Blogs

Today was a beautiful day for baseball. I had a great time photgraphing the Red Sox and Dodgers playing a great game at Pinckneyville Park. Photographs of the game are now available.

For DragonCon this year I decided to give Lightroom 2 a try. I have changed a lot of things in my photo processing procedures, not the least of which has been the change from Windows to Macintosh OS X, and Lightroom sounded like a good fit. On Thursday evening I installed the Lightroom 2 30-day trial on the Apple PowerBook G4 laptop that I would be using for the weekend. Chris [insert last name] helped me get started with Lightroom showing me some of the basics. The biggest thing that got me excited about Lightroom is the ease that metadata could be added to images and the ability to easily search for and filter images making it really easy to find images that have been tagged. ...

I had a great time at DragonCon this year, the costume contests were fantastic, the guests told wonderful stories, and the fans were a lot of fun. Here are some links to take you directly into the gallery: Gallery Homepage Costume Contest Parade Dawn Contest Masquerade I hope to write a post about how I processed images this year. Lightroom 2 is really fantastic, I did not use Photoshop to edit any of the 1,181 images in the gallery.

On Saturday August 23rd I spent a beautiful night participating in Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk in Atlanta Georgia around the Buckhead – Lenox area. At 7:00 pm about 45 photographers gathers in front of the Terminus 100 building at the corner of Peachtree and Piedmont eager to attack the neighborhood. I did not really feel inspired until I got to Dante’s Down the Hatch where I stepped inside and got a couple pics of the crocodiles inside. The energy inside the restaurant and seeing the reptiles fired me up to get out there and take a lot of photos. ...

It is almost that time again, DragonCon is less than a month away. I am a staff photographer for DragonCon and have 7 years of DragonCon photographs on my web site. This year I am most excited about meeting Hayden Panettiere, James Kyson Lee, and George Takei of Heroes, Sean Astin and Brad Dourif from The Lord of the Rings, Gareth David Lloyd and James Marsters from Torchwood, Beau Bridges from the upcoming Max Payne movie, Joel Hodgson the creator and host of MST3K, James Callis, Aaron Douglas, Michael Hogan, Tahmoh Penikett, and Katee Sackhoff, from Battlestar Galactica, Jewel Staite and Morena Baccarin from Firefly and Serenity, Randal L. Schwartz computer geek extroidinaire, and my favorite science fiction author Mike Resnick. ...

I have had my suspicions for a couple of years that Photoshop had been stripping out the EXIF data that I inserted into my images with Exifer, and now after a bit of testing I have discovered that Photoshop CS3 does indeed remove EXIF data when saving JPG files. Here is the workflow that I have been trying out lately. Take pictures in JPG format Use Exifer to add EXIF and select IPTC data Use Microsoft Pro Photo Tools to add GPS and address information (geotagging) Copy all images into an “Originals” folder Edit the images being very selective as to what pictures are to be Photoshopped and shared with the public Publish to SmugMug, Facebook, Flickr, and/or my blog. Copy images to the Storage Area Network device Meta data in the form of EXIF and IPTC information makes it much easier to search for files years later and web sites like SmugMug will take the EXIF data and use them for descriptions, locations, and more on their web site. ...

Almost every day I use Google Reader to read RSS feeds from many different web sites, 44 of them today, and I would like to share the photography feeds. The Big Picture The Big Picture is a blog over at boston.com where they post some of the most amazing pictures of the week. These picture regularly inspire me to get out there and do that thing that I do. http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/ ...

The Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) is a web based stock trading game that trades in the success and failure of movies. The game is free to play and can provide some real insight into how a stock exchange works and what makes for a successful movie. By creating an account you receive $2 million HSX dollars to buy and sell stocks, bonds, and funds with. It is plenty of money to jump right in and create a portfolio that can take off but not so much money that you cannot lose most of it in one bad weekend. ...

We really enjoyed ourselves at Stone Mountain Park Thursday night with the laser light show and fireworks display. I get excited about any opportunity to take pictures of fireworks and this night proved to be exceptional. I didn’t get a lot of pictures, but having the carving at Stone Mountain as a backdrop to the fireworks makes for some wonderful pictures.

About four years ago I found myself deep in debt to the point that I spent many nights laying awake worrying about it. I was making enough money to pay the bills that came in the mail every month, but there wasn’t a lot of money left over for having fun. I was fed up and sick of it all. I sat down with my computer and worked out a written budget, I included everything I spent money on every month, all of the bills, food, gas, rent, etc… Putting everything in a spreadsheet where I could see exactly where the money was going made it much easier for me to funnel more money to my largest bills. After two years I had made a very nice dent in the mountain of debt. ...