What I don't have is interest.  There's a lot going on in my life, and I'd rather get on with it than write about it.  Besides I doubt anybody really wants to read about it.  So I've been neither writing in my blog, nor really reading the blogs of others.  I check in on Aces Full and Pandora's Tea Room every now and again, but that is pretty much it.  I post on MOTL every now and again, but not too frequently now that the werewolf games were cancelled due to people taking them too seriously.

What's been occupying my time is my photography business.  It seems to be picking up, which is great, because I simply love this work.  I did a school dance in February, and a photoshoot for an aspiring actor.  In May I did a costume shoot for a dance school which is the first shoot I've done where I can unequivocably say that I made pretty good money.

June's been hopping.  I did a graduation shoot for a relative (no money, but I did some networking at the school while I was there that might turn into business), and a graduation party for the same relative.  This past Thursday night I shot the dress rehearsal for a stage production of a dance interpretation of Peter Pan.  Friday night I shot the eighth grade dance of a middle school in southeastern Massachusetts.  Then Saturday I shot the 1PM and 7PM performances of Peter Pan (42 Gb of pix in one day... yowza!)

I wrote about this a little bit on a message forum, so I figured I'd share that here.

June 12, 2009 11:01 AM

Last night's shoot went well but I am exhausted. I took a chance and produced a 36" x 24" (poster size) print of the main cast (with some added text) and it came out GREAT. I was amazed. I expected at that size the image would be very fuzzy--you know "stand a few feet away and it will look fine". Nope, it was nice and sharp. About 90 minutes of post production and cost about $50 to print, and I gave it to the dance school director as a gift.

She went positively gaga over it and hung it immediately as a poster for her show. The kids loved it too.

Of course I had a couple totally unrealistic parents come up to me after the show asking if I "had any extras" or would "give them one". "These are quite expensive to print. Of course I can have one made and shipped to you but it would cost $100." "Oh forget it then." LOL. It's so hard to make money in this business unless you are doing weddings or products. For the costume shoot I spent 8 hours shooting, and 50 hours in post production. My total profit after printing and shipping was $800--that's $13.75 per hour and no matter what price you charge people think it's too much.

Anyway the dress rehearsal shoot went great, apart from the 580 EX burning though batteries like there's no tomorrow. 4.5 hours of shooting, 1,105 pictures, 30 batteries eaten. I picked up a digital frame and loaded it with a bunch of work I've done over the last couple years and set that up next to the fliers--that got some attention. I had a number of people come up to me after the show and tell me how much they loved my work, which is always nice. We'll see if they still love me when I raise my prices next year. 

So tonight I have a middle school dance to shoot, and then tomorrow I have to shoot the performances that I went to the dress rehearsal for. Busy few days!

June 13, 2009 1:55 AM

Tonight's Middle School Dance shoot was exhausting but fun. These kids were different that the kids at my daughter's middle school--they were a lot stiffer... nobody danced for like the first 90 minutes. I was like WTF? Heck I wanted to put the camera down and dance myself. The DJ was great, all the tunes were current.

This was an 8th grade dance and soon the kids will all be going off to different highschools so there was a lot of emotionality... a lot of kids were crying toward the end... that doesn't exactly make for a nice photo.

Kids at my daughter's art school are also more hammy for the camera, these kids pretty much constantly ducked and hid whenever the camera showed up. This behavior drives me nuts, I'm being paid to shoot the dance, these kids are bawling that they're not going to see their friends again, and they're not going to have pictures of their friends to remember because they're too busy responding to the camera in the way they've been trained to respond "ooh don't take my picture I look ugly". You just want to say "Jesus, grow up already." Sometimes I say to them "this may come as a surprise, but we can all see you... we already know what you look like." No matter, I just switched to the 200mm and shot long... you get nice closeups that way and the kids don't know who is being photographed.

All in all I think it went well. Two big shoots tomorrow... man am I beat.

June 13, 2009 9:44 AM

Fell out of bed about 8:20... showered, shaved, and will be heading out for the third and biggest of this weeks three shoots. What an exhausting time this has been! No flash today ('cept before and after) so I shouldn't need a frickin' gross of AA batts...

