Photography

On Thursday April 9th I participated in a “Painting with Light Workshop” at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, GA. Judith Pishnery of Pisconeri Studio & Workshops brought us together for a night of photography and learning. We began the night around 7pm filling out releases and donning nametags on the porch of the visitor’s center. After an introduction by Judith and some words from the cemetery staff we were left to wander the cemetery to get acquainted and take some pre-nightfall photos. ...

I have been using SmugMug to host and sell my photography and seeing their participation in the photography community is one of the reasons I continue to use them. Vincent was one of the first people chosen to test and stretch the limits of the Canon EOS 5D Mk III which he did wonderfully with “Reverie.” SmugMug hosts the video of “The Making of Reverie” along with other content from Vincent, here is his SmugMug home page.

Had a great time at the 2008 Wings over Marietta Open House & Airshow. This was my first opportunity to see the USAF Thunderbirds. It was a beautiful day with a wide variety of aircraft to see. Photos of the 2008 Wings over Marietta Open House & Airshow Gallery or you can view the photos as a slideshow.

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/ ...