Top 5 things to travel with if you want the TSA to give you some extra special lovin'....

   Ok- not a photography post per se, but lots of photographers travel, and as I am getting ready for a cross country trip, I was wondering what to post before I take the workstation apart. The answer is this list, inspired by the bottle opener I used to open a beer to celebrate completion of packing.

   A while back, when I shot a fundraiser for the Travis Manion foundation,  and one of the favors was a fifty caliber round that had been turned into a bottle opener.

   It's my favorite bottle opener, more sturdy than an other one I own, works like a champ, and as I used it, I wondered what would happen if I stuck this in my carry on and went through the TSA checkpoint. (If you want to get your own, you can do it here).

  DISCLAIMER: I actually have no idea what would happen if you tried to bring any of these things through security, you will probably wind up arrested, and most assuredly miss your flight. Without further legal notices, here comes the list.

5) Bullet Bottle Opener. As I mentioned above, this is the best bottle opener I have ever used. And it doesn't hurt that I think the browning Ma Deuce .50 cal is one of the two best weapons ever created- the other being the 1911 .45. Seriously, if the design of the weapon has remained basically unchanged and still in use for roughly a century or so, you have to figure they did something right.

4) Bullet Pen. Along the same lines as the bottle opener above. I actually had one of these before there were hundreds of companies making them, I got mine from a gunners mate on my second ship who made them in his garage in his spare time. Hope he is getting rich off the royalties from all the copycats these days, can't find his original site anymore.

3) Bomb alarm clock.  I think in the pre-911 days these used to be in the SkyMall catalogue, now I cannot even imaging the hilarious chaos that would ensue if someone put one of these in a carry on bag and went through security.

2) Hand Grenade Paper Weight. Yeah. Same as above. This might get you thrown to the floor with guns pointed at your head. But still hilarious for everyone else.... once they realize they aren't going to die.

1) Atomic Bomb Shot Glasses. I mean, you have to finish your drink before you go through the checkpoint anyway, because heaven forbid someone tries to use perrier to take over the plane.... may as well do it in style as you await your lawyer.....

  Ok- those were in no particular order, and again, you may get arrested for bringing any of those to security, but the idea amused me so I felt like posting. It actually annoys me that we go to such great lengths for security theater which doesn't really make us safer at all. Chances are, the TSA wouldn't notice if you had any of these in your carry on. Seriously, looks like you have about a 95% chance of getting something past the window dressing that was put in place as a knee jerk reaction. But real security would take work, and training, and learning to actually deal with people instead of relying on money and technology to fix everything.

   Thankfully, I will not be flying the friendly skies cross country, as I am sure this post will get me on a watch list somewhere along with the rest of the babies and other horrible threats. (in defense of the TSA, some of what my son has done in his diaper and around the house could legitimately be classified as explosive.....)

   Now I am rambling. To take it back to photography, what we have in our airports isn't real security, it's the photoshopped version... everyone knows it's fake, but we all pretend to believe it.

  That's all for tonight, I'll post more once I am up and running in my next place. Enjoy your flight!

Photo Editing- it's all in the wrist... carpal tunnels that is..... (GEAR REVIEW: Anker Vertical Ergonomic Mouse)

    So, for those of you who haven't been following along, in addition to photography, I also moonlight as a circus acrobat. I primarily focus on aerial arts, but have also started working on partner acrobatics. For the past few years, I have been working on my handstands, and until very recently I was getting decently close to being able to hold a one arm handstand.

   Then my right wrist started bugging me. This happened about two months ago, and I finally was able to nail down the cause- long hours spent on the computer working on images, blog posts, web site updates, job seeking, etc. Pretty much everything except shooting the images these days involves sitting at a computer working. Since I am still in the Navy for a few more years, a good portion of that computer time for me is on a ship, and let me tell you, Navy ships were NOT designed with ergonomics in mind. That is starting to change a bit, but if you look at the furniture on most ships in the fleet today, it isn't really any different from what you see if you go to see a WWII battleship museum. I can't say my home setup was much better either, because it just wasn't something I thought about. Until now.

   So, I started to notice things, like the angle my wrist was in while using my mouse. It was bad. Can't change the mice on the work computers, so for that I will be using a wrist rest. For home, after some research, I decided to purchase a vertical mouse. Based on reviews, I went with the Anker Wireless Vertical Mouse.  Hell, I figured for $20.00, not much would be lost if I hated it. Luckily, I don't.

