Why no posts for so long?  I’ve been traveling in Iceland for two weeks for my honeymoon, and am writing this from a cafe in Reykjavík.  Unfortunately, I idiotically left my camera cable at home and have no way of processing or uploading the 32+ gigabytes of photos I’ve taken so far.  We’ve had a fantastic trip so far, which has included several days here in Reykjavík, a few days exploring other towns like Akureyri and Lake Mývatn, and two long backpacking trips, one through Jökulsárgljúfur National Park and the other on the Laugavegurinn, a trail that our guidebook calls “one of the world’s great hikes,” an assessment which may only be a minor exaggeration.

Things we’ve seen so far: tons of beautiful landscapes, lots of eerily bubbling hot springs and steam vents, wacky local fashions (wildly patterned tights are a big thing here), lots of blonde people, crazy buses capable of fording large glacial rivers, some very interesting foods, the most delicious butter we’ve ever had, endless sheep, cows and horses, plenty of European tourists, very few Americans, a man we took to calling Beowulf, and more. Of course, there will be photos to come (I’ve tried not to let my photography totally dominate our honeymoon, but it’s up to my wife to decide whether or not I actually succeeded).  Sorry for the hiatus and the photo-less post, hopefully it’ll be worth it.

Yeah, you read that right. I’m on Twitter - @bwuphoto, offering thoughts, news and commentary on photography, music and anything else that comes to mind while I’m standing at the front of the house for 2 hours waiting for a show to start. Pic (mostly) unrelated, from Shamrock Fest which I shot last weekend (and tweeted a lot from). I may have a post or two up about shooting there. It was a blast, if you like taking pictures of drunk people at least.

So says the National Weather Service with their all-caps mojo:

…EXTREMELY DANGEROUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS THIS MORNING FOR THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON REGION…THE EASTERN PANHANDLE OF WEST VIRGINIA… DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DRIVE THIS MORNING AND EARLY AFTERNOON. LIFE THREATENING BLIZZARD CONDITIONS HAVE DEVELOPED RAPIDLY ACROSS THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON REGION THIS MORNING. AT 7:27 AM THIS MORNING…A WIND GUST WAS RECORDED TO 60 MPH AT MANASSAS VIRGINIA. NUMEROUS WIND GUSTS OVER 40 MPH HAVE OBSERVED AROUND THE REGION ALONG WITH WHITE-OUT CONDITIONS.

So, this is what life-threatening blizzard conditions look like. More here.

You may have heard that it snowed a lot on the Eastern seaboard the past couple days. The Washington Post is saying that DC got 25 inches or so, which sounds about right to me - when I stepped outside on Saturday morning, the snow came up to my knees, and there were still several hours of snowfall still to come at that point. On Friday night, I wandered around a bit with a few friends, shooting some typical documentary snow photos using only a Nikon 35/1.8 DX lens. I’ve heard that this lens works well on FX bodies with just a bit of vignetting. All the photos in this set shot with that lens (which is all but the last two) are totally uncropped so you can see how true or untrue that is.

I like how this lens works on my full-frame D700. Yes, there are limitations: it has to be shot wide open or the vignetting gets much worse, and the further away the focal point, the more pronounced the vignetting is as well. That said, when shot wide open with a close focus, the vignetting actually almost disappears. This isn’t evident in any of the photos in this set because I didn’t get really close to any subjects, unfortunately. Still, in a lot of cases the dark corners actually give kind of a cool, claustrophobic effect. (Not to mention that, in some applications like concert photography, they are often not even noticeable at all.)

Again, here’s a larger set of photos with this lens, from Friday night.

Two years ago, one of the most challenging things I shot as part of my photo-a-day project was a dance performance by local hip-hop company DCypher. The lighting was dim, the action was fast, and I was using a manual focus Series E 50/1.8 lens, which did not meter on my D70. I was quite happy with what I got. In retrospect, most of what I got was junk. This time around, shooting the same group almost exactly two years later, my camera had an extra zero on the end and I had an array of fast autofocus lenses at my disposal. My results, needless to say, were much better.

