Tonight was round three of the high school state football playoffs.  It was also the first night of the local football season where the temperature was really uncomfortable for me as a photographer.  I have been doing this for a while now, and I am just starting to get the hang of staying warm while still being able to operate my camera.  I don’t like to wear a heavy jacket while I’m working, so I generally wear a long-sleeved t-shirt underneath a hoodie.  I may wear thermal underwear under my blue jeans if it’s cold enough.  A fleece head cover keeps my tater and ears warm enough.  The problem is my hands.  I have some light weight gloves that I wear that are thin enough so I can still operate the controls on my cameras.  They don’t keep my hands warm, but they do keep them from going numb in the cold for the most part.  If I can figure out how to keep my hands warm and still be able to operate my camera, I’ll have it made…

This football season is on its way to being longer than normal.  During my time doing this sort of work, I have never been past the Friday after Thanksgiving for high school football games.  I have only been that far once.  This year, we still have three local teams in the playoffs after tonight, so there will be three local teams playing next Friday.  I don’t know if any of them will be playing at home though, so I’m not sure if my football season is over yet or not.  I’m sure that two of the three teams will be playing on the road.  I don’t know about the third team yet.

I’m ready for basketball season so I can park my butt on the baseline where it’s warm and let the action come to me…

Photojournalism, Sports

Basketball season is finally cranking up around here.  There are several good things associated with basketball season.  It’s a welcome change of pace from high school football about this time of year.  It means that I get to go back inside where it’s warm.  I have been fairly lucky this football season.  It hasn’t been terribly cold outside yet, but this week has been different.  It’s 28 degrees outside as I type this blog post.  Shooting sports for the local newspaper multiple times per week can make one weary of a certain sport after shooting it for several months at a time.  When the sports seasons change, it’s usually welcome. 

I like photographing basketball.  I can get much closer to the action.  From a photogrpaher’s standpoint, I find it funny that I’m not really getting to enjoy better light than when I shoot football.  After daylight savings time ends and the football games are all starting after dark, I generally shoot photos at 1/320″, f/2.8, ISO 1600, and use my flash.  There are only about three basketball gyms in my local area where I can shoot faster than that at a lower ISO.  Most of the gyms are dark and I find myself shooting at similar settings.  I do like to use my 50mm f/1.4 lens for basketball when I can, but I generally shoot at f/2.0 instead of f/1.4.  Even at f/2.0, I’m still shooting at ISO 1600 anywhere between 1/320″ and 1/500″.  I’m envious of sports photogrpahers who get to shoot in decent light.  I’m also envious of those people who have cameras that can shoot usable images at ISO 3200 and ISO 6400.  That is going to be my first priority after I graduate.  I’m getting whatever camera is current in the Canon 1d line.  Those cameras are amazing.  The high iso abilities of those cameras would let me forget about my flash as a light source.  I would probably still use it for fill light in football, but that would be about it. 

It looks like I’m going to have an opportunity to do some work with the newspaper staff of one of the local high schools.  I might be providing some training for a few photographers.  When and if that happens, I will write some posts here about it.  I’m excited about the opportunity to do a little teaching in the craft of photography…

Photojournalism, Sports

I went to the Catawba Science Center this morning for their National Chemistry Day event to make a few photos.  One of the more interesting scenes of the morning was a demonstration of the flammability of hydrogen.  Josh Kugel explodes a hydrogen-filled balloon for the visitors to the event.  Other demonstrations included a hydrogen fuel cell and some interesting liquid nitrogen experiments. 

Uncategorized

I haven’t seen any Hannah Montana car tires, power tools, condoms, cigarettes, whiskey, tampons, or water bongs yet, but I’m sure they will be here soon enough. My girlfriend and I joke a lot about Miss Montana every time we go to Walmart. It seems like you can’t go down a single aisle of that store without finding something with the Hannah Montana brand on it. She occasionally buys me a gag gift of something to do with Hannah Montana. I recently got a collection of ball point pens, a dog tag neck chain, and today I was provided a bottle of hand sanitizer. I’ll actually use the hand sanitizer as long as no one sees me do it, but would I have bought it for myself? I don’t think so :)

Discussion, Miscellaneous

Yesterday’s election cast me into a minority unlike any I have ever seen before.  Patrick McHenry (pictured above) is the only candidate I voted for above a local level who won his race.  McHenry was re-elected as the congressman from North Carolina’s 10th district.  Interestingly enough, I’m not a huge fan of McHenry.  He wasn’t my first choice of candidates when he was first elected to this position.  I also supported Lance Sigmon in this year’s primary instead of McHenry.  In that primary and in yesterday’s general election, McHenry hasn’t defeated his opponents in the Catawba County vote by very significant margins, but his votes from outside Catawba County seem to carry him. 