   I have only been using it for a short time, but I can already feel a difference. My wrist, for example, isn't getting sore as I sit here and work on this post. I actually haven't noticed my wrist at all since I started using the vertical mouse, which is something I couldn't say with the regular mouse. I even switched back to the old one for a bit just to check, and the difference is night and day.

  There is definitely a slight learning curve involved in getting used to the new hand orientation, but despite what a lot of users said to the contrary, it was pretty quick and painless for me. After about 10 minutes I was using it as easily and thoughtlessly as I had ever used a mouse. It's embarassing to admit as a photographer, but I wasn't able to get a good clear picture to show how it fits in the hand, mostly since I am right handed and do not own a selfie stick. The nearest thing I can relate to how it feels is that it seems rather like the feeling your hand has in a catchers' mitt or a baseball glove, grip wise, just without the external leather.

   The mouse itself is a nice texture, giving a pretty comfortable grip. The neutral wrist angle is comfortable as well, even without any other changes to the ergonomics of my desk. the wireless worked with my macbook pro (yosemite 10.10.3) right out of the box. The one caveat is that this is technically a five button mouse. In addition to the left/right click buttons and the scroll wheel, there are two thumb buttons that are supposed to be FWD/BACK buttons. They do not function right out of the box as FWD/Back, at least not with my setup. The scroll wheel picked up the same hotkey functionality from my regular mouse, left and right click were the same, as expected. The back button on my setup mimics my F3 hotkey to display all windows, but the FWD key does nothing. From the reviews I read before buying, I knew the FWD/Back buttons didn't work on Mac without doing some hacking and installing some other programs (which I haven't done, so I won't speak on any further) so having one do something was a nice surprise. I may even be able to change that by playing with the preferences, but it isn't something I need so I haven't worried about it.

   Tracking was flawless, whether just on my desk or on the Mouse Rug I usually prefer to use. The mouse is setable to 800, 1200 or 1600 DPI, via a selector button on the mouse. This brings me to my only actual criticism of the mouse- there is no way to know which setting it is on at any given time, so not really sure how much use the button or the changeability actually is. I am not a graphics designed, and for detail work I am using my Wacom Pen Tablet, so it isn't a deal breaker for me, I am just a geek and would prefer to know which settings I am in. The only other minor gripe is that batteries weren't included. Luckily, as a photographer I tend to have tons of spare batteries lying around. It takes 2 AAA batteries, easy to change, and supposedly long life, but that report will have to wait.

   If anything changes after extended use I will update this, otherwise for $20 this mouse has already given my wrist enough relief to be well worth the money, and if you are having carpal tunnel issues it's definitely worth a try.

Naked Women, Richard Prince, Peter Lik, the meaning of art, and a bait and switch. (not necessarily in that order)

  Spoiler alert: There will be no images of Naked Women in this post. However; my last post, which had the words "naked women" in the title, quickly became the most read post in my blog history, thus teaching me the truth of a lesson every advertising executive since the dawn of time has learned, sex sells. When Og and Trog the cavemen first started selling fire, they probably did it using a naked cavegirl as their grunts-model. (guessing this happened before speech, so no spokesmodel). But anyway, here's the bait and switch portion of this post. I do occasionally take pictures of sexy, scantily clad men as well, so here is some eye candy for those who enjoy that sort of thing:

    So, now that you have gotten your daily dose of photo hotness out of the way, even if it wasn't what you expected, now we get to what this post is really about. 

   The news this past week, at least in the photography and internet privacy circles, has been Richard Prince selling slightly altered images from other people's instagram feeds for insane prices at high end New York Galleries. There's a whole mess of articles and follow ups on this one, and whether it was a copywrite violation or not. Based on what I have read, as much as it sucks to think, it seems like he was within the letter of the law. You can read all that and come to your own conclusions, that isn't what this post is about. 

   This post is about my thought process, which went something like this:

First though: "WTF?"

Second thought: "Seriously, WTF?" Ok, let's skip down a few because it took me a bit to get past that stage."

15th though: "Some one was willing to pay $90K for a picture they could have gotten for free on the internet..... WTF?"

   And this is where my thoughts started to get into something I thought may be worth a blog post. What makes something ART? And what makes that ART worth $90,000. Or, in another recent story, what makes a photograph worth $6.5 Million, like Peter Lik's recent sale. 