June 14, 2009 7:37 PM

Yesterday's shoots were positively EXHAUSTING! But I think it went well. At the end of the afternoon performance I knew I was in trouble tho... I had shot 20+ Gb of pictures, and I only had 22 Gb in CF cards with me. I had time before the 7PM performance so I went to best buy and purchased another 20 Gb of CF memory (1x 8 GB, 3x 4 Gb). During the second performance I shot the entire remaining 22 Gb. For the after photos I had to switch from RAW to JPG, and pull out my old "emergency card"--a 512 mB card that I've often questioned why I still carry it. Thank heavens I had it!

But 42 jigglebytes in a single day is some outrageous shooting. About 3,500 pictures. Sorting through this is going to be fun. Lightroom is chewing on them now and probably will be until tomorrow.

Emma was able to perform as Peter Pan, which was nice, though she had to hold back and give a slightly more subdued performance to prevent further injury to her ankle. It was nice seeing her dance at all though.

The "movie poster" was a big hit. About 700 people filed past it and every time I went out into the hall to shoot candids there were people looking at it and my digital frame (yay!). The thing I liked best was when I caught the dancers looking at it, they really liked it and it made for some nice photos. Have I mentioned how much I love this work?

I got more compliments and requests on Saturday, some people looking to buy the poster print. I added it to the show gallery and enabled large format printing options (and T-shirts, which my lab has begun to offer).

So now begins the long slog of post processing. But with so many pictures to choose from I should be able to come up with some that are sure to please. And the post work should be hella easier than the costume shoot was.

Gonna be a lot of busy nights tho... but not today, today I am recuperating... 12 hours of driving over the last 3 days, getting home every night after 1 AM, sore as heck from shooting...

(Good news, I had two orders today from earlier galleries. Yay! Only $70 but I'm taking it as a good sign.)

Wow am I beat. But it's a good kind of beat, when you feel like you accomplished something.

On a quick run through the performance photos I found a nice little series. Peter Pan was not on a wire, so she got about by making beautiful acrobatic leaps. I managed to snap a series of leaps (on the tail end of the leap as she was coming down) as she leapt around the dancer playing the part of Wendy Darling. In the series it looks like Peter is flying...  Sweet!

The photos are up!  Here's my polling station at about 7:15 AM this morning.  I vote in precinct 2A so I signin on the right side of the room.  Click the photo to see all photos I've taken or will take today.

Well I spent this afternoon making some more updates to my business website. I incorporated a few more images and rearranged the order of the images on the thumb bar at the bottom of the page.

I also added arrow buttons to allow the user to manually rotate through the thumbs, and also set the thumb bar to auto-rotate if the image currently displayed by the slideshow doesn't appear on the thumb bar.

One invisible but important change was to set up timely preloading of the images such that there shouldn't be a big wait for individual images to load, but also no big wait up front. Basically the page now loads an image, and schedules the preload of the next image a few seconds later, long before the slideshow will automatically display it. In this way, the next image is loading while the user is viewing the current image, and should avoid delays.

If the user dorks with the thumb-bar the preloads and slideshow are cancelled and rescheduled to be further out. Theoretically this should prevent the user from being interrupted while working the toolbar with annoying delays or images loading.

So my friend Brian had an idea for a fun photo he wanted me to create for him.  He wanted to be Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels, tied down on a beach by the Lilliputians... all of whom would be played by his wife Lynnea.

I originally wanted to shoot this on a beach (as per the original idea) but the lake in Chelmsford, MA that we were relaxing at didn't afford a beach with a suitable layout for the shot.  So we instead did it on a nearby grassy knoll.

First we "bound" Bri by encircling him over and over with a thin twine.  Then I helped him lie on a slightly raised knoll and lay flat before him so that the camera would be angled up to make him appear bigger.  I said "imagine there is a six inch high person standing on your chest lecturing you" so that he would look in that direction.  That was the first shot.

The subsequent shots all featured Lynnea using the thickest rope I could find on short notice as a prop.  Bri would stand out of shot (typically on a footstool) and hold the rope while Lynnea would pull on it this way and that.

After recording about a dozen different poses, we did the lecturing pose, and then I shot the "sitting on the toes pose" when Lynnea was just relaxing on the stool.  I thought the pose would come in useful and as you can see it did.

Shots were all done by daylight, no flash. EOS 5D with the EF 24-70mm 2.8L lens, which is the widest I own.

