Dirty
July 2nd, 2009
Kelsey is a great model and she really worked hard for me on the day we shot. Not only did she get up very early in the morning so we could start shooting at dawn, but she kept working all day long and went from one dirty uncomfortable setting to another with never a complaint. I shot this after she got up from a pose on the floor in this old building. Not the cleanest place in the world. But I liked what the dirt and sweat was doing on her back, so I had her do this pose. Just another dirty picture.
Thanks Kelsey. All the best to you out there in Seattle.
What’s Going On
June 30th, 2009
It’s been a very frustrating few days. I guess I’ll let any of you reading this know what’s been happening.
I’m looking at moving to a new studio. I’ve already rented the new space, but it needs some work to get it ready for me to move in. It’s more space for less rent and it’s within walking distance of my home, as opposed to the 30-mile drive I now have to do to get to my old studio.
I was supposed to move in this past weekend. I had movers and a truck all set and I tore the old studio apart, emptied all the cabinents and desks and packed everything up. But the work didn’t get done to make the new space ready, even after a promise from the landlord as late as Saturday morning.
Needless to say, I was pissed. I had to cancel the movers and truck at the last minute. My old studio is now non-functional, unless I undo all the work I’ve done to get ready to move. And the landlord has been nowhere to be found.
Finally this morning I went down there and found him. I walked in ready to demand my rent money back and just walk away and forget about moving. But, he told me he had been out of town because of a sudden death in his family. I decided to believe him, at least for the moment. So, the work is to be done over the next few days. But I won’t be able to schedule the move again until the middle of the month. And, of course, I have to go ahead and pay July rent at the old place.
At least it’s summer, when I don’t do much studio shooting anyway. I often question why I even have a studio…but I have so much stuff there that I need a place to store it anyway…no room for it at my house. My wife would kill me if I tried to move all that stuff home. Maybe someday I’ll decide I just won’t do any more studio work and I’ll just get rid of most of that stuff…but it is nice to have a place to work…a place to go and be away from the house to get stuff done.
So, everything is in turmoil right now. I’m waiting to see if the work actually gets done this time at the new space. But I’m not going to undo all the preparations I’ve done for now.
On a happier note, that’s the beautiful Adrina posing in an old building in my town…not the building I’ll be moving into, in case you were wondering. I’ll obviously be posting photos taken in that new building soon, assuming I actually do the move. Stay tuned.
More Kelsey
June 28th, 2009
I’m having a real busy and fairly unpleasant weekend. So, here’s something pleasant to look at. Another of Kelsey from this week’s shoot. She is a very fine model. Seattle’s gain is certainly my loss.
Hanging out
June 26th, 2009
A while back I edited my profile on Model Mayhem with the aim to cut down on the number of models contacting me wanting me to shoot them. I was getting way too many messages that essentially said:
“I’ve been modeling for 15 minutes now and I’ll be coming to your area and I think you should shoot with me. My rate is $300 an hour. And I don’t shoot nudes, so don’t even think about asking me to pose nude.”
Wild Flowers
June 23rd, 2009
I’m staying pretty busy with shoots and computers and editing, so I haven’t had much time to blog. The truck is still in the shop. I’m finally running a 38-hour synch process on two 1.5T external hard drives that will, when it eventually finishes, have all my work duplicated on each drive. Still some more editing of duplicate folders to do, but I’m getting close to having that problem solved for the time being.
In the past couple weeks I’ve had two models who I’d not had any previous contact with ask me to do shoots with them. Both of them are very beautiful women and very talented models. You’ve already seen here one of the photos of Adrina that resulted. Later this week I’ll be shooting with another new model, so I hope to have something from that shoot to show you soon.
Lots more stuff to post, just no time for editing and writing just now. I hope that will be changing in the next few weeks.
Back to Glacier for today’s photo. That’s Brooke adding her beauty to a field of wild flowers.
Twins
June 17th, 2009
Twins are on my mind these days. First and foremost because I have new twin grand nephews down in North Carolina who were born a bit early and are having struggles in the hospital. I keep up with them through the blog their parents are keeping up. It’s been a real roller coaster, but both seem to be doing pretty well under the circumstances.
And, I’m spending lots of time playing with twin hard drives as I try to get my new backup system working. This is involving running a synchronization program on several drives in order to make sure I have everything in my old files saved. Some of these sync operations are taking close to 20 hours to run. And, since my truck is still torn apart and without an engine or transmission at the moment, getting back and forth to the studio is a bit of a challenge. I have the motorcycle, but it’s been raining pretty much every day. Or, worse, they have been predicting rain which fails to fall, but convinces me to stay home to stay dry.
