Smote by the Technology Gods.

Apparently, I have done something to anger the technology Gods. The nature of my indiscretion is unclear. Perhaps my preference for hand written notes has enraged them, or they are terribly vexed by my faith in the telephone system over their clearly superior e-mail. Maybe my lack of participation in Facebook has aroused their contempt. Whatever the cause, they are greatly peeved and as punishment for my sins they have chosen to smite me. Well, not me exactly, but instead my innocent external hard drive. Some great deity of Data storage reached down from the heavens and, pressing it's great glowing finger against the drive, wiped from existence every image I've made in the last three years. And so a great sadness descended upon the land.

Okay, maybe that's a little over dramatic. To be fair, almost everything is backed up elsewhere, squirreled away on DVDs or hidden on the remote corners of my computer. None of my professional work is lost, but my personal photos are mostly gone. Go figure, I protect everyone else's photos, but not my own. Smart move. Trips to Ecuador and El Salvador, Colorado, Wyoming, Madison, the family farm, all lost into the ethers. Bummer. Worst part: I know better.

I know hard drives fail. It happens. They break, get lost, get stolen, whatever. That's why you always have a backup. About a month ago I had my mouse arrow poised over the "add to cart" button on a set of three identical drives. The perfect redundant system. One for travelling and working from the road, one as an at home backup and the another for occasional archiving in a fire-proof safety deposit box. Now that's a good system. So why didn't I do it? Because I'm cheap.

As we speak some friends in IT are frantically performing the equivalent of harddrive CPR on the little fella, but it doesn't sound too good. We're basically looking at a total flat line.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

"Shock him again."

"It's no use doctor...he's gone. Call it."

"No, damn it! We have to at least try. Give me 60 joules this time. When I look his mother in the eye, I need to tell her we did everything we could."

ZAP! Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

Quiet sobs emanate from the corner where I'm curled into the fetal position slowly rocking myself.

"He was so young. Why God? Why?"

I should find out Monday what if anything can be recovered. Wish me luck.

Eat. Eat. Eat. Take Photo. Eat.

We're back from almost a week in Alpena, MI for Thanksgiving. I swear if I lived there, I'd be right around 800 lbs. We ate constantly for six days. Steaks, turkey, chicken, pie, potatoes, more pie, another potato, pasta, ice cream, another half of a potato. I think I even ate a paper clip that was sitting on the table next to my plate at one point during the feeding frenzy, but it didn't phase me. Amazing food. In between rampant boughts of stuffing my face, I did managed to snap a few photos.

Above is one of the outtakes from a shoot for our friend Heather. Her yearly Christmas Card features a photo of her and her dog, Tucker. I think Heather and I were pretty much on the same page about what we were going for, but Tucker had a widely divergent concept of how the photo should look. We were thinking a nice little shot of them sitting on the rocks looking at the camera. Tucker seemed to think that an action shot of him catching a goose and tearing it to tiny little goosey pieces would make a far better Christmas Card. While I agree it may have been a striking image, it's not quite holiday greeting material. Eventually, a small change of location and reason (by which I mean a squeek toy held above the camera) prevailed and we got a few good frames. Here's the best:

Small World.

 

Here's another shot from this summer that I just got around to archiving. I don't have much to say about it, I just love the colors in this image. This was taken with a tilt-shift lens from the roof of a parking structure in Wausau, Wisconsin. Origininally designed for architectural photography tilt-shift lenses can be used to correct for converging verticals and other perspective related distortions. They can also be used to create this effect commonly referred to as miniature faking. Kind of cool. This was part of a project I did with an old friend from college. Craig's a designer with a firm down that way. Always a blast to work with him.

Art Slides.

Wednesday evening, I got together with a local ceramics artist to shoot some slides of her recent work. As you can see, she has some really great stuff. A bunch of it is wood fired, which does some really cool things to the texture of the glaze. Pretty impressive. She's documenting it all before pieces go off to be sold or shown other places.

As a concept, shooting art slides of three dimensional work is relatively simple. I use a big roll of white seamless paper and two lights. One soft light from the front/side and one hard light from behind for some rim light. I sometimes add a reflector opposite the front light as well. Pretty basic. The tricky part is managing the glare. For matte finished pieces that's not an issue and you can get a good slide in one or two frames. But glossy pieces can be a bear.

