Rejiggle all the things

Tech

Update: making progress, the list now includes tipsfromthetopfloor.com (took a bit longer because I had to make sure there was no interruption or side-effects on the podcast delivery). Once I'm back from Russia, I will get to work on the rest of the sites. It's about time to revamp my web hosting. So far, it's all on one dedicated server (as in a hardware box with spinning disks, mirrored albeit) and the system has served me well in the past. It's getting a bit long in the tooth though and the cloud offers everywhere are quite intriguing. Especially as many of them run on really fast hardware, SSDs, quick networking and the flexibility is beyond anything I've ever had. Fire up an instance with the click of a mouse. Add a temporary server for a special purpose, delete it later and pay by...

Nov122016 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

I don’t often get political here…

Politics

Jonathan Pie's take on who is to blame for Trump winning. I'll just put this here. It made me think. Strong language, but I think it touches right where it needs to. "How do you think, people are going to vote if you talk to them like that?! When has anyone ever been persuaded by being insulted or labeled." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLG9g7BcjKs

Nov92016 by Chris MarquardtNo Comments

Brace Yourselves, A New World

VR/AR/MR

Update 2017-02-17: seems that Magic Leap isn't quite as far as they made seem. Some current perspective here. I'm still 100% in on AR/MR though. We ain't seen nothing yet... No, I'm not talking about the US elections, I'm talking about a profound change in technology that lies in our not too distant future. It will impact almost anything in our lives, the same way smartphones do. Just more profoundly. Since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, things haven't been the same. Now almost everybody carries one of those devices and they changed everything. Everybody now carries a camera all the time. Communications and social interactions have dramatically changed. Even seemingly disconnected things like film photography see their fair share of influence from smartphones. Physical rolodexes ...