So, in honor of the twinness that is going on in my life right now, here is a portrait of twins Cat and Christy. Cat is an accomplished model and lovely person who I’ve worked with a number of times over the years. Christy is her fraternal twin sister who I met when I convinced the two of them to come in to the studio for a shoot together. They are both lovely women, but, as you can see, they are very different. That difference extends to more than their physical appearance. But I enjoyed working with both of them and hope they will each be back in my studio in the future.
The twin sync job that is running on this computer right now says it has 7 hours left to run. I’ll not be sticking around for all of that…and it doesn’t look like I’ll make it in to the studio tomorrow because of the weather. Maybe I’ll try to make a quick trip between thunderstorms and start a new sync job to get a little closer to having this chore finished. Then I might be able to start thinking about doing some new photos.
Adrina
June 15th, 2009
There are still many photos from the Glacier trip to be posted, but I thought I’d take a break from them today and post something I’ve done since I got back home. A delightful and beautiful young woman passed through Ohio last week on a modeling trip. She contacted me and offered to do a shoot if I was interested. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, of course.
So we met and went to an old building to see what we could do in a very brief shoot. It was quite a success for a very small investment of time. The credit for that goes in no small measure to this talented young model who knew just what to do with very little direction from me to get what I was after. We had cloudy weather most of the time, but the sun came out briefly and created this beautiful bit of light which we both jumped to take advantage of.
I usually promise my models that they will get cold and wet and dirty if they work with me. Well this shoot didn’t quite live up to that. Adrina got pretty dirty, maybe just slightly wet, and it was definitely not cold where we were working.
You can find Adrina on Model Mayhem and One Model Place. She is a very fine model. If you are a photographer and get a chance to work with her I strongly suggest that you jump at the chance. You won’t be sorry.
Thanks Adrina.
Field Of Dreams
June 10th, 2009
You can dream about baseball if that suits you. I’ll stick to something more like this. Brooke and _G_ at Glacier.
Things continue to be very busy with most of it non-photo related. The truck engine and transmission have been removed and are both being rebuilt. I’m limited in my travel to either riding my motorcycle or hijacking my wife’s van by taking her to and from work. Since it is raining here today, and I hate riding my motorcycle in the rain, I’m spending the day at home. I expect the truck to be out of commission for at least another week and a half, so I’m concentrating on my many jobs that need to be done around the house.
I’ve spent the last several days transferring data from the old home computer onto the new computer and setting up a somewhat logical backup scheme. I think I have that all under control now. I used a program called Goodsync to get everything transferred and make sure I didn’t lose something in the process. It worked very well, but some of the sync operations took as much as 10 hours. We’re talking lots of gigs of photos here. But thanks to the sync program I was able to free up a couple hundred gigs of unnecessary duplication on my external hard drives. Now there is just one of everything on my old drives and they and the internal drive on the new computer all back up onto a new external 1.5T drive. Tomorrow I’ll start trying to do something similar with the data on the studio computer. But there I’m dealing with about 10 times as much data and something like eight external drives in various stages of confusion and duplication and triplication. It’s going to take some time. When I finish I hope to have each file stored and regularly backed up on two drives using two 1.5T drives and four 500 gig drives. Then I’ll start making another backup using the blu-ray burner on the new studio computer.
Now if I could just figure out how to free up more space on the C: drive of the old computer. I’ve uninstalled a bunch of my old programs, like PhotoShop CS, that took a lot of space, but it still seems to have at least 5 gigs of space taken up by something that doesn’t need to be there and that I can’t find to delete. We are giving the old computer to our cousin who doesn’t need a lot of computing power and should be able to get a lot more use out of it. But the C: drive has less than 1 gig of free space…not enough to even let me defrag it. If everything else fails we’ll just take it to Best Buy and have them wipe the drive and reinstall windows XP. I’d try that myself, but the computer didn’t come with an XP disk, so I can’t. It started life as a Best Buy floor sample and has always had some issues that must have been caused by that.
Meanwhile I’ve been getting estimates to have my 100-year-old house painted. _G_’s boyfriend is going to do the job. That should get started in the next couple weeks and take most of the summer to complete. The house is tall so one of the first steps was to buy a used 40-foot extension ladder. That was accomplished last night. They tell me the new paints are better than what was available about 10 years ago when we last had it painted, so this paint job should last at least 15 years. That would be nice.
And I need to make some calls to get someone to do a bunch of little jobs on the exterior of the house. I still haven’t found a roofer to repair the hurricane damage to the house’s tile roof. But I hope to get that taken care of within a month or so.
I also have some commercial photo work that I should be doing over the summer. Nothing all that exciting, but work that will pay some bills…maybe even let me put enough aside to get a new Nikon when the next digital generation is announced.