Daniel Johnson (Democrat) was Patrick McHenry’s opponent in this race, and Daniel was a rather worthy opponent.  There is probably only one issue that kept me from voting for Johnson, and that was his philosophy on reducing our demand on foreign oil.  Johnson’s statements on that pretty much follow the general opinions of the rest of his party.  He’s supportive of doing everything available except for increasing domestic production.  This philosophy will work, but it will just take a lot longer to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. 

With current gas prices falling back to just above the $2 per gallon mark, I expect this desire to reduce our foreign oil thirst to subside just like it did in the 1970s after the gas shortages.  It will be out of sight and out of mind before we know it. 

Here are some of the things I expect to see over the next four years:

• Insignificant reduction of dependency on foreign oil
• Across the board tax increases on all social classes caused by a non-renewal of the Bush tax cuts
• Higher than average increases in the consumer price index due to increases in cost of doing business caused by removal of tax incentives for businesses
• Premature pull-out of troops in Iraq, which will cause a humanitarian crisis within that country which will require the same type of aid that is NOT being provided in Darfur 
• Significant increases in the cost of healthcare insurance for those who already have healthcare insurance
• The Dow Jones Industrials index will not return to its peak level achieved during the Bush administration

These are just a few high points.  I’m not looking forward to seeing these things, and I hope that I’m wrong.  I’ll have to come back and review this post in two years or so… I’d love to hear some disagreement on these bullet points along with supporting reasons…

Discussion

Ok… After using Lightroom 2 for a few days, I have some first thoughts and impressions.  Lightroom has some fantastic features and capabilities.  I think one of the most important features is that it will catalog all of your photos based on whatever keywords you may enter and the metadata present in the image file itself.  When you import photos into Lightroom, you have the option of adding or modifying any of the embedded metadata within the file.  These features allow you to find photos in your catalog quickly and easily with just a few keyword searches in most cases.  I don’t keep all of my photos online for extended periods of time.  I archive to DVD periodically.  A little forethought in this process also makes it easy to go back and add a keyword to a collection of files to tell me which DVD I archived to if I wish.  So, with this feature used properly, you should be able to find anything at any time with minimal hassle.  The database that Lightroom uses to accomplish this feat is rather large though.  With about 5500 photos in my current Lightroom database, the size of the database is about 380mb, so be prepared for that. 

The real attraction of Lightroom for me is for quick editing and processing of images.  When I shoot any particular event, I just need a quick way to browse the images, pick out the ones I want to edit, and do some brief and informal processing of those images.  Lightroom is perfect for this task.  I can make my tonality adjustments, color correction, crop if necessary, along with a host of other possibilities including some localized spot editing within the images, in a few short strokes of the mouse.  This workflow is VERY similar to the one I used when I actually shot my photos in the RAW mode and used Capture One to process them. 

Another secondary feature of Lightroom is that it will ultimately make you organize the way you store photos on your hard drive.  If you don’t do this, you will quickly have a rather large mess that is difficult to navigate within the program. I had a fairly streamlined process that worked for me in the past, but I further refined it for use with Lightroom to minimize the number of top-level file folders on my hard disk where I store photos. 

The process of importing photos into and exporting photos from Lightroom is more complex than I thought originally.  You have to pay very close attention to what you are doing in these procedures or your files won’t end up where you want them, they won’t be named properly, and they might have the wrong keywords associated with them.  The import and export modules in Lightroom remember your last setting, and will apply them to the current process automatically if you don’t change them.  Depending on the size of your monitor, you need to make sure you scroll the dialog box window to view ALL of the options that are part of the process.  I would love to see these dialog boxes designed where all of the information was displayed at once rather than having to scroll to see it all.  It’s easy to overlook something when it doesn’t appear before you on the screen. 

Lightroom is missing one feature that I really loved about the Capture One software I used in the past.  In Capture One, as I edited photos, I could add the individual photo to the ‘batch.’  The ‘batch’ was a list of photos that I wanted to process for further editing, printing, or whatever else I might want to do.  I could build this list as I worked.  I could also start processing the batch while I worked and continue adding files to it.  In Lightroom, this ‘batch’ isn’t built.  When you are finished with your editing, or ‘developing’ as it’s called in Lightroom, you have to go back to your Library view and individually select or ctrl+click select the group of files and then run the export process.

If I come across an image that needs additional editing in Photoshop, I can go straight from Lightroom to Photoshop, with my Lightroom modifications and continue editing.  This is an excellent feature. 

I have been using Lightroom for less than a week, so I’ll probably come back and write some more on this a little later. 