I favored my 24-70/2.8 for the most part, with some usage of the 80-200/2.8 for some tighter shots; I actually think I should have used the latter a bit more. Breaking out the 50/1.4 might not have been a bad idea either, but I never did. Because I needed shutter speeds of at least 1/200, preferably much faster, to stop the very fast motion going on onstage, I was mostly locked in at ISO 6400, dropping down to 3200 in the rare moments that the lighting brightened up enough. (Considering ISO 6400 is two full stops more sensitive than my D70 was capable of, it’s not surprising my photos were better this time.)

Not much else to say about this; the challenge was purely about nailing the exposure and getting the timing right. Compositionally I didn’t have too many options; I was seated directly in front of the stage and could not move around during the performance. The nice thing about this position - aside from the obvious perk of being close to the action - was that by shooting slightly up at the performers, any jumps or other airborne moves they made were exaggerated by the angle.

Full set here (170 photos), or if that’s completely overwhelming, here’s a smaller set of highlights (34 photos).

Let’s just say this is not how I envisioned sharing photo space with James Nachtwey. Currently at the TIME.com photo essays home page, the top essay is a series of Nachtwey photos documenting the devastation in Haiti. Directly underneath that is… a photo essay about Lady Gaga. The first two photos in this essay are mine. While I’d rather be doing what Nachtwey is doing instead of taking pictures of crazy Lady Gaga fans, I’m still pretty psyched that Time bought a couple of my pictures.

Above, another fan photo from that show (not one that Time used). Fun thing to take note of: both my shots in the TIME.com photo essay were taken at ISO 6400. D700 for the win.

For the third time in four tries I have a photo in the annual DCist Exposed photography show. Thanks, DCist judges (including fellow concert photog Kyle Gustafson)! The above shot of Samael performing at Jaxx back in the fall of 2008 made the cut. Funny, I don’t even really like this band, but they were great to shoot.

I also entered this shot of Arve Henriksen and this abstract that I highlighted a few posts earlier. I actually like both of those shots better than this one, but no complaining here. In any case, Erin Lassahn’s winning shot of All American Rejects completely blows away pretty much any concert photo I’ve ever taken, so there’s that.

The show runs March 6 to March 21 at Long View Gallery.

You may notice that I’ve slightly changed the layout of this blog - all I’ve done is widen the layout so that I can display my photos BIGGER. Because while some photos are better viewed small, usually those are the crappy ones. Displaying photos big gives them more impact and reveals detail where in smaller sizes all you see are patterns. This does mean that if you’re stuck in the Stone Age and using a monitor with less than 1024×768 resolution, you’re out of luck; but I don’t think I’ve got many readers that fall into that category.

Anyway, the above shot of Jucifer (one of my favorite live bands to shoot) from Monday night just doesn’t work in a small size; it looks like a bunch of clutter. In a large size, it’s still cluttered, but the action comes out. Of course, this works both ways: in the below shot, a perfectly acceptable shot at a small size shows imperfections at a larger scale; you can see that the left side of the photo is not quite in focus. Oops. (This is a quick after-show shot of Jucifer and openers Salome; the Monday night show was the last one of their mini-tour. More photos from that show here.)

Hope you enjoy. After this post, the first post with the new BIG format will be a 2009 retrospective. I’ll also be going back and retroactively increasing the size of the photos in previous posts.

My new housemate got new housemates, in the form of two absurdly cute kittens. She has multiple kittens, I have multiple cameras. Cameras + kittens = way too many pictures. Here are a couple. (More here.)

Out of curiosity I checked the shutter counts on both my cameras tonight. I got my D300 in April 2008 and it has 83,790 clicks on it. I got my D700 in April 2009 and it has 23,570 clicks on it. Conclusion: I’ve been taking lots of pictures lately.

The photo above is click #23,541 on the D700. I went a step further and charted out my month-by-month usage of this camera:

April: 473 clicks
May: 8,094 clicks (8,567 total)
June: 3,521 clicks (12,088 total)
July: 2,499 clicks (14,587 total)
August: 7,287 clicks (21,874 total)
September so far: 1,696 clicks (23,570 total)

Tons of photos in May because of a wedding and two days of Maryland Deathfest; tons in August because of Virgin FreeFest and… a trip to Vancouver? Honestly, I’m a bit shocked that I took 7,000 photos last month. (And that doesn’t even include D300 usage.)