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My name is Tristan Tom and I'm a San Francisco Bay Area based photographer shooting mostly portraits, lifestyle type stock images, engagements and weddings. This blog follows both my personal and professional life. Like most, I’ve got opinions and musings on a diverse range of subjects, some of which will be featured throughout the blog along with my photographic endeavors. I encourage you to leave comments on anything you see or read here. And, tell a friend about it too!

For more information on photography services, please use the contact link above. Also, here's a short bio.

Thanks for visiting.


portrait gallery // dreams gallery

Portrait session with Karen

I just finished editing shots from a photo shoot I did with Karen-current UC Berkeley student and grad school applicant extraordinaire.

And I’ve been playing with a cool piece of equipment that I recently got-an Alien Bees Ringflash. These shots were lit with the ringflash at various settings.

img_6716a1 Portrait session with Karen

While I can’t say I’ve completely mastered the use of ringflash, I think the results I’ve been getting so far are pretty good.

img_6756a Portrait session with Karen

And getting someone as photogenic as Karen to model for you doesn’t hurt!

img_6799a Portrait session with Karen

img_6745a Portrait session with Karen img_6726a Portrait session with Karen

Karen, thanks for collaborating with me on this photo session!

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November 27, 2008 - 9:24 am Everton - I really like your work clean and nice.

November 30, 2008 - 8:58 am Josh - These are cool! The ring flash really helps give them that Vanity Fair fashion look. Nice job.

November 30, 2008 - 6:43 pm robin - She is beautiful. Love the fourth one (second horizontal one). Have fun with the ringflash!

Heidi in black and white

I did a photo shoot with Heidi over the weekend and this is one of my favorite shots from the shoot. It seems to have a bit of my signature ‘look’ at least as far as headshots go. Thanks Heidi for choosing me to photograph your project! The complete portfolio of pictures will be ready for pickup this week. 

img_6652a Heidi in black and white

Adventure game on the iPhone

screenshot1 Adventure game on the iPhoneAdventure brings me right back to my childhood and it’s currently available free on the iPhone/iPod Touch in the iTunes App Store! Anyone who used to play the Atari 2600 and owns an iPhone or iPod Touch will need no further explanation.

Adventure basically pioneered the action-adventure genre of games, and that though its art is spare and its noises are little more than bleeps and bloops, both are classic and coated with pure nostalgia.” - TUAW.

My Nephew

hassaniphone My Nephew

This is a shot of my Nephew. He always wants to steal my iPhone :)

November 14, 2008 - 4:54 pm robin - He's a cute kid--I love his hair! You have to admit, the iPhone does kind of look like a schwanky version of the little portable video game thing that so many kids have. :)

November 14, 2008 - 4:57 pm Tristan - @robin - Definitely. And the fact that I do have some games on my iPhone doesn't help things either ;)

CNN - stop calling it a hologram

You may have seen CNN’s election night coverage where they beamed in some ‘holograms’ (clip above). Well, it wasn’t really a hologram, but you probably knew that. For it to have really been a hologram, the 3D image would have had to have been projected into space, right there in front of Wolf Biltzer. Instead, he was just looking at nothing but a red dot and a remote video feed was switched in with the on air feed.

What about the blue Star Wars like edge around the image? That was added in by CNN for effect.

Welcome to Annexia

natural_light Welcome to Annexia

Welcome to Annexia” - William Burroughs.

Now hosted with HostGator

webhosting Now hosted with HostGatorI’ve now changed hosting companies on this site. You may notice that it’s loading a lot faster than before. Tristantom.com is now hosted with HostGator, who seem really good so far in terms of speed, uptime and customer service aside from their somewhat stupid alligator logo. They have a server partnership with one of the largest server facilities in the country, The Planet and what they do, they do really well! (Ie., provide excellent load balancing, speed and uptime). In fact, HostGator ranks at the top of most all shared hosting companies for uptime.

My prior hosting company was DreamHost and while a lot of people really seem to like them for the price, I experienced short bouts of downtime on at least a weekly basis. I also had slower load times and they only have email support, no telephone or live chat.

Prior to DreamHost, I was hosted with EngineHosting for several months. They were really quite good-fast, great support, etc. But their control panel was very minimalistic for me. I wanted more control over my site/domain. Their storage and bandwidth for the price is also rather expensive.

Before this I was using IXWebhosting (so bad, I won’t even link to them). They absolutely totally sucked in every single respect. IXWebhosting really is one of the worst hosts.

For years (probably 10 years) before all of the above, I used Pair Networks. They were great in terms of uptime and seemed fairly fast although they were expensive for the needs of my new MySQL/PHP WordPress site and just couldn’t compete. When I just had a static site, they were fine.

Just a short trip down hosting companies memory lane for this domain!

November 1, 2008 - 9:01 am Bill - I agree with you i use host gator also and i have used them for a while now. I like you site the pics you have here are very clear and the women is very beautiful.

Mina

img_6482 Minaimg_6450a Mina

November 25, 2008 - 8:52 pm Karen - Love the second picture.

Colin Powell endorses…:

I really like what Colin Powell has to say here:

T I R E S

Tires