Month: January 2013

I’m thinking about this – you go to do something great, but you film the setup and how it was done. why not let the art or result stand by itself. I’m glad I never did a how-to on the John Stockton composite. It stands alone.

It’s funny how today mediocrity won. No, it’s actually not funny. The assignment wasn’t one that was going to lead to some amazing award-winning frame. (And I’m not going to post a photo or talk about what it was— what you imagine may be better or worse.) But I stood out there for an hour (as long as my parking space allowed) and I shot the scene unfold about a dozen times.

First take, frame too busy.
Dodge traffic, watch for the walk sign, move back to the middle of the street.
Second take, I was a moment late.
Dodge traffic, watch for the walk sign, move back to the middle of the street.
Third take, I wasn’t at the right angle.
Repeat several times.
Let the young, crying lady use my phone. “I just got to town and I got into an argument with my friend. I don’t know anyone here.”

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it was so damn cold. My hands were going numb, even in the sunshine.

The lady called her friend in Centerville 8x and never got an answer. She stood there crying.
Two trains pulled up and I had another chance to get the shot. I’m distracted thinking about the directions to the shelter and miss the shot for a variety of reasons. I look around and she’s across the street now, reunited with her friend, who is hugging her so tight he’s lifting her off the ground.

Enough about her.

I got back to the office frozen and without a great shot. I had a usable shot, but not a great shot.

And now I’m somewhat warm watching Bones Brigade, An Autobiography, and I’m watching these great skateboarders who influenced me so much in my youth. They are trying and falling, trying and falling, pushing themselves to greater things, over and over.

And I gave up after an hour in the cold.

To reach the greater heights that I’m seeking, I need to convert the frustration of the shot not coming together into a further determination and keep shooting, keeping working the scene. One hour parking spot or no. I need to push harder.

The other big project that I’m in the middle of is backing my entire photo archive up to the cloud. We’re talking bout 600 gigabytes of selects at full resolution, ENCRYPTED, to Amazon’s new Glacier cloud service. It’s going to cost $6 a month to host it.

Can’t be beat.

Only problem is uploading 600 gigabytes. It’s taking a while.

I’m using ARQ, which is a great backup program that handles the encryption, the upload/download, etc. Highly recommended.

part of my 2013 goals is to go big. do things that take a little extra work, slow down and focus on making better work, no more snapshots, etc. I want to do things that are great.

one thing I’ve done is my geotagging project.

I’ve been wanting to geotag my archive for a while now. With the release of Lightroom 4, I started to geotag all of my photos going forward, so 2012 was done, but that left over 120,000 photographs untagged.

Damn.

Nothing worse than having to go back into your archive and add details that would have only taken a few minutes a day if you’d been doing them all along.

I came up with a plan to make the job manageable. I’d simply geotag by day. So on November 1st, I’d go through and geotag every shot I’d taken on November 1st from 1986 until 2011. Sounded like a great plan, and I’d be done in a year or so.

But then I went completely mental and geotagged over 130,000 photos in one month.

I’m still trying to recover.

But now I’ve got an incredible data set that I can put to use in a hundred different ways.

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