Head In The Clouds

Well maybe not in the clouds but somewhere close. After being sick for a week, I’m beginning to feel human again… and just in time to go back to work.

I spent a few days in Washington DC and Annapolis Maryland while I was on vacation this week. I came home to one day of beautiful weather followed by a day of constant rain.

I’m still in sleep mode, or trying to sleep mode. I guess I am a little more rested than when the week started but I don’t feel like I got much accomplished, at least nothing of lasting significance. In life we seem to spend a lot of time running around and not getting anything done. I took a bunch of photos while I was out of town but nothing seemed to stick. I guess I was just off my game and not feeling so great. Maybe in a few weeks I will have a different perspective on things. In the meantime I decided to move everything from my laptop to the backup drive so I will use that as an excuse to make a fresh start (at something).

Life In The Fast Lane

As planned, I got together with the Strobist St. Louis group on Sunday and spent the afternoon learning some new things about lighting and taking photographs of cars. I also got to play with some CyberSync flash triggers, which worked really well with the Alien Bee studio flash units provided by Ariana, who put together the whole meet-up and had three cars there for us to photograph. She also arranged for her favorite model Zaea to pose with the cars because cars and models seem to go pretty well together. For my part I was mostly there as a fly on the wall and anxious to learn as much as I could from everyone there. I tried to stay out of the way and not trip over any light stands.

As it turns out, taking photos of black cars in bright afternoon light is not so easy and we retreated into the garage where we could control things a little better until the sun got lower in the sky. Ariana brought along something called a PLM or Parabolic Light Modifier, which is for lack of a better description an 84″ diameter shiny umbrella which doubles as a death star if you happen to look directly at it when the flash goes off. Even the tungsten modeling light on the flash unit lit things up like a night game at a baseball stadium. Ariana brought enough lights, stands and reflectors to mount a small expedition and it was nice to have a lot of options and more choices for how to set up the lights.

I had a lot of fun and came away with a bunch of new ideas about working with lighting and keeping all the gear organized. You can look at the photographs from this meet-up by going to www.flickr.com and doing a search on this tag – stls_sept09

I went to work on Monday and caught a cold which has me feeling pretty miserable at the moment and makes it hard to be very productive as far as editing photos or writing anything that makes much sense. Some more aspirin and orange juice and then I’m off to bed.

External Validation

I finally heard back from the folks at http://www.istockphoto.com/ and it appears that my submissions were in fact up to stock snuff. So now I will be combing thru the archives over here looking for the one half of one percent of shots that may be suitable for stock images and submitting those a few at a time while hopefully adding a few more to the collection as I go along. I don’t know if it will amount to much but at least now I can further confuse people I meet on the streets by telling them that I shoot stock photography. “Huh?”

No new photography adventures this week (so far) but I am planning on going to a meetup of the St. Louis version of the strobist group from http://www.flickr.com/ and meeting some of those colorful charactors in person. We are going to be shooting some high end sports cars which is something I had never really thought about doing before so I should be able learn something in the process. I’m hoping to try out some new lighting gear while I am there.

The gang over at http://www.adventurecanoe.com/ is also getting together this weekend for a quick float trip, so that made for a tough choice between paddling canoes or photographing cars. I’m hoping I will still get to go camping (and canoeing) sometime in October for a little fall color action out in the wild woods of the Missouri Ozarks. I’m hoping for an Indian Summer this year.

The Strobist Bootcamp II, Assignment IV, winner is supposed to be announced over at http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/ on Monday 09/28/09. I’m curious to see the results on that one which was on the subject of transportation. I’ve had a good time taking photographs in the process of doing those assignments.

Right now I’m looking for some sort of bag or case to throw my light stands, adaptors and flash units in. I seem to have a lot of little boxes and nothing really fits or is easy to access all those small parts and connectors. Of course there is no budget for new cases, bags or backpacks (as usual) so I’m a little stumped for what to use. The lightstands and umbrellas fit in an old baseball bat case I found for $2 but it’s all the other junk like cords, chargers, batteries, filters, clamps and flashes that I can’t figure out what to do with. I think I need something like a tackle box with lots of little compartments. A waterproof Pelican case would work well since I like to venture outdoors with all this junk every now and then.

I want an iPhone

The fact is, I'm a late adopter (or is it adaptor?). One of the few things I have ever bought when it first hit the market was my Nikon D300 and that's because I have a lot more confidence in Nikon cameras than any other consumer products. I figured the camera would be right out of the box or that Nikon would make it right if it wasn't. That's based on past experience. All my Nikon gear works and keeps working for years and years.

When the iPhone came out I thought to myself, "Oh I want one of those." I didn't camp out at the Apple Store or wait in a long lines to get one, I waited... A few months later Apple dropped the price and I still waited. The truth is that I am a luddite and I don't really use a cell phone very much. The one I have now is probably eight years old and has a couple of missing and broken parts. I often forget it and leave it sitting on the kitchen counter like a pitiful answering machine. For the most part I can live without a cell phone. Whenever I get around to calling someone they are usually busy talking to someone else on their cell phone. The other problem is that our family is locked into another service provider's plan for at least a few more months, atleast that is my current excuse. Oh, and I hate the thought of paying those monthly data and text plans for the life of the new phone.

So, I keep looking wistfully at iPhones and iPhone upgrades and thinking that they are not so much money and that I need a new point and shoot camera anyway, so the iPhone could kill two birds with one phone, I mean stone. Today I'm sitting around minding my own business and looking at photography blogs when I come across this tidbit from Chase Jarvis.



Damn, I want an iPhone.