Art Photography, Product Review

I’m on the advisory board of my local community college photography program, and I got to attend my first meeting with that group this afternoon. I won’t go into the details of that, but one of the brief items that was discussed was bringing students out of their shells (photography students) and getting them acclimated to the social environments required to be a great photographer.  I remember when I first got into photography it seemed difficult for me to approach people with my camera for various reasons.  I think there is a general fear of approaching a complete stranger and asking if you can make their photo.  It’s not an abnormal fear really… I think it’s probably a simple fear of a possible negative confrontation.  When I got into photojournalism, I had to overcome this fear, because the social interaction between me and my subjects is a requirement and not an option.  After doing this work for several years, I have developed the ability to approach absolutely anyone at any time for any reason with my camera if I want a photo of that person or group of people. 

I have several modes of operation when I want photographs of specific people.  Sometimes I will just walk up to the person and ask if I can make a photo.  This simple question usually catches people off guard unless they have been watching me work for a while.  The first thing they want to know is why i want a photo.  My list of reasons is rather diverse… it may be for newspaper work or for a personal interest such as my 1000 Faces or My Town photo collections.  If I’m shooting for the newspaper, I tell them that and I tell them why I’m doing it and what the story is going to be.  If I’m shooting for myself, I simply tell them that I’m an amateur photographer and I enjoy making photos of people that I find interesting.  That response is my favorite because it makes them start asking questions about my interests.  It usually generates an entertaining dialog where I get a chance to learn something interesting about my subject.  This part of the social interaction feeds my personal passion for photographing and knowing something about a perfect stranger. 

The photo above is a guy I met tonight.  His name is Paul Gaither and I had never seen him before in my life that I know of.  His moustache was obviously what attracted my attention, and when I got closer, his facial textures impressed me even more.  I was early to a football game and was wandering around on the sidelines when I notice him.  He has a kid or relative in the school’s marching band and he was assisting with their setup for the evening’s events.  I attracted his attention and asked him if he minded if I took his photo.  He simply said yes, which sorta caught me off guard since I’m not used to being rejected for this request.  I did a double-take on him and he was grinning.  He walked up and leaned toward me and said that if I’d slip him a few dollars I could take all the photos I wanted.  I told him that I was a photographer, therefore I had no money.  That got an even bigger giggle out of him.  At this point, I knew I was gonna get my shot.  The next thing he said was that he would be honored to let me make his photo, and I did.  I showed him the image on my LCD right after I shot it.  He called his wife over to have a look, and they both loved the image.  At this point, he told me another story about a photographer who photographed him recently.  She (the photographer) made him wait while she ran to her car to get a camera :) 

Doing this type of thing as often as I do, I think I have learned how to avoid the potential rejection by my subject.  I guess you just have to observe people sometimes and see what their demeanor may be before you approach them with a request like this.  Sometimes people just say no when I ask, and I accept that and move on without question.  No one is obligated to give me a reason if they don’t want their photo made.  I just move on to the next person :)

1000 Faces, Discussion

After working in the I.T. industry for about 15 years, doing everything between PC repair work, programming and software development, and network/systems administration, I think I’m losing touch with my inner-geek.  Maybe some of my experience in that industry has been helpful, but the last two days have been difficult for me with my home computing habits.  My desktop PC is about 5 years old, so I decided it was about time to replace it.  I picked up a new off-the-shelf desktop computer from Best Buy on Thursday and have spent the better part of the last two days getting all my data and applications moved onto the new system.  Every time I upgrade or replace a home computer system, I usually get easily amazed at what you can have for the price these days.  My first desktop PC was a PC XT clone that ran at a whopping 8 megahertz.  It had a 20 megabyte (yes… MEGAbyte) hard disk drive, which would be difficult to fill up at the time.  It also had 5.25″ 360k and 3.5″ 720k floppy disk drives.  The monitor was a simple amber monochrome display with no color.  I was also fortunate enough to have a 9-pin dot matrix printer.  After some serious saving, I was able to afford a 2400-baud internal modem so I could connect to the few local computer bulletin board services in my area.  It was quite an undertaking in 1987 to shell out $2400 for all that stuff. 

My current desktop monitor smoked itself last week, so I went out and found a huge deal on a nice Viewsonic 19-inch widescreen LCD for $115 on sale.  This week I spent $479 on one of the new Acer Aspire desktop boxes that has quite a few bells and whistles for the money.  It has the AMD Phenom X3 triple-core processor running at 2.1ghz (262 times faster than the old XT.)  It doesn’t have any floppy drives and it has a 320gb internal hard disk drive with 4gb RAM and the Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition of the operating system.  It has 9 USB ports and one firewire port.  It also has a multi-card reader that will read the various memory card formats I use in my digital camera equipment.  As I write this blog entry, I do think I have just about everything up and running the way I want it.  I can start to settle back into my normal routine now rather than the get-it-running routine of the last two days. 

