I've been very behind on my editing lately and its frustrating to have photos piling up and no time to properly finish them.
Most of my time has been occupied by work, and when I'm not at work, I'm doing side jobs. I've been getting a good amount of eBay jobs as of late as well as a regular job tutoring in Photoshop. I'm also gearing up to teach a bi-weekly image editing class with a coworker (if we can get the syllabus finished up). Last week I did an on-site color calibration and some other photo work on the side!
I can't really complain because work = money, but I don't want to ruin my hobby/passion. Working at a camera store is bad enough... One of the problems I'm running into is that I'm forced to keep heavily focused on the technical side of photography and I feel that it is affecting how I think artistically. I would have a ton more ambition, photographically speaking, if I wasn't so involved with selling, teaching and constantly learning the latest imaging technology. Its hard to get inspired to do anything besides buy the latest equipment. In college, I was always interacting with artists, absorbing the work of both modern and classic photographer and never was I more inspired. I feel like a tool salesman as opposed to a carpenter.
A photographic retreat is what I need, a sabbatical of sorts to focus on a project, perhaps finish a series or start a new one.
In the meantime, here is more of the same: One from the recently recovered memory card, and another of Tasha from a while ago.
In my last post I mentioned that I had lost a 2GB memory card full of photos from our camping trip at the Black Rock desert. I tore apart EVERYTHING looking for it and nothing. I spent almost an entire day cleaning my car, double and triple checking my camera bags, unpacking all my camping equipment and making phone calls to the places we stopped on the trip.
A couple days ago, after I had finally accepted that my photos were lost forever, I received a call from someone saying they found my card! The card must have fallen out of the car when we made a brief stop 100 miles away from home.
Moral of the story: label your memory cards with your contact info and make backups on the spot if possible!
Although I'm way behind in my editing, here's a couple from that card...
Last weekend I joined a group of friends for a camping trip on the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach, NV. I actually grew up there and hadn't been back in about 4 years, so when Katie and Scott asked me to do some formal wedding portraits of them, I immediately said "we should go to the playa!" BTW, I've never shot a wedding in my life!
It was a great time! A few of us stayed up all night BSing and watching the amazing sky (you can see the band of the milky way perfectly as the nearest city is about 100 mi away)! We were up early for the sunrise and I got some pretty good stuff, although I still need to edit a bunch. The one caveat of the trip was that I lost a 2GB memory card with some pretty damn good photos on there. Luckily, none of them were wedding portraits.
Below: Nikon D300, Cheap Tokina 28-70mm 2.8 lens, Quantum Q-flash to camera left through Westcott Halo.
As always, comments welcome and look for more photos from this shoot soon.