Then, after some cleanup in lightroom, came the hours of photoshop work to carefully clip Lynnea out of her surroundings in various pictures and edit her into this one at reduced scale.  I thought the grass, which to a Lilliputian should be knee high at least, would be a problem, but it turned out that just using a gradient transparency on the ends of her legs (or whatever was closest to the ground) worked fine unless you look really close.

Things I would do differently if I shot this again:

1. I really need to get a chromakey backdrop for shoots like this.  I shot Lynnea against a grassy green background, but that was not uniform enough to make clipping her out simple... it was fun, but it was a LOT of work.
    
2. Lynnea had been swimming prior to the shoot, and threw on a pair of pants for her poses.  But in each subsequent pose water slowly seeped through the material and created spots in various places.  I was mostly able to edit those out, but it was additional work.
    
3. Get thicker rope, or simply edit the rope out altogether and use the twine.  The size difference between the reduced rope and the twine bugs me a little.
    
4. A beach location with a nice uniform ocean background would have made for easier editing.
    
5. I would have backed off a little more when shooting Bri.  At 4x6, 6x9, or 8x12 the photo is fine, but at 8x10 the ends get clipped.  That was just dumb on my part... to produce an unclipped 8x10 print some edits would be required.

All that said, I am really pleased with how the resulting image came out.  And more importantly, my beloved friends Brian and Lynnea are happy with it, which is really what this was all about.  Doing something nice for people I hold very dear in my heart.

Love you guys, glad you liked the photo!

Oh I remember now... that's the sun!  I saw that the day we left to go on our vacation here in Rainland.  How nice that it has decided to grace us with its presence... on the last day.  Well I'm not going to be cynical today (I mean, after this point).  Clark's Bridge was a bust yesterday... rain dumping down and you have to pay to get in to the tourist trap it is ensconced in... a veritable fortress of phony, brightly-painted, dreck.  So I'm not going back there.  But maybe I can get to the Flume Bridge today.  We'll see.  Either way there should be something to shoot.

Unless it starts raining.

Okay, starting from now, I mean...

So yesterday I was exhausted in the morning.  I had fallen asleep about 10 PM the night before and then woke up around 2 AM.  I was excited to be writing about Mara and Kennis again, and when I woke up I went back to work on it.  By 7 AM the chapter was nearing completion but I was utterly wasted.  So toward the end it got a little rushed but all in all I was satisfied.

It also looked to be the only day we weren't going to have rain.  So needless to say the fam was up and about by 8 and looking to go out for a day hike.  But I was so not up to it.  So I slept on the couch while they went out and had fun.  I woke up around 1:15 or so, and trekked to the information center in Thornton where there was a public access internet terminal.  The wifi on this old laptop is fried... so I need more than an access point.

When I got there two people were coming out, a man and a woman, and the man was saying "well ya, I could have checked that if I could have gotten on the computer."  That didn't sound good.

Once inside I noticed a teenage girl was on the computer, so I decided to kill some time and asked the person on staff for information about local architecture that I could shoot.  He recommended a list of covered bridges starting with the Blair Bridge.  I had already shot the Blair Bridge last year, but thought it would be nice to try again with the 5D.  Plus I had an idea for something new to try, and even had the necessary lens in my bag--fisheye shots from inside a covered bridge.  I thought that would look really cool.

We talked for about 20 minutes.  When we were done the young lady was still using the computer, so I said, quite clearly from about 3 feet away.  "Thank you sir, do you mind if I wait here for a bit?  I need to use your internet access."  The staff member said, "Sure no problem."  The young lady glanced up at me and then went back to what she was doing.

I had brought my Kennis and Mara story with me, all preformatted and ready to post.  All I would need to do is copy and paste it into a window and click a button.  Then I wanted to check my mail, respond to any comments on my blog or flickr, check twitter and post a tweet about shooting bridges, and then I would be on my way.  I figured it was about 10-15 minutes of time on the computer.  So I sat in the chairs provided to wait.  These chairs are situated immediately behind the computer, which is probably not a good idea because it means you can see whatever the person using the computer is doing.

