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Every year, I try to look back at the past year and see what I have accomplished, what I have not done I wanted to do, what I have done I didn’t plan for. In numbers, 2016 has been an incredible year, I kept 33809 images (I probably took over 60K images knowing my kept ratio around 50%), I have traveled to Turkey, France, South Africa, La Reunion and Cuba. I did 32 headshot sessions over the year. That was the good side, on the not so good side, I have only done on aerial shoot this year, I was planning more and I did not do ANY sunrise over the Golden Gate Bridge (some improvements are needed in that section). No need to say it but reducing so many images to just 10 is really tough. Here the images that have a special importance for me in 2016: I have also...

It has been almost 4 years since I have last visited Cuba and Havana. My first time around, it was harder to get to Cuba, you had to fly a charter plane, you had to travel with an officially sanctioned tour operator. This time around, we flew with JetBlue, we were still part of a group but that was a small group focused on dancing salsa and rueda. I was expecting huge changes in 4 years and that was not the case, Havana is still Havana. Everything here works on a different time scale. The main difference seems to be that there are more newer cars than last time but there are still plenty of old ones too. It seems there is more signs for “casa particular” (room for rent to tourists) and there is definitely more “palavar” (private...

Happy holidays! Wait! What? Happy holidays? It’s not even Halloween yet! Yes but why wait! So for a couple of weeks you can get some of my print at an incredible discount and you can get also my new calendar. The starting price on some prints is $49. Calendar Last year, I printed a calendar for the first year and it was a success, so I’m doing another one this year. Like last year, I have featured my favorite images of San Francisco: some of them you have already seen either on this blog, some of them are completely new. Here is what the calendar looks like open: If you want to order one, simply click the “Add to Cart below” [wp_cart_display_product name=”2017 San Francisco Calendar” price=”30.00″...

My longtime friend QT Luong has finally released his photo book about the US National Parks. QT and I have known each other for more than 20 years and I consider him one of the smartest people I know. A couple days ago, we met for lunch and he gave me a early copy of his book. My first impression was that’s a very heavy book, it’s massive, it weights 7 lbs! But then I opened it and immediately I felt drawn into it image after image, park after park, description after description. I could not stop myself to read on and virtually visit each and every park. The book  describes all 59 national parks, with beautiful color photos. The best part is that each photo has a description of where it was taken and when (time of day but also season). Each...

For many years, I have always wanted to have a way to let anyone search all my images. Yet none of the solutions I could find was user-friendly or useful. No one wants to see a gallery with 10000 images. Some photographers are using location-based hierarchy, so you need to know what you are looking for in order to find it. For example, if you want an image of El Capitan, you need to know it’s in Yosemite National Park in California in the US. I have always found this way too restrictive. A better system is the one Getty Images uses, where you can search images using keywords. In order to work I need to add keywords to all my images. I do have keywords on my images but I don’t have nearly enough. You need to have keyword for the dominant color, generic...

The Carnival in San Francisco was this weekend. I was following a salsa group called Rueda con Ritmo. Rueda is a type of cuban-style salsa dancing, where all the dancers dance as group and switch partners. We showed up early to photograph the preparation and the make-up of the dancers. The parade is always on the last Sunday of May. This year the weather was extremely pleasant and we all know it can be cold in May in San Francisco. The group had invited a professional cuban dance group, the All Stars, from Santiago de Cuba to parade with them. The parade was composed to over 50 different groups and it took over two hours for us to get going to the official parade route. Here is a couple of groups I was able to also get pictures: Leading the parade were old...