   I am not even remotely prepared to address the question of what makes something art. I have so many different opinions on this even in my own head, that I don't feel qualified in any way to put out a definition that would stick. The closest I can come is that ART is something you make not just because you want to, but because you have to. Your soul can't rest until it's done. If it meets that criteria, then it's art, whether any particular viewer likes it or not, whether anyone is willing to pay anything for it or not. ART doesn't need to make a statement, other than, "here I am." 

    Once upon a time, in the technical theatre days of my youth, someone swept up the backstage area of the theatre. On a whim, these techies (some booze and drugs may have been involved, I can neither confirm nor deny that) took the resultant pile of sawdust, screws, random pieces parts and whatnot, superglued it into a giant ball, spray painted it various colors, gave it a super pretentious name like, "cosmic disentegration of the universe," entered it into an art competition, and won. Now, was this art, or just silliness? Is there a distinction? Was the statement- "you art judges are all F'd up and stupid?" This leads me back to Richard Prince. I saw that he has a history of doing this sort of thing, testing the limits of copywrite and such. I have to wonder if he started out on a bender and just threw some slightly derivative work of something public out there and said, "no way is anyone stupid enough to actually pay me for this.... right.... holy shit... someone is actually that stupid.... mother fuck... seriously.... ok.... if you are actually willing to pay me for stealing shit I guess I'll keep doing it..."

   Which leads to the question of what is ART worth. The only answer I have been able to come up with is that your art is worth whatever you can convince some jackass..... er.... art lover.... to pay you for. If you have the balls to throw some slightly altered instagram screen captures up on a wall, someone else is willing to give you gallery space for it, and someone is willing to pay you $90k for it, then I guess that's what your art is worth. Once, in a gallery, I saw- this is not exaggeration, a completely BLANK canvas. I think it was roughly 3x4ft, with the title "WHITE" and a $5k price tag. Seriously. Someone had the sheer balls to put a completely blank canvas on a wall and see if they could get someone to pay $5k for something they probably got at the Micheal's five cent sale. 

  Which leads me to what the hell I am doing wrong and why I think I will have trouble making it as an artist. I simply don't have that sort of chutzpah. I feel like I need to give you some sort of value for your money. When I shoot artists performing, it's hard for me to ask for money, because it's something I enjoy and would do for free if I had some other source of money that was sufficient to allow me to do so. So when it comes to charging, I will base my prices on what I need to get by, not what I think I can get from the audience. I am just not built that way. I'll add a modifier because time spent shooting is time I am not spending with my family, but it's still time spent doing something I love. I don't want to strike it rich, all I want to do is make enough to take care of my family doing something I love. 

  Which brings me back to Peter Lik and his super sale. A year ago, before he became news, I randomly stumbled into his gallery in Waikiki while my ship was in port in Pearl Harbor. I was blown away by his work. His shots were beautiful, but even beyond that, he had developed some incredible ways to print and display his work. That's what you can't see in the internet articles. His large scale prints looked almost 3D, and managed to shine even in the dark, without the traditional glow in the dark paint effect. When I saw that one of his prints went for $6.5 mil, I wasn't really that shocked. He put in the time. He did the work. He came up with his own unique style and his own printing processes. He built the galleries, he did the marketing. He made a bet on his own skills, abilities and images, and he won big. He earned it, more power to him. 

   Richard Prince is a hack. Maybe he is trying to make some sort of statement about copywright and public domain, I really don't care. He is making a living stealing other people's work and using the veneer of making an artistic statement to justify it. If this was the first time he'd done it I'd be more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but really I think he falls into the same category as patent trolls and most of the lawyers you see advertising on tv looking for class action clients. I think he has just realized that not only can he get away with it, he can also make a killing getting away with it. (Mr. Prince, if you are reading this and want to disagree, feel free to shoot me a message and we'll discuss it over a beer- your treat, you can afford it). But I don't think what he does is art. Lik, on the other hand, despite the insane prices on his work, I think really does it for the art. I think he'd still be shooting landscapes even if people weren't buying them. (Mr. Lik, if you're reading this and wish to discuss anything over drinks, same offer applies- I know you can afford to buy) Maybe Prince would still be stealing your instagram photos if he wasn't getting paid to do it, but that's just creepy. 

