Earlier this morning I sold the above shot as my 70,000th sale on iStockphoto. While 70,000 is a far cry from the nearly half million images my friend Sean has sold, it’s still a fairly large number. Onward to 100,000!
Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens – 1/160 second, f/8, ISO 100
I spent this morning with two of my photographer friends, Ann Torrence and Jeremy Hall, on a Photowalking Utah scouting trip to the Timpanogos Cave National Monument. I have lived in Utah over twelve years yet this was my first trip to the cave. It was definitely a cool site to see and I recommend anyone in the area to spend a few hours checking it out.
But for Ann, Jeremy and me the highlight of the morning wasn’t as much the cave as the ultra cool ranger that guided us through it – Park Ranger Nancy. Nancy went out of her way while leading the group we were in (about a dozen or so visitors) to allow the three of us to get all the photographs we wanted. It would be very easy for someone in her position to be annoyed at our desire to take photos, but instead she made us feel like what we were doing was as important to her as it was to us.
Rich (me!), Park Ranger Nancy, Ann and Jeremy
Ann Torrence has spent a lot of time in National Parks over the past few years as she researched her Highway 89 project. She has met many a ranger and she was quick to point out to Jeremy and me that Park Ranger Nancy was by far the most photographer friendly ranger she has ever met.
So for all the photographers out there, I offer up a sincere THANK YOU to Nancy. You made our day!
My daughter spent last weekend working on a project for her school. The task was to create a video and posters advertising herself for a position as a student body officer at her middle school. Her theme for the project was loosely based on the popular Twilight book series. My participation came into play when it was time to create images for her posters. She wanted a couple of studio shots with a look evoking that of the Twilight poster, and I did my best on short notice to create these.
We shot two images for the posters. The above shot is of the group of young women who played parts in her video. The second image was an individual of Elisabeth holding an apple as a reference to the book’s title shot.
Without getting into too many of the details on how I created the look for the images, I basically blended a couple of high pass filter layers into the original and then applied some aggressive over-sharpening using unsharp mask.
Last month I was approached by my good friend and fellow photographer Ann Torrence to take an outdoor portrait of her for her soon to be released book. She wanted a natural looking image to be used in the About the Author section of the book. We needed to take the picture before April 18th. The reason for the timing of the session was that Ann was preparing to embark on a Colorado River rafting expedition and would be cutting her hair extremely short the next day (and by extremely short, I mean BUZZ CUT short!) and wanted her portrait to portray her with her hair at a normal length.
After a bit of discussion, we opted for taking the image along Highway 89 (the subject of Ann’s book) in downtown Salt Lake City. I envisioned an image with her standing in the middle of the street with the background showing the highway (State Street in Salt Lake City) leading up to the capitol building. Ann’s idea was a picture of her along the highway with the Salt Lake City City-County building in the background. We shot both versions and had planned to let blog readers vote on which one would be used in the book.
Now for the Knucklehead part.
After our short streetside photo session, I re-packed my gear and we hopped into my car for the short ride back to Pictureline to drop Ann off (we left her car there). I then went about my normal routine for the rest of the day with my gear stowed in the trunk of my Saab – forgetting all about Ann’s images.
My standard routine after a shoot is to copy the images from the memory card to my redundant external harddrives. In this case, I got busy for the remainder of the day and did not do so (big mistake #1).
The next morning I had a portrait session scheduled in the studio with one of my models Kylee. When she arrived we chatted a bit about the images we were going to shoot while I finished prepping my gear. Without a bit of hesitation while we were talking I grabbed my 5DmkII and instinctively formatted the card (big mistake #2). Now had I remembered that Ann’s images on that card I could have pulled the card immediately and used another card (big mistake #3). Instead, I went on with the shoot not even remembering the Highway 89 outing from the day before.
Kylee’s portrait from the next morning session
Later that afternoon when copying the images from the day’s shoot I had what can best described as a Panic Moment. We’ve all had them. It is the moment that you realize that you’ve made a major blunder and suddenly the temperature in the room increases what feels like 20 degrees. It was at this moment that I remembered Ann’s pics were on the freshly formatted card I used for Kylee’s shoot. It was at near the same moment when I realized that Ann was also sporting a new Buzz cut in preparation for her trip and a re-shoot was out of the question for at least 3-4 months.
Trying not to overreact, I remembered that I had previously purchased software to rescue a corrupt memory card. The software is DataRescue’s PhotoRescue and I blogged about it back in 2007. Even though my memory card was not corrupted, I decided to give the software a run to see what it could find on the card. The good news was that it found and recovered about half of the images from the shoot. Even better, the ones it recovered were the pose/background shots that Ann preferred.
Disaster avoided!
Last week Ann telephoned to tell me about her trip. It was at this time that I came clean with her about our photoshoot and my knuckleaded move. I’m happy to say that I have never heard her laugh as hard as she did when she heard the story. Whew!
In light of this, we have instituted a new policy for the staff at Legacy One Photography (umm, that’s only me). Before any cards are formatted the photographer will take a moment and review the images on said card.
Now if anyone wants to make me feel better, take a moment and share one of your Knucklead stories in the comments. If I don’t see any I guess I will go on thinking I’m the only one who does these things :)
Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens – 1/100 second, f/10, ISO 100
As I wrote earlier in the week, I’m knee deep in image editing for the time being. Here’s another sample from last month’s Apartment Community stock shoot that I have been working on. I really liked shooting this particular model in the kitchen setting, mainly because of the similar tone of her hair color and the cabinets behind her. Not to mention her great smile.
Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens – 1/125 second, f/7.1, ISO 100
My good friend and fellow iStockphoto Diamond Level Contributor Nicole Young put together a really cool time lapse video during the SLC Minilypse event in Salt Lake City. Held on March 28-29, the outing featured four separate locations in the Salt Lake area for the participating photographers to shoot in. Be sure to watch for the snaking line of photographers near the end of the video.
To see a lightbox of images created during the event, click here.
I’ve been so busy the past week editing images from my backlog of photoshoots, that I haven’t been writing very much (if at all) here on the blog. I plan to get caught up on my processing work in the next week or so and get back into my regular routine of doing a bit of writing each week. In the meantime, check out this portrait of happy little Cash. He dropped by the studio with his family yesterday afternoon for some portraits.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering – that isn’t a regulation size football helmet :)
Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens – 1/100 second, f/9, ISO 100
Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 70-200 f/4L lens – 1/160 second, f/4.5, ISO 200