The glossier the piece the more time it takes to get things just right. You have to fiddle with the angle of the lights, move the piece around; you have to find that spot where the glare is as small as it can possibly be with out disappearring completely. I still like to have that little spot of glare (we call that a specular highlight in photograpy) to show the true texture of the piece. Without it, you can't tell if it's actually shiny or not. In combination, that highlight, the halo of rim light and the soft , wrapping light from the side do a really nice job of revealing the shape and texture of the piece. That's the whole idea.

Faces in the Crowd.

Here's a frame from a senior portrait shoot in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Kind of a strange looking kid, but, hey, who am I to judge...Okay, sorry, that was lame, I know. This really is from La Crosse though. It's on top of Granddad's Bluff. Everyone else is up there looking at the Mighty Mississippi, taking in the spectacular view, snapping a family photo, and I'm wandering around taking pictures of the coin operated binoculars. Seriously, what's wrong with me?

Making Bad Weather Look Good.

When Vicki (Allyson's mom) and I scheduled Allyson's senior portrait shoot, weather.com was projecting sun for Thursday afternoon. Sounds good. A sunny fall day, yeah, let's do that. Weather.com was wrong. Thursday afternoon was cold and grey. I mean really grey. And really cold, for that matter. The sky in the image above was not photoshopped to look that way, that's really how bad it was. And yes that's full color, grey just happened to be the only color around.

So what do you do when you get bad weather? Well, you could postpone the shoot, reschedule for another day, wait for better weather. I try give people that option if that's what they want to do. Or you could do what I like to do, which is work with what you've got and get some really good photos anyway. Personally, I think an ominous cloud-laden sky can be far more striking than a happy sunny day, but maybe that's just me.

Bad weather does take a little more planning though. You've got to have a dry place to leave extra equipment, a warm place for the subject to hang out while you get things set up, more lighting equipment, and someone to keep the lightstands from blowing over in the wind (Thanks Vicki, you were an awesome assistant.) That aside, the final images can still be pretty sweet. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a photogenic subject either.

Here are a few more frames from Thursday afternoon:

It's all about Timing.

I didn't take this photo. My friend Adam took this photo and I think it's just about perfect. It's me crashing a motorcycle on the Pan-American Highway. I think it's great for two reasons: (1) it's a priceless memory of an amazing trip and (2) it's a perfect example of how timing is crucial to a good photograph. Sometimes a great image is about lighting, sometimes it's about the interaction between the photographer and the subject, but sometimes, just sometimes, it's all about good timing. And for this one, Adam had it.

Let me set the scene: this was the tail-end of a trip to Ecuador. We had done some mountaineering in the Andes, visited Mitad del Mundo, drank Pilsner by the gallon and ate all manner of strange roasted meats on a stick. Like I said, it was an amazing trip. For one of our last days in the country, we rented motorcycles and road into the mountains to see the aftermath of a recent volcanic eruption. It was a great day and I wanted a picture of me to riding on the legendary Pan-American Highway to commemorate the occasion. Adam was, of course, happy to oblige.

I handed over my trusty Canon and went down the road to loop around past him. Adam waited for me to come cruising past, wind in my hair, the heroic traveller flying by on the iron steed. I had it all planned out. It was going to be a great picture, and Adam took that picture. Done. Cool. Most folk would have put the camera done at that point, but, knowing me better than I know myself, Adam kept the camera to his eye, ready for the aftermath of my triumphant driveby: the low speed, cart-wheeling dismount into the ditch. Turns out, that was the great picture. A real wall-hanger. All because of impeccable timing. Nice work, Adam.

Harvest Season.

Talk of harvest season always conjures up images of fresh-cut hay and yellow-tassled corn and old tractors chugging across frosty autumn fields. That sort of thing. Well it's my harvest season too, in a way. It's been cold and rainy all day, so I'm sitting inside this eveing drinking a cup of mint tea and processing all my backlogged photos; turning RAW camera files into real, usable photos. I'm catching up on all the things I shot over the summer and haven't yet touched. They're all photos I shot for myself and, since no ones paying for them, there's been no rush to get them finished up. "No rush" usually means they sit around for a ridiculously long time before I finally just delete them. But today I'm actually doing something with them, I'm harvesting my summer photos. They've been waiting patiently for an evening like this and now I'm reaping what I sowed. And taking a nice little saunter down memory lane while I'm at it.