   Anyway, I know this is not one of my most coherent posts, but my thoughts on art are a jumble of stuff, all over the map, like art itself. And, like art, even if it isn't perfect, sometimes you just have to put it out there because it's tearing its' way out of you whether you want it to or not. So you give it to the world as it is. I think all good art does make the viewer question something, even if that question is an generic as "why," or "WTF," so on that note I will leave with two images and a question for you: Are these ART? 

  The first one, in the spirit of Richard Prince, is a slightly edited copy of someone else's art, in this case an edited picture of a painting someone else made. So, is my copy of some else's work art? What if I gave it some pretentious title, say, "Cosmic Swirly," and listed it for $50k? Then is it ART?

 The second, in the spirit of Peter Lik, is only stolen in that I saw something in nature that I thought was beautiful, in this case a single leaf dangling by a strand of spider web, spinning in the breeze, and took a picture of it, which I then edited and tried to make into something beautiful. If it was hanging in a gallery space I bought in some major city along side more of my work, would it be worth millions? 

   One thing I am sure of is that art raises questions. So I would love to hear yours, and am always open to serious, or even whimsical, discussion of any of my opinions- as long as you're buying. Until then, I will keep posting about NAKED WOMEN, because even if it isn't art, it sells!

   

Fire, Naked Women and Life Shifts... aka what have I been up to lately...

  I'll start with this image, not because it's one of my best, but for two other reasons. First, it's safe for work, unlike most of the rest of the images in this post. Second, this is an image of the last sunset at sea I will likely see in the role of a Naval Officer. It's been a heavy last few weeks.

  For those of you just tuning in, I am a career Naval Surface Warfare Officer. My photography passion started long before that job and will continue long after, but that's been my primary work and source of lively hood since 1993. Last December I pretty much found out my career was not going to go much further, and a month or so ago I found out that what will probably be my final tour will take me away from San Diego and the life I have built here. May was my last month out to sea on my final ship. Leaving the ship I have mixed feelings. I am glad that I won't ever have to deploy for long stretches away from my family ever again (aside from two months of training coming up on the east coast, enroute to my new assignment). But I will miss the sea itself, and the feeling of being in control of a 100,000 ton nuclear powered airport and the 6000 people onboard. Honestly, there are a lot of things I was never good at in my career, which rightfully limited how far I could go, but one thing I can do better than almost anyone else out there was drive a ship. While I may suck at powerpoint, 3M paperwork and the admin BS, put my on the bridge or in Combat and stand back, there's not many better.

   How are my limitations as a Surface Warfare Officer germain to my photography? Well, there are interesting parallels. What was I good at? Ship driving and watch standing. Ship Handling is a mix of science and art. There are general rules, techniques and formulas that can get you through 85 percent of it. But that last 15 percent is all art... you have to understand the rules and the science well enough to know when it works and when it doesn't, but ultimately you have to feel the ship under your feet and learn to react before you can see things happening. I can't describe it, but it's the feeling of, "wait for it.... wait for it... NOW!" but no one else feels the now moment and no science can point to it. Seems similar to photography or any other art, in that you have to know the technical side, but applying the science becomes a matter of art that you just have to feel in yourself.

  Anyway, in the last couple of months I found out I was moving, I eloped to Vegas, and did a lot of shooting, and being stuck on a ship for a month away from the world gave me time to get caught up and start to process all that.

    So, after years of living in San Diego, finally decided to shoot a model at Blacks' Beach. Other that the stupid amount of stairs to get down and up, especially with 50 pounds of camera and lighting gear strapped to me, it was a great place to shoot.

    The long flat expanse of calm water gave me an idea, I really wanted to get a fire spinner out there, I was hoping to get a really good reflection in the nice, flat water. Alas, the night I had a model and the time available, the tides and weather didn't cooperate, and I couldn't get the perfect mirror I wanted, but we still got some good shots.

  I also did a promo shoot for a Fringe Festival show that is being putting on by (and performed by) a group of my friends and fellow circus people. This was a great shoot, the only down side to it was I found out I am not as immune to poison oak as I thought I was. It has never bothered me before, even though I have waded through it numerous times doing search and rescue and just hiking, but I guess I finally got enough to overcome my resistance, because my legs were mounds of itchy pain for a month after this shoot, but it was worth it because we got some great stuff.

