Eric Church performs “Sinners Like Me” during a 3-song acoustic solo set in the middle of his show at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena. “On the day I die, I know where I’m gonna go. Me and Jesus got that part worked out. I’ll wait at the gate, ’til His face I see. I’ll stand in a long line of sinners like me.”

Mark Collie performs a song from his excellent new CD, “ALIVE at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary,” at the CD release party at Hard Rock Cafe in Nashville May 1, 2012. The CD was a decade in the making – see this story: Mark Collie’s Prison Project Sees the Light.

I shot this photo with my Canon 5D Mark iii set at ISO 3200 because of the low light in the club. I have posted the full-sized image so you can see the incredible level of detail and relative lack of “noise” even at that high ISO thanks to the state-of-the-art technology of the 5D3. The photo was shot at 1/80 sec, f/5, using a Canon 24-105mm L-series lens set at focal length 105mm. No flash was used because I don’t like flash and am not very good with it. And also because I accidentally dropped my Canon Speedlite 430ex ii off a 50-foot cliff while hiking around a waterfall a few months ago.

Check out the photography of Barrett Hedges, a photographer from Tullahoma, Tennessee, whose photograph of a charging brown bear in Katmai National Park in Alaska won a National Geographic award in 2010. Good stuff. I purchased a small print of another of his images, of an ice-encrusted tree in Yellowstone National Park, after meeting Hedges at his booth at the Main Street Festival in Franklin, Tennessee.

Part of a picturesque farm along Horton Highway (US 31A) at Owen Hill Road in the unincorporated Allisona community in southern Williamson County, Tennessee. You can see a couple more pictures of the farm here and here.

The resolution of the 8-megapixel camera in the iPhone 4S is rather astonishingly good for such a small lens and sensor. Here are a couple photos I took today of a similar subject. One photo was taken with my iPhone 4S, the other with a Canon 5D Mark II equipped with a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 zoom. The Canon is a 21-megapixel pro-level camera. Neither photo has been altered in post-processing except to shrink both images to 36 inches in width and then cropping the Canon image down to 24 inches in height to match the iPhone image’s dimensions. For that I used Pixelmator, a low-cost but reasonably good alternative to Photoshop for Mac computers.

The Canon 5D Mark II image started at 78 inches wide, the iPhone 4S image at 45.33 inches wide. You would think the iPhone image would suffer from being expanded to 78 inches wide – however, when I did that, it still looked incredibly sharp. You’ll have to trust me on that since I only uploaded the 36×24 images here.

The iPhone camera is too limited to replace a DSLR, but it can produce high-quality images.

Click each image to enlarge. Can you tell, without looking at the exif, which of these was shot with the iPhone and which was shot with the Canon?

Fan Fair, 1994

Nashville, Tennessee

Country music fans lining up for autographs from artists at their booths inside.

West Coast commercial advertising hotographer Tim Mantoani has captured famous photographers posing with their most iconic images for his new book ‘Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends’. (Click link or thumbnail to buy the hardcover book at Amazon, $37.80. There also is a limited edition version that costs more.)

Yahoo has some of Mantoani’s images in an online slideshow. The images were shot on 20×24 Polaroid. The book began as the personal quest of photographer Mantoani to document and preserve noted photographers together with their images. “We have come to a point in history where we are losing both photographic recording mediums and iconic photographers,” Mantoani comments. “While many people are familiar with iconic photographs, the general public has no idea of who created them. This book became a means to do that, the photographer and their photograph in one image.”

So, why did Mantoani choose to use 20×24 Polaroid film, a soon-to-be-extinct photographic medium, for the project? Mantoani explains:  “I chose the format for two reasons. First, it is very possible that in just a few years, film for this camera will no longer exist. Second, to me this is the ultimate view camera. If you are going to call the greatest living photographers and ask to make a photo of them and you are shooting 35mm digital, they may not take your call. But if you say you are shooting 20×24 Polaroid, they will at least listen to your pitch.”

Tim Mantoani’s all-about-photography blog is at MantoaniBlog.com.

Here is some absolutely stunning time-lapse cinematography of Yosemite National Park. The video is the result of a collaboration between videographers Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty. You can see more on their Project Yosemite website. Be sure to expand the video to fill your whole screen.

A horse plays with an old tire during the first snowfall of 2012 in Williamson County, Tennessee.

I went out and shot some pictures with an old Nikon F camera today – first time I’ve shot non-digital in almost a decade, and first time I’ve shot film with something other than a disposable camera in about 15 years. The camera – similar to the one pictured here. belonged to my granddad, Howard Forrest Henry. He used it to create photographs in the 1960s for ad campaigns for companies like AT&T when he worked at N.W. Ayer & Son, the first advertising agency in the United States.

Ayer was AT&T’s main agency for decades, and coined the slogan “Reach out and touch someone” to promote long-distance telephone service. The firm also created the slogan “Be all you can be” for the U.S. Army, and “A diamond is forever,” for deBeers. I don’t know if my granddad worked on those accounts, but I have some original artwork and copies of a variety of ads he created for the AT&T account. He was both a painter and a photographer. That’s a picture of him taken in 1960.

After my granddad died in 1974, the Nikon F became my mother’s camera. Now it is mine. The detachable finder/metering system doesn’t work, so I used my digital camera to meter the scene, then set the Nikon manually. I was shooting on Kodak black-and-white print film. Since I have to finish the roll and have it processed, I have no immediate feedback on how the shots turned out. I don’t anticipate using the Nikon very much at all – it was a great camera in the 1960s, and even the 1970s and 1980s, but today it is simply too technologically limited to do the things I like to do, and film and processing are expensive. Plus, the Nikon F simply doesn’t allow me to shoot as fast as I like to shoot. I shot some scenes today with both the Nikon and my digital Canon T2i. When I finish the roll of film I plan to post some of each images here.

As for N.W. Ayer & Son, it no longer exists. The Art Deco building it once occupied in downtown Philadelphia’s Washington Square neighborhood was sold in 2005 and renovated into a ritzy condo tower called The Ayer. The company however did donate 270 cubic feet of its records to the National Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian. The N W Ayer Advertising Agency Records include business records but consist primarily of print advertising created for thousands of clients between 1869 and 1996 – more than 400,000 proofs of advertisements prepared by the firm for various clients. Which means my granddad’s artwork is in the Smithsonian.