And in this case the person using the computer was on MySpace.  I realize it is a public access terminal, and nothing I was going to do was any more important than poking about on MySpace.  That wasn't the problem.  The problem was this young person was posting comments on MySpace pages and then waiting for responses to be posted.  Or rather, hoping responses would be posted.  She would check her incoming MySpace messages, and then scroll up and down, up and down, up and down, on her MySpace page, continually refreshing it, to see if she had gotten a response.  After a few minutes of no response, she would click on one of her friend's pages, post a message there, and then return to her page and scroll around waiting for responses.  This is clearly not the way such a resource should be used, you get on, you do what you need to, and you get off.  If you are going to just wait around for messages to be posted, you let other people on and get back on when they are done.

After about 15 minutes she got bored scrolling around, so she went to YouTube to watch videos of kittens playing with toys.  After 5 minutes or so of this she glanced back at me, at the time I wasn't looking exactly at her.  I was looking a little to the right, sitting forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped, and clearly doing nothing other than waiting.  I think it occurred to her at this point that it was obvious she was just fucking around with the PC, so she had three options: (1) get off and get back on later, (2) do something other than simply kill time, or (3) try to make it *look* like she was doing something other than kill time and hope that I would give up and go away... like the people before me had.

Guess what option she chose?  She turned back to what she was doing and opened a new browser window.  The home page was a New Hampshire tourist information page, so she clicked around and pretended to read information about local attractions that she probably would not be visiting.  And then, about once every 30 seconds or so, she would switch back to the browser window containing her MySpace page, refresh it, look for new messages, and then minimize it and go back to pretending to read tourist information.  Occasionally she had a message, but most of the time she didn't.

I was not going to be bested by this kid, so I remained where I was.  I figured I would wait until she looked at me again and if she did I would ask her how long the wait was going to be.  I figured I could offer as a consolation that it would take about 15 minutes for me to take care of what I needed to post.

It took another 10 minutes or so before she looked at me again.  By now I had been in the information center for almost an hour.  This time when she looked at me, I made eye contact with her and made clear from my expression that I was not going to leave.

"Are you waiting to use this computer?" she asked.

Gimme a break.  She knew I was waiting.  Still I just wanted to get on, so I gave her an out.

"Yes.  I need access for about 15 minutes."

"Um, okay, I'm almost done I just need 2 more minutes."

Yeah.  Two minutes so you can post a message to whoever you are yakking with on MySpace to let them know you need to get off the computer and you will be back in 15 minutes.

"That's fine thanks."

After about 5 minutes she shut down her MySpace page.

"Ok all set."

"Thanks.  I'm just checking my e-mail and posting an article.  I should be done in 10 to 15 minutes, and then you can get right back on."

"Okay, thanks." And then as she left "I'll be back in 15 minutes."

She was just letting me know not to take my time.  Now if I had been an asshole I'd have sat there and waited for her to get back, then watched videos of kittens on YouTube.  But I actually  had things I wanted to do that day... and should have long since gotten started doing them.

It took 10 minutes for me to post my material, check my mail, and respond to my messages.  And then I left.  No kid in sight outside.

But I'll be returning today to post this article, upload 5 covered bridge fisheye-pix to flickr, and check and respond to mail/comments.  And of course to minimize my time on the PC I have prepared everything in advance.  Should take about 10 minutes again.  I wonder if I will have the joy of waiting for her again?  My plan this time is to show up at 9 AM.  I got the sense this young person doesn't do 9 AM.

The fisheye pix came out nice BTW (12345).  When I get home I'll be able to do some proper post processing.  All I have here is IrfanView, which doesn't do well with Canon RAW files.  100% chance of rain today, but it is 8:22 AM and nothing has started yet.  So I am probably going to at least *try* to shoot some covered bridges today.  Wish me luck!

Yes I know, first I'm writing about the likelihood of contacting alien civilizations, then I'm talking about immortal humans who have sex for three days straight and write books in their sleep, and then about creepy flickrites, and now I am writing about watching ants.  You don't come here for consistency.

I was leaving my office around lunchtime the other day for a brief walk.  The front of the building has a raised garden with some azaleas and a really nice looking stone wall bordering it.  As I walked out I noticed the wall was swimming in tiny black ants.  Not the big ones you see wondering solo, but hordes of teensy ones.  Usually that means that a tasty food item has been discovered and the colony is out to disassemble it and carry it back.  I could see where the ants were clumped up, but didn't notice anything there that I recognized as anything ants would want to eat.  But I figured maybe somebody had spilled a soda and they were gobbling up dried sugars right off the rockface.  I went off to my walk and didn't think any more about it.