   Most of these were lit with speedlights balancing the sun, just like the beach shots earlier in this post, but I also decided to experiment a little bit and see what I could get with just some nice golden hour natural light for a few shots.

   It was a fun afternoon of shooting, and totally worth the itchy hell that followed. I also got an email from a burlesque dancer who really liked the shots I did of one of her shows, so she wanted to hire me to do a shoot with her for her web site. Had a blast, again, did some speedlight and experimented with some natural light as well, and really got to take advantage of my 85mm/1.4 for some classic boudoir shots.

 Kept the hotel room we shot in for a mini stay-cation with the wife and our son, managed to get a great shoot in with the wife, but sorry, you don't get to see those shots ;-P.

  In addition to the shooting and editing, as past of moving onwards and upwards in the Arcanum, I had to come up with a vision of where I see myself in the future. Strangely hard, but appropriate as I contemplated my impending move. So, as I get ready to head to my new home in San Antonio, where I will probably retire from the Navy and look to establish myself a local photographer, I had to figure out exactly what I want to shoot and who I want my market to be. This was much harder than I initially anticipated.

  After a lot of thought, what I realized was that while shooting beautiful, naked women was fun, it was really just a bonus perk but not what was really important to me. I want to shoot artists, both performing and standing still. I want to be the guy that the local circus performers, burlesque dancers, yogis and theater artists call when they want pictures. I want to shoot their live shows, I want to shoot awesome projects with them, I want to shoot headshots for them that aren't just standard cookie cutter stuff. I want to be the guy they call to capture their soul, their art, their expression. I'd like to make enough income from photography to break even, but I think ultimately I am more motivated by recognition of artistry than payment. Money is nice, but respect and admiration is better, that being said, money is necessary to survival.

   Which leads to moving. I get to re-establish myself in a new market. This is the epitome of the whole challenge = opportunity theme. I will have to establish myself as part of the artistic community not only in San Antonio, but neighboring Austin. The bright side is, none of the artists there will be my friends and family like they are here, so I will be able to establish a paying relationship from day one. But I will need to build a clientele, I want to become the go to guy in the area for any dancer, artist or performer who want shots done, either action or posed for their portfolio.

   This leads to a lot of work on my part. I get to spend the next couple of months totally re-working my portfolio and my site to cater to the photographer I want to be. Focusing on festivals, artists and performance primarily.  I even have a good tear sheet to start, the artist that made my trapeze saw the pics from the bridge shoot I did a while back and asked to use them for her publicity, so I am slowly getting known as a circus shooter. Then I get to get in the market and make connections and see what happens.

 In the mean time, I am going to try and shoot what I can while I am traveling, but posting might be intermittent until I get re-established and come up with a new home and a new normal. Until then, the journey continues. Click on.

I just discovered that I am an Available Light photographer....

  "Available Light Photography." In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "you keep using that word.... I do no think it means what you think it means....." When most people use the term "available light," what they really mean is ambient light, or whatever light exists already in the situation you are in.

   Not me. What I mean is, if the light source is available and I need it, I will freaking use it to get the images I want! If the sun is all I have available and it does the job just fine, cool, I can live with that. If I need to add a reflector, I will. If I have my speed lights with me, then they count as available, and I will use them to get what I want.

   If all I have with me is the flashlight on my iPhone and I want to get a shot in a pitch black room, I will use the iPhone. It's available, it's light, it must be available light! I have used headlamps, car headlights, flashlights, the flash from someone else's phone.... I'll take it.

  So, let the truth ring out from the hills, I AM AN AVAILABLE LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHER! I will shout it from the mountaintops. (ok, maybe not, I am too tired to climb any mountains tonight).

  I actually think the only true "natural light" photographers are landscape shooters or street photographers. If you are directing your subject so stand somewhere, i.e. near the window, or somewhere they weren't when you initially saw them, you are still manipulating the light. Everything else is just a matter of degree.

Disclaimer: I will still avoid using flash at live performances if at all possible. As long as the lighting designer has provided some form of available light for me to use, I'll try to stay true to their vision, and not blind the performers and put them in danger.

So what the heck have I been up to lately?

 I know you are wondering, since it's been a while between posts. All three of you reading this were waiting with baited breath for the next installment, so here's an update about what's new in my world,  sorry I kept you so long. 

