Microsoft Windows 7 Wallpapers

I am so excited to finally be able to announce this: six of my photos were chosen for use as desktop wallpaper backgrounds for Windows 7! Working with the Microsoft team was a great experience, and I am so honored to be able to contribute my photos to their project.

Here is the full story in an interview I did with the 7tutorials blog.

And here is a mention in Microsoft's Engineering Windows 7 Blog.

More at willaustin.com, including info on limited edition prints.

And... a video interview with Denise Trabona, Senior UX Lead at Microsoft, talking about the new desktop backgrounds on the Channel 10 blog (I get very nice mentions at 4:20 and 7:20).

Quote from the video:

"We are featuring the work of a local photographer named Will Austin... one of the reasons for featuring Will is that he actually specializes in architecture and we were finding architecture a little hard to fill out. As it turns out he is all-around a very good photographer so some of his work made it into the other sets as well.... You know what I love about his work in these sets is the light and energy... it is the theme of Windows 7."

I'd like to thank my family, friends, teachers (and readers of this blog!) who have been so supportive of my creative pursuits over the years.

Here are the six images-

A pile of iPhone photos

I have been having fun making photos with my new camera, oops, I mean phone ;-)

All of these were taken recently with my iPhone 3GS and processed entirely in camera with several different apps. One of these days I'll do an app review as well. I also used an app called pixelpipe to upload this post, no computer needed!

If you follow this blog you can expect many more of these....

New Book: "In Love with a Hillside Garden"

Our good friends Ann and Daniel Streissguth, with the help of their son Ben, have been working on a book about their spectacular hillside garden in Seattle and it has now been published by the University of Washington Press. They were so kind as to let me practice my garden photography there over the years and several of my images were used in the book. To me it is really a love story- love between Daniel and Ann, and also love of gardening, of nature and of architecture/design.

From the introduction-

"It all began when architect Daniel, then a bachelor, built his own house on a wild hillside lot, developing his garden as next-door-neighbor, Ann, was developing a garden around natural springs in her backyard. We married, and together with our growing son, Benjamin, continued these gardens as we also fought through blackberries, horsetails, and morning glories to push intersecting paths through the adjacent two-lot wilderness we later purchased, creating a little park which we planted and nurtured and ultimately gave to the City of Seattle in 1996, with our promise to maintain it through our lifetimes."




It is also available at Amazon.