This new PC had one ‘feature’ that I hated right out of the box.  That 320gb hard disk drive was partitioned into two drives.  I simply think that’s a bad idea and it’s not the way I like to work.  Fixing it was going to be no easy task.  With the 64-bit operating system, I could only find a couple of software options to correct that issue without having to re-format the disk completely and start from scratch.  After a little research, I found a software package called Partition Manager by the Paragon Software Group.  For $39.95 I got a tool that would allow me to combine the two partitions on the 64-bit operating system into a single partition without having to start from scratch.  It did, however, take me multiple tries and a lot of head banging to get it to work.  The documentation that comes with this software isn’t the best, and re-partitioning drives in a 64-bit system isn’t something everyone should try just for fun.  In a nutshell, I finally got it to work and if you want to know the details of HOW, just ask and I’ll fill you in with the geek detail. 

As for losing my inner geek, I find myself not on the cutting-edge of the PC computing world anymore.  This is the first time in a LONG time that I have had the latest and greatest version of any operating system on my home PC.  I had Windows 95 when it was fairly new, but I skipped over Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows NT completely.  After Windows XP hit the streets, I did upgrade to Windows 2000, which wasn’t the newest.  I couldn’t boast the latest and greatest to the other kids in the neighborhood, but what I had achieved during these times was unparalleled system stability without the hassles of constant upgrades and bug fixes.  As I mentioned earlier, the computer that just came off my dekstop was five years old.  That probalby also tells a real geek that I’m not a gamer.  Since I don’t play computer video games anymore (haven’t in the last 10-12 years), I don’t have to keep the hottest and fastest computer on my desk all the time. 

Maybe the loss of the inner geek isn’t so bad after all.  That geek is high maintenance. 

Miscellaneous, Product Review

I often tell myself that if I could draw or paint, I would throw my camera gear in the garbage can. I have absolutely no skill at putting a mental image on paper or any other media. I have never really practiced at it, but for some reason, I just don’t even feel comfortable trying. Watching other artists work fascinates me. I can do it for hours. This afternoon at Oktoberfest, I watch artist Bill Leaseburg for quite a while as he created caricatures for people. He’s been here every Oktoberfest for the last several years, and I have watched him at length in the past as well, with no less fascination.

While I was watching Mr. Leaseburg work, I made the comment about tossing out my camera gear if I could just draw, and he overheard me. He said that he had tried his hand at photography without much luck, so I guess it may go both ways. I have always wanted to have a caricature done, but never bothered to do it. Bill is so good at what he does, there is usually a pretty long wait to get one from him at Oktoberfest. He does black and white or color caricatures for $10 and $15 respectively, and I have never seen him idle. As I was standing around watching him work this afternoon, I noticed that the line wasn’t too long, so I decided to get in the queue and get my own caricature made.

This is a quick photograph I made of the drawing. It’s 11×14″ so I need to get a mat cut for it and put it in a frame soon. I’ll get a nice smile every time I look at it :)  I encourage all of you to get one of these at some point in your life!

1000 Faces, My Town

Hickory’s Oktoberfest is one of the local events that I never miss.  In the above video, the Foothills Oompah Band treats the crowd to “In Heaven There Is No Beer.”  These guys are at Oktoberfest every year, and people love to listen to their traditional (and not so traditional) Oktoberfest-themed music.

Bob Wilusz is another one of my favorite entertainers at Hickory’s Oktoberfest each year. He wanders through the crowd with his accordion playing polka and waltz-themed tunes for the crowd throughout the weekend event.

My camera club manned a booth at this year’s Oktoberfest for the purpose of promoting our amateur photography competition and selling prints from the members who were interested in doing so.  We didn’t sell very much, but I think the mistake we made was choosing the non-profit route rather than the business route of renting booth space.  There was only a $25 difference in the booth space charge, but we took the cheaper way out.  What we got for our $25 savings was a booth space on the outer edge of the square near the railroad tracks.  That part wasn’t so bad, but the tough part was that we were sandwiched between the political and religious booths.  I think this little ‘mistake’ probably hurt us in realizing the potential foot traffic we could have had at the booth.  In the booth direcltly next to us, we had this:

There was another guy with a sign hanging over his body that I just couldn’t make myself photograph.  He had actual photographs of partial birth abortions on his sign.  The preaching and singing at this booth didn’t bother me so much, but the graphic nature of the anti-abortion sign did. 

I’m all for freedom of speech, so I shouldn’t complain, but I do anyway.  Due to some recent events in downtown Hickory, the door has been opened to a proliferation of this sort of free speech at all events held on Union Square, regardless of the nature of the event.  These people wanted an audience just as much as I did today.  At next year’s Oktoberfest, they can have their audience, but I’m going to pay the additional $25 to have my booth alongside all the other arts and craft (and junk) vendors away from this stuff.  I think that our booth being in this particular line of booths probably kept some of my potential customers away.

Since my mom is now into photography, as well as me and my dad, we’re going to have our own booth at next year’s Oktoberfest.  Hopefully we’ll be more successful on our second attempt :)

Uncategorized