  Actually, my unique reader count just passed 30,000. I am pretty excited about that. Still building slowly, which is all I could hope for from this blog. Several people are clicking through and buying things via referral links, again, it's only a few dollars a month, but it's also moving in the right direction. 

   My Book, while pretty much staying flat, is now also available as an audiobook, and has sold two copies. I didn't really think about trying to make an audiobook version, because the visual seems integral to a photography book, but turns out it was totally free to do, I just split the audio sales with the voice talent, so I figured what the heck.

   My stock sales are slow, but consistent, again, only a couple of bucks a month, but it's better than nothing. 

   I had my application approved and am now a photographer on Model Society, and one of my shots is in the rotation on their cover page. I saw that site a couple of years ago when an awesome aerialist/model/yogi friend of mine was featured. There are lots of amazing images all over the site and some really inspirational photographers. I only recently felt like I was doing good enough work to put something on there, so getting accepted and having a shot picked for the cover rotation was nice validation. 

   I also finished my first ten levels in the Arcanum, and am now moving into the first Sphere as an apprentice there. 

   More important, I have been getting asked to do shoots, and am actually even getting paid for them! WOOHOO!!! 

    I had an aerial duo ask me to do some promo shots for them, so we went out to a really awesome bridge nearby, hung a trapeze, and went to work. We had to shoot in pretty much the worst mid-day light because of how our schedules worked out, but I think we did ok. And since they were so darn buff, I even got to play a little bit with some dodging and burning when it came time to edit. 

  We actually had a stylist for this shoot, one of my friends, a fellow aerialist and an awesome model. She is also quite a fan of Black Milk Clothing. So, when your stylist is an awesome model, you have a great location, some extra time, and she happens to be wearing some fabulous stuff, what else do you do but keep shooting? She spent years perfecting her supermodel hair flip, and when I looked at the back of the camera to see how we timed it, I pretty much said, "it's a wrap, we aren't getting better than this."

  Black Milk agreed and put the shot in their online feeds. Do tear sheets still count when they are screen grabs? Whatever, I'll take it. She's one of my favorite people to work with on either side of the camera and this hair flip was epic. 

   The next shoot I had the pleasure of doing was with an aerialist and professional ballerina friend of mine. She is also an amazing photographer so I was stoked that she would choose me to work with when she wanted to get in front of the camera. She wanted classical, well lit shots, so we grabbed some down time in the aerial gym and spent a few hours playing around. I think we got some good stuff, and I am definitely getting better at lighting my subject without spilling onto the background, so editing is getting much easier. 

   I have decided that I need to invest in some serious studio strobes as soon as I can afford to, especially when shooting aerialists. Speed lights are great, but when I want to do very specific lighting on a moving target, I think I really want the help of modeling lights. A lot of the frames wound up not being ideal because the light was focused for one spot and my model either spun or was at a slightly different height, just enough to put the focus to another area of the physique. I am getting used to the throws of the speed lights with my various modifiers, but modeling lights would make the process much easier. (and yeah, I know the framing on that last shot was bad, I cut off her hand.... it actually was just a lighting test show, but it turned out to be one of my favorites from the set... moral of the story is pay attention to detail even when you think it's just a throwaway click....) She's shot with Joe McNally before, who is pretty much the god of Nikon speed lighters, and apparently he liked this set, so SCHWING!!!!!!! 

   Finally, for this post, another aerialist friend of mine decided she wanted some studio shots, not just the live performance shots I had taken of her. She was worried that she really wasn't photogenic at all and usually took horrible pictures. Still working on the edits of the full set, but I think I was able to prove her wrong.

   This shoot was fun, and easier than the ballerina because this model brought her husband along so we had a third person to turn her and spin her into the right positions between frames. I think I am going to make a positioner mandatory on aerial shoots from here on out, not sure how I ever survived without one. And, once again, my favorite stylist/model/aerialist also showed up to help out, and we couldn't resist some clowning around... I mean... testing the lighting..... during outfit changes.... 

   

    My fiance set me up with one of her friends who is an awesome yogi at the studio she works for that wanted some shots. Didn't try to do anything crazy with the lighting, just wanted some classic shots of a seriously hard core Ashtangi. Learned that a lot of times a technically correct pose doesn't necessarily lend itself to the most flattering photo posing, I think a lot of the yoga shots the world sees sacrifice form for the sake of a good image. It was hard trying to get good angles of the best poses. But I think we managed to get a few where the pose and the shot worked together and looked amazing. 