Later that night when I left work, I glanced at the wall and noticed the big cluster of ants was still there, but it had moved a few feet to the right.  Again no food was evident.  Just ants in a big tangled mass.  So I leaned close to peer at them and noticed that ants were bunching up around other ants, and apparently biting each other.  Other ants seemed to be carrying away dead (or dying ants).  I leaned back and noticed that unlike a typical feeding situation where you see a river of ants leading from the colony to the food and back, this was the meeting place of two rivers of ants.  One from one crevice about 5 feet to the left, and another from a crevice about 4 feet to the right.

That's when I realized I wasn't watching a feeding frenzy.  I was watching a war.  It was an epic battle between two colonies of ants that had both claimed this rock wall as their territory.  Thousands upon thousands of ants continually poured from both crevices, and converged in the center to engage in a massive melee.  It was mesmerizing to watch the supply lines bringing in fresh ants as the wounded or the dead were hauled away (presumably as food).  They moved in tides and complex whorling patterns as they made war... it was so intricate it was actually mesmerizing.  I checked my camera bag but I had neglected to bring ANY macro lenses with me that day, or I would have had pictures of all-out insect warfare and abject carnage to upload to my photostream.

It made me a little sad to think of these ants fighting for hours over a few feet of turf.  After 15 minutes I suddenly realized the time and made a mental note to bring my macro lens to work today.

But when I arrived this morning, the battle was over, and the battlefield had been swept clean.  Had I not noticed it, the day before, I never would have known it had happened.  In my inner thoughts I could not help but make the connection between the affairs of the ants and the affairs of humanity.  In 100,000 years, if humans are still here, what great battles and wretched suffering of ours will have passed into the unknown?  Will we forget World War 2?  Will we forget the Holocaust?  Will we repeat it?  Big thoughts from the tragic ant war of June 25, 2008.

What is it that prevents some people from realizing when they are being creepy?  I recently uploaded some photos to my flickr photostream from a birthday party I attended.  Then later I was tooling around in the Fitchburg Photo Pool and saw some cool architectural photos, so I left a comment telling the photographer I thought the shots were nice.

Within minutes I had three e-mails.  The first was flickr informing me that the photographer had added me as a contact.  The second seemed nice enough, the photographer wanted to talk about other landmarks that were good to shoot.  The third seemed a little peculiar and forward for someone who doesn't know me from dirt:

 "Hey how do you know that girl XXXXX in your photostream?  She's a real knockout!"

So I responded about Fitchburg landmarks, and on the second item, remarked just that she was a friend of a friend, and that she was very photogenic.

Within minutes, two more e-mails.  More chatting about landmarks and camera gear as well, and the second:

 "Man is she cute.  Hmm."

So I'm getting a little weirded out by this dude.  I mean, if you are friends with someone it's one thing to compliment someone they know once, but if you barely know a person it's kind of creepy to do it repeatedly.  So I decided I didn't really want to keep talking to this guy, and chose not to respond.

A few minutes later, another e-mail comes along:

 "Do you think she would let me take some shots of her sometime?"

Yeah.  That will happen.  She's going to pose for some stranger on the internet because a friend of a friend photographed her at a party.  Who asks a question like this of someone they barely know?  I have a terrible time just asking people I do know if they will pose for me.

Any way, I really didn't want to talk to creepy dude any more, I knew if I called him on it I'd get assured up and down that his request was completely innocent in nature.  As if it is quite normal to ask strangers on the internet if you can photograph their friends.  I mean seriously, if you are THAT desperate for models, there are places to go (http://www.modelmayhem.com/).  So I just blocked him... that will be the end of that, thanks.

I generally think it wise, when someone adds you as a contact on flickr, or favorites one of your photos, to check their profile and see what groups they subscribe to, and to also check their favorites.  It's usually quite clear when they are using flickr for something other than an appreciation of great (or even mediocre) photography.  If you see anything that looks creepy, it's probably a good idea to block them.

Creepy dude didn't have any bizarre group subscriptions or prurient favorites that I could see, but his behavior was enough to warrant the block IMHO.  The only thing his profile had to say about him other than a laundry list of his gear was that he was "Male and single".

Call me "Male and unsurprised".