Revisiting A Not Too Distant Past

I can't believe I have not processed these photos from the last shoot I did of Arron and Scott. I was using iWeb at the time and was posting galleries by the number of model shoot they belonged to but the direction of my work changed just about then.

Two things happened. I was getting burnt out processing the thousands of photos from each shoot when I went with Arron to the John Robert Powers school for his audition. The school owner told Arron that the photos he had brought, from the shoot I've done with him, were not good enough for a headshot. I knew when I heard her comment that she was right. I was not color-correcting the images. Then I was more concerned about exposure and resolution of the images.

By the end of that week, Apple switched its hosting software and for a week I couldn't access my website to update it. That made me start looking at other options on the Internet and found smugmug.com by following a link on a photographer's site. Reading the help files on smugmug.com was my first introduction to color correction and the difference in color spaces for the Internet and for print. 

That was two and a half months ago but feels like a lifetime ago. I didn't shoot models for six weeks while I learned how to use smugmug. I decided after two weeks to use it for displaying my photo images. Aside from the more elegant and professional appearance of the site it also included a way for selling the images. I still wanted to learn to build my own website with a shopping cart page but I realized that if I got around to doing that it would be at least another year. Now I am not so sure.

In the past month I have been doing Photoshop and photo-editing tutorials. There is so much just in Photoshop to learn. I did do two new photo shoots. They benefited from what I have been learning in terms of the processing. I now have an idea of the sensible workflow I will adopt. In this time too I rearranged my files after adding two more internal hard drives. I couldn't trust the Maxxon drives any more.

Meanwhile, becoming more comfortable with the new Canon D5, I have started taking non-model photos again. Resolution is not the problem that it used to be. Even the images I took with the D20 were not as bad as I thought when I learned how to use Camera Raw in Photoshop. The D5 takes better photographs, of course, and this showed in the last shoot I did.

Watching a movie this morning (the marvelous Irina Palm with Marianne Faithful) I wondered if I would ever get back to editing videos again. What little I learned about Final Cut Pro has receded into that other lifetime, too. My hands are full right now just learning the craft of still digital images. But when I am moved by a movie again I feel the desire to try my hand at making movies again. 

I shoot an arrow into the air and don't wait to see it land to shoot another. There is no destination to reach, only arrows to let fly.