This summer was all about food. It was the first summer Sarah and I had a big garden, the first summer we had a CSA share. It was the first year I really thought about where my food comes from. And when I think about something a lot I usually take a lot of pictures of it. Over the last several months I've spent time on a lot of different farms, including my Grandma's land in southwestern Wisconsin. I've learned more about chickens and livestock and crops and vegetables than I ever planned. And I have more farming related pictures than I know what to do with. So, here are just a few of the best:

Wait. Was that Art?

Sunday afternoon I was out on a tennis court as part of a senior portrait shoot and, as I usually do, I took a quick throw-away test shot (above). You can see I didn't even bother focusing. Just fired off a quick frame to check colors and measure the ambient light level before I started setting up the shot. Test frames like this give me a baseline exposure to start from as I add lighting to a scene. Technical purpose aside, I usually just toss these images as soon as I get them onto the computer, but for some reason I really liked this one. So I held onto it. As I've worked on processing the images from that shoot over the last few days, the dreaded mouse arrow of Damacles has hovered over this image more than once, but I can't bring myself to delete it. So what is it about this picture that I like? I don't know. Is it the colors, the angles, the softness of the lines, all three together? Not sure. But wait...Does that make it art?

Whoa. Easy there. That's a big question. Here's a bigger question: What is art? Where's the line? I'll be honest, I have no idea. This shot wasn't intentional, but I dont know if intention is the critical element that defines art. I've seen wonderful pieces that rely, at least in part, on chaos. And on the opposite side of the coin, I've seen impressive intentional efforts that I would not qualify as art. Is art merely that which is pleasing to the senses? Maybe, but that gives us a pretty broad definition. Is a nap on a Sunday afternoon art? On the right day, I could probably be convinced that it is. But then what about works of art that make us uncomfortable, art that's not pleasing to the senses. Do we demote them to something other than art? I hope not.

But that means there must be something else. Some vague intangible concept which defines art that lurks just beyond my ability to describe. I don't know what it is, but I know something about it. It's a living thing always just out of site. It's somewhere out in front of me always waving me over to the side of the road when there's an amazing photo opportunity. It's the nagging whisper in my ear that always says "try that shot one more time from that angle over there and maybe it will be perfect." It's the passion that makes me pick up a camera everyday and try to do something completely different. That's it. That's what it is.

Nice Day for a White Wedding.

Woke up Saturday morning to an inch of snow on the ground, a stiff northern wind, and an outdoor wedding to shoot (Where did I put my long underwear this spring?). Some very dear friends, Jess and Blaise, had been planning an outdoor wedding on their property for months and, due to the sudden cold weather, had to scramble to find an indoor venue for the reception. Despite a little last minute chaos, the whole thing ended up being absolutely beautiful. Thanks, Jess and Blaise, for the amazing party and congratulations on gettin' hitched, you crazy kids. Here's a sneak peek at a few of the wedding photos:

Here I am World.

Okay everybody, listen up. Here it is. This is it: my first blog posting. I am dipping my toes into the blogosphere. God I hope that's the right use of "blogosphere" or I'm going to look like a virtual idiot. But that's beside the point. The point is this: I don't facebook, I only vaguely understand what twitter is, I even struggle on occassion with cell phones. I'm a photographer. But today I'm taking a flying leap into 20th century technology and starting my blog. Well, to be fair it's not really my blog. It's the Hired Lens Photography Blog.

Anyway. Here I am world (see picture, that's me). This blog will feature periodic postings about my photography, a few comical anecdotes, maybe a how-to thing here and there, and hopefully invitations to a bunch of new gallery hangings I'm lining up for the next few months. So keep checking back. Feed me to your RSS thingy-ma-bob, whatever that means. You can't ignore me now. Hired Lens Photography has gone GLOBAL. Keep it real out there world. (exit stage left, crickets chirping.)