   Of course, because it's me and I like to have fun on shoots, I even got the hard core yogi to break into a smile and dance a bit, thinking the camera wasn't ready....

   I might get smacked in the head for posting that one, but I have learned that if I can connect with my subjects and get them laughing and having fun, even on a serious shoot, we're gonna get good images. If we can't laugh together and make some sort of connection, it doesn't matter how great the model is or how good a photographer I am, the images will wind up flat and missing that little something that makes them sparkle. We wound up having so much fun that my finance even jumped in for a few shots as well... 

    So, to summarize, having a hell of a lot of fun, doing lots of shoots with some awesome friends, and starting to even make a little bit of money for it. Life is good. I also did a couple NSFW shoots with models I hadn't worked with before, one ballerina in the studio and another outdoors on the beach. Still editing those so consider this a tease, more coming soon, until then, that's what's up with me, I missed you too, let's try to stay in touch more often. 

How to speed up your workflow without crystal meth..... (Photo Mechanic Review)

   So it's only been a couple on months since I switched my workflow out completely and started using Lightroom instead of Aperture. I am just getting the hang of LR and my new way of working. So why would I want to screw my workflow up completely again? Quite simply: SPEED!

    When it comes to editing, faster is better. This isn't as important when I am working up a personal project and have no deadline, but when I am shooting event gigs, even if there is no specified deadline, speed is important. Getting the images up as soon as possible after an event is key, the longer it takes me to put images up following an event, the less traction those image sets get me, so I am always looking for ways to improve my turnaround time without sacrificing quality and attention to detail. Sure, it would be really fast just to post all the in camera JPEG conversions from a shoot, but that isn't my style. I want to at least present my best and do some workup even if there is a tight timeline.

    Lightroom and LR mobile was a step in the right direction, and a great timesaver because I could cull images on my iPad the next day at work while I was bored sick in meetings. But I kept hearing about this speed demon of a program that photojournalists swear by, and even got a great word from Joe McNally; Photo Mechanic. 

   Photo Mechanic isn't an image editor, it's an image sorter and image culler. This quick review won't even touch a portion of the capabilities resident in this freaking awesome too. So, what the hell is it? Quite simply it's the fastest, most useful import and sorting tool I have ever seen. And I have only used the free trial version so far.

   Basically, Photo Mechanic destroys any other image handling program I have seen when it comes to importing, sorting, categorizing and adding meta data to your image files. Shot five cards worth of images? No problem, PM can ingest (what it calls the import function) as many cards simultaneously as you have card readers.

   Meta Data control is simply unbelievable. Yeah, most programs like LR or aperture let you set up IPTC presets to apply on import, just like PM. But photomechanical ads variables. You can build a presets that let you automatically build dynamically changing captions, titles, file names.... etc. You can even build cheat sheets for your captions so that you can use shortcuts to make your captions specific to each image.

    Even if you aren't a photojournalist with a tight deadline, Photo Mechanic still offers the advantage of speed. Unless you build full resolution previews of all your images on import, either LR or Aperture can still be slow as hell to work with when you just want to view your images and go through them quickly for culling. Even if you have a really fast processor and lots of RAM, if you are shooting with a high resolution sensor (heaven forbid the D800 and its' 36mp 14 bit raw files) you will be waiting forever each time you scroll forward and the preview has to render. It isn't a long wait for each file, but it adds up, and is really frustrating when you are in a hurry and trying to get an image set edited fast.

   Rumor had it that Photo Mechanic eliminated this issue. It uses the built in JPEG preview contained within the raw file and lets you blast through the culling process. Or so they say. Camera Bits (who makes PM) offers a 30 day free trial, so I decided to see how PM could work for me. I was pretty skeptical, since LR mobile was already shortening my workflow significantly.

   Downloaded and installed the trial, and got set to test it out. I was initially not that impressed. Turns out this was my fault. When I do my imports into LR, I convert my raw files into DNGs. For my initial tests of PhotoMechanic I was using it to work on folders of already imported/converted images.

   This was a mistake. Photo Mechanic does not seem to play well with DNGs. When I tried to go through a contact sheet (PM's term for a folder full of images, throwback to old school negative editing days) of DNGs, it was horribly slow to render images, and if I attempted to change any meta data, PM would lock up and pretty much die. So I was initially underwhelmed, to say the least. But everyone was talking about how fast it was... figured I had to be missing something. And I was.

   My next shoot, instead on importing images using LR and converting to DNG, I just copied the .nef files directly from my camera card to a holding folder on my drive, then used PM to go through those files. DAMN! This was what everyone was talking about. PM ate the nef files like they were candy and would respond almost faster than I could click the scrolling arrows or change any meta data settings. Just to double check, I then took the culled image set and imported them to LR and converted them to DNGs and then re-opened them in PM... and found that the same slowdown and crash happened.

  I am not a coder, not sure what is going on under the hood, but my theory is that when LR converts a raw file into a DNG, it either throws out the built in jpeg preview that PM runs on, or puts in into a format that PM can't recognize, this preventing Photo Mechanic from being able to speed render and work with those files.

   So- here is my new workflow. When I am done with a shoot, I do the initial import using Photo Mechanic's Ingest function. I take advantage of the meta data functionality in PM, which seems to me light years ahead of what I can do in LR. I then cull the images and make my initial selections and put them into a sub folder all within PM. Last thing is that I crop all the images in PM- it is light years faster and easier than in LR. Once I have done all the initial bulk work in PM, I go into LR and run an import/convert to DNG on just the files that survived the initial cull. Once this set is imported into LR, I take the rejects and toss them onto a scratch drive, just in case. As that drive fills up the oldest rejects will get deleted completely. I figure if no one has asked for them by then, they never will. Then I proceed to edit the survivors using my normal LR and Photoshop workflow.

   You would think that adding an additional layer of software and basically doing a double import would add time to the workflow, but it actually creates a significant time savings. The closest equivalent example I can make is the difference between using just PhotoShop or adding Lightroom to PS in your workflow. Before LR, you had to convert each images from raw to another format, then open each image in PS one at a time and do all your edits, then move on to the next image. Adding LR let you look at multiple images simultaneously, do basic editing a hell of a lot faster, and even apply batch settings to a group of images.

   Photo Mechanic does add another layer, but just like batch adjusting exposure or WB in LR is faster than doing it individually to each image in PS, Photo Mechanic lets you caption, rate, select and crop images significantly faster, easier and more powerfully than LR does.

   For a personal shoot with a model where I may only wind up with a couple hundred images and no particular timeline to get them edited and shipped out, I may skip the photomechanic step and just use LR. But for a conference like I shot this week where I wound up with 1400 images to sort through, caption, cull, edit and post I definitely appreciate the speed and power Photo Mechanic offers. It helps me win the speed race and get quality images back to the clients as fast as possible; fast enough that the event is still fresh in the minds of the audience, and my high quality, well edited and curated images can actually get out and posted in time to compete head to head with the crappy cell phone shots that were on Facebook and instagram 30 seconds after the event. And that may just prove to be worth its' wait in gold.

    Even if nothing else, not having to wait on the dan skinny beach ball is worth the price of admission. If you have all the time in the world to edit and deliver images from your shoots, save the $150 and don't pick up Photo Mechanic. But if you are shooting lots of images and operating on deadlines, or just appreciate every second you can spend playing with your family instead of waiting on images to load so you can get through the aftermath of a shoot, then photo mechanic will prove to be well worth what you spend on because you will get back the only thing in life you can never get more of- TIME. It's the only thing that matters, and photo mechanic lets you use yours more efficiently. If you're not sure if it will help you or not, they give you a month free to try it out, so you may as well give it a shot. I did, and there's no going back. It's awesome!

UPDATE: The people at Camera Bits (who make Photomechanic) apparently read this review. They have reached out to me and said PM should not be any slower with the DNG files than it is with the NEF version. I just sent them a couple of sets of files and all my system info, so maybe my issue with the dngs will get resolved, but even if not I am really impressed with their customer service and dedication to their product.

UPDATE 2: Camera bits took a look at my files and sent me an answer. Turns out I was close to correct in my theory. My DNG files did not have the embedded jpeg preview that PM uses. But this was because I had lightroom set to not built and include jpeg previews into my DNG files. I changed that setting, did a test conversion with the previews embedded, and PM eats those and spits them out just as fast as the unconverted raw files. So, awesome program and beyond stellar customer service and support. Definitely worth the money for both time