I know that all babies are not as good-natured as Annelise was for her portraits. I think that mom Jeanette was more than pleased that we got upwards of an hour of smiles and wagging tongues from her daughter. To be fair, there was one early moment of panic when we couldn’t figure out why Annelise was suddenly wailing. Her forehead had found a zipper on the couch pillow — one which I’d taken care to turn earlier, just for that reason — but she perked right back up after a minute, albeit with a red raking across her brow! Thank goodness for the resilience of babies, and also for the magic of the digital darkroom!
Setting up for Annelise’s portraits was a good exercise in impromptu home-studio creativity. I started with fabrics I’d found at a secondhand store, reusing curtain material as a subtle butterfly backdrop. An ottoman covered with more silky material was transfixing enough to Annelise, keeping her seated and amused in one spot for a decent amount of time. Finally, two strobes with umbrellas transformed a dim living room into the bright “studio” I was looking for.
Incidentally, for anyone wondering about my digital darkroom, I use Adobe Lightroom to both organize my photo library, and to do 99% of my color/tone corrections. Typically only when I need to merge photos together or do some heavy editing do I then pull it into Photoshop.
Seattle puts on a pretty good July Fourth fireworks show over Lake Union. Nailing down a choice location for viewing the show comes down to a few options: 1) Trundle on down midday to Gasworks Park or similar locales, claim a grassy spot, and wait 10 hours with copious amounts of beer and picnic items; 2) Happen to have a Capitol Hill or Queen Anne apartment or condo with a viewing deck pointed in the right direction; or 3) Find friends with #2 and at the appropriate hour, fight all the other people for a precious parking spot in those glutted neighborhoods. I suppose there is 4) Watch on local television, but that’s no fun.
For me this year, I bypassed my own slightly-too-distant roof deck for #3, a party on Capitol Hill, which came with a contest for the most creative and patriotic mixed drink, and a vibration-prone deck for viewing the fireworks and taking some photos. Here’s what I got.
Apple has enough P.R. problems to deal with without me piling on, but some of you know I was more than a little dismayed when my only-18-month-old iMac died suddenly with a hard drive failure of the mechanical variety. All I can happily say is that my photos were on an external drive, and anything that WAS lost* bordered upon the inconsequential.
But the episode brought into clear view a couple of should-have-been-obvious things. 1) It’s easy to back your hard drive up, and therefore 2) Not doing so is at best negligent, and at worst, for a photographer, potentially ruinous to your business.
Starting with the first point, operating systems these days come with straightforward utilities that take any hassle or confusion out of backing up your data. In Mac OS X, there is Time Machine, which creates rewind points so you can recover your files at any save point in the past. The interface is simple (a little too simple, I wanted more flexibility than only hourly backups, so I found a third-party tool, TimeMachineEditor that utilizes the underlying Time Machine mechanisms), which is what users sometimes need in order to do the smart thing. The other thing you need is an extra disk drive to save to, and I’ll just say that spacious hard drives are cheaper than they’ve ever been on a per-gigabyte basis, so there really is no excuse. Just do it!
As to the second point, well it should be pretty obvious. Lose photos from a few portraiture sittings, you might get your clients to come back into your studio to do reshoots. Lose photos from a wedding, and you’ve potentially lost an important record of someone’s big day. Oh yes, they’ll have their happy (but now tarnished) memories, and a trusty marriage certificate, but they’ll be calling up any friends who brought point-and-shoots, and they’ll be cursing your name. Good event photographers swap out memory cards (to spread the chances of a failure to a smaller set of photos), immediately upload and back up their raw images once they get them onto a computer, and only edit on copies of the original files. Anything else is asking for real trouble.
So I’ll admit to getting caught losing some data, even as I breathe a sigh of relief that my photos were unharmed. It’s easy to let the task slide (I even had purchased a new external just for backups but hadn’t actually set it up yet), but these days it’s just as easy to do what’s best and gain that piece of mind. I hope anyone that reads this is prompted to review their backup procedures, avoiding problems in the future. We all have easy access to some form of a time machine to make sure we don’t lose those valuable photos!
* [Technically, the data from my drive is potentially recoverable, but only after sending the it to a company in California with a special clean room where they can open it up, transplant the platters into some other drive, and THEN evaluate the recoverability of the data. All for likely $1000-3000 minimum, which I suppose could be a small business expense/write-off for a successful photography business, but for the time being, not really what I want to spend in order to recover (what I remember to be) non-critical documents, etc.]
It’s been a busy month so I haven’t put up a lot of new photos, but here is a little travel set from my golfing vacation to L.A. and to see the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach with my friend Joey. We wrapped five rounds of golf at various courses around a weekend of viewing golfing greats. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let cameras into the tournament, or else I would have snapped a photo of a glaring Tiger Woods. Next time maybe I’ll spring for the weekly pass so I can shoot during practice rounds.
For any golfers wondering, the courses we played at were: Oak Quarry GC in Riverside, Olivas Links in Ventura, Rustic Canyon GC in Moorpark, Angeles National GC in Sunland, and Lost Canyons GC in Simi Valley.
Babies everywhere! Are my friends trying to tell me something? These of baby Iris were again taken at the hospital shortly after her birth. Look for engagement portraits with baby Christopher in about 20 years or so.
Hey, that’s MY name! But it’s okay. Some photos of baby Christopher at the hospital. Mother and child now home doing fine.
Interestingly, when I visited the day after the delivery, I was surprised and amused to see the hospital-sanctioned photographer there at the same time, so we tag-teamed on the photos like paparazzi. Both shooting Nikon, although I was shooting with my 50mm/f1.4 (dim room, some window light) and she had a 18-135mm with an upturned diffused flash. So mine inevitably ended up with more of that ultra-soft focus quality, simply because I had less light to work with.
After the busy weekend and my scurrying to meet the deadline to submit shots to PCNW for consideration for the LONG SHOT exhibition on June 4, I can finally post the remainder of my shots. I’m glad people are still interested in seeing what else I’ve got. Hopefully not because they were underwhelmed by what’s been posted so far….
As mentioned before, a little bit of fatigue had set in after we’d made it through the nighttime hours. Our team of five dwindled to just two of us who decided to stick it out (I had sponsors COUNTING on me!). Creativity lagged, and other than a few brief spurts of activity, I was content to sit for stretches and let the world come to me. At one point, that included a homeless Vietnam veteran who nearly epitomized the “aggressive panhandling” controversy that wracked Seattle a few weeks ago. But we shook him off (without really documenting him fully, unfortunate in retrospect), and the day dragged on.
The homestretch included an afterparty in Ballard where I snapped a pic of a “lucha libre fotografo” before extracting myself a shade before 6pm and heading home. Too tired to make it to any of the other events I’d tentatively scheduled for that evening, my day was over.
P.S. I should perhaps say something about the group shots…. Before our team broke for the day, we wanted to do some group shots, and there were a couple walls we had in mind to shoot in front of. We all lined up our cameras, set the timers, and then on “GO!” we ran to the wall for our pose! The idea was to see what we all would get shooting at close to the same moment from different angles. The one where I’m looking to the left was my playful admonition to our fifth photographer for not getting into the frame on time, which turned out pretty funny in my camera later.
I’ve heard from a number of people that it perhaps didn’t make a lot of sense to start the 24-hour photo-thon at 6pm Friday, shoot through the night, and then have all of Saturday stretched out before us like a desert of sleep-deprivation. I did try to take a small nap Friday afternoon, and at least we weren’t rained on, but I will admit that my creativity during the daylight hours on Saturday probably suffered some. On the other hand, since I was hyper-awake and energized for the event when it did start, I think I was forced to come up with some solutions to night shooting while my mind could still handle it, so I’m thankful for that!
So these are the nighttime shots. Areas of Seattle we hit included Georgetown, Capitol Hill, and Queen Anne, the latter of which included the Seattle Center shots I posted earlier. Let me just say that I can’t remember using my tripod so much in my whole life! However, it is a necessity for long exposures, no matter what sort of beefcake lens you’ve got, unless you’re aiming for some other look. The other trick was (duh!) using flash, but typically I was running around and popping it manually while my camera sat with its shutter open on the tripod. Some people call this “light painting”, using your flash to bring more light to areas of a scene you want to highlight. I wasn’t nearly so methodical, but it’s a technique I’ll try to use with more confidence in the future.
P.S. The photos with the colored wall are taken at Counterbalance Park at the corner of Queen Anne Ave. and Roy St. I don’t really show it, but it’s two long stretches of wall lit with colored lights that can shift hues. Lots of fun for posing people against it and getting weird effects.
It was a grueling 24 hours, fueled by adrenaline, inspiration, and frequent pauses for iconic Seattle coffee. And speaking of iconic Seattle, the first images that I post here will have a definite Seattle/Space Needle-y bent to them. I’ve got to appease my out of town donors (thank you so much!).
Hearty props need to go to my shooting group who, in keeping with our team name (“Team Zen”) went with the flow when I said I needed to go to Seattle Center for some of these shots. On the whole, we were all pretty laid back and avoided most of the crazy events that were happening in Seattle over the weekend. I’ll try to point readers to some of their work too if it goes online.
I will admit that I’m a little worried about stamina during the LONG SHOT photo-thon this weekend. Walking around Seattle for 24 hours (and then hitting the Sounders game) sounds a little daunting this morning.
But perhaps even more worrisome is my personal goal: Can I take at least one quality shot every hour? We’ll see, and (hopefully) the people that donate will be the beneficiaries.
I’m wondering what sort of sights and characters I’ll see during this escapade around Seattle. They might look something like these.