So, posts may be less frequent for the next few weeks while I deal with “real life”…but there are lots more photos to come from Glacier, not to mention a bunch of other shoots that I’ve never gotten around to putting up here. And I have a couple shoots planned over the next couple weeks. Have to keep shooting, no matter what.
Blame CS4
June 4th, 2009
Yes, I haven’t been here posting updates because of CS4. I’d been putting off upgrading my version of PhotoShop for quite a while, mainly because I knew my old studio computer would not be able to handle the newer versions. I was still using the original CS. My studio computer was so old that I had to add boards to it to give me USB2.o and to get an ethernet port. It still ran pretty well, but was showing signs of future problems.
So, I finally bought a new computer. I’ve been spending this week getting the new machine set up, working out a new backup scheme for my files, loading software…all that stuff. I’m not done, but I’ve made a lot of progress. My old scanner isn’t supported in Vista, so I decided it was a good time to upgrade that too. I don’t use a scanner much, but with the new Epson V500 I ordered I may start working on scanning some of my old negatives. I’m also about to shoot a polaroid project, using up the last of my stock of polaroid film in the process. I want to be able to make good scans of those prints when that project is finished.
So, I’m working on the new computer now…and editing files with the new CS4. I don’t see a lot of changes, but I think that’s because I just don’t know what I’m doing with the new program yet. I’m one of those old weirdos who actually read the manual that comes with software…but, alas, no manual was in the box. I suppose there’s one stashed somewhere in pdf form, but I haven’t found it yet. I think I’m going to break down and buy a book about this version and read it…I really should take a course since I’ve never had any formal PhotoShop training. Or maybe I’ll just take another drive up to Stephen’s in Minneapolis and pick his brain. He seems to know everything there is to know about PhotoShop.
I’m still driving the truck, but it will soon be going into the shop for major repairs. I’ll be riding around on my motorcycle for a few weeks while the work gets done. I’m going to have the transmission rebuilt while the engine is out, so I’ll have a new truck when it comes back…ready for another 200,000 miles.
So, here are a couple of my first photos edited on the new machine with CS4. That’s Brooke and _G_, of course. Above, taken on our first day of shooting at Glacier in the very cold morning light. Below on a later day after a steep climb up an occasionally snow-covered trail to reach that waterfall in the background. My models are tough as well as beautiful.
Flathead Lake and Tina
May 30th, 2009
One of the things I enjoy about traveling to do my figure work is the chance to meet and work with a variety of models who live in the areas I visit. I’ve encountered some very beautiful and talented models this way. Tinytina is a perfect example of this. I contacted her through Model Mayhem and am very glad we were able to work together.
First, she is a very accomplished model…totally professional and brave and bold enough to go ahead and get nude for photos despite the terrible weather on the day of our shoot. It was cold. It was sleeting. There was a strong wind blowing. Tina is a tough lady.
Also, she took us to a location that I would never have found without her guidance. I really appreciate her willingness to share this bit of local wisdom with me. Not every model or photographer is open to sharing location information. But that’s a subject for another blog post.
One of the advantages of bad weather is sometimes beautiful light. I really like the light and color in these photos. They would be very different photographs if it had been warm and sunny. Of course I wouldn’t have had to worry about the models turning blue, but that’s another issue too.
So, thank you Tinytina for being willing to freeze for me. Thank you for being beautiful and talented and making a very difficult situation work despite the weather. I hope we get to work together again, perhaps in a bit warmer situation.
This last photo of Tinytina is pretty different from most of my work. I’m usually looking for a somewhat romanticized sort of photo with everything all beautiful and perfect…a romantic illusion of what nature might be in paradise. But I find myself really drawn to this much more “real” photograph that communicates a bit of the struggle Tinatina was going through to make the photos work. I’m not sure why I like this one so much, but I keep coming back to it, so I decided to go ahead and share it with you.
The news on the truck is not good. The deer did a lot of damage. And the engine isn’t running well now…can’t tie that directly to hitting the deer, but the engine started running a bit rough right after that happened…and it had been running just fine before. Now one cylinder is way down on compression. So the engine is going to have to be rebuilt. A couple weeks of work and several thousand dollars of expense. The radiator also will need to be replaced along with some other stuff that got smashed. I’m looking at possibly having the transmission rebuilt while the engine is out, just because it has a lot of miles on it and will need that done sometime in the future. So, no trips for a while…no wheels for a couple weeks. I’ve been trying to sell my motorcycle, but guess I’ll put that on hold so I can have it to ride around on while the truck is torn apart.
At least the truck kept running through the whole trip and got us all safely back home. So I can’t really complain about anything. These repairs will probably ultimately extend the service life of my truck for a few years longer than I had planned. It only has 200,000 miles on it, so it’s just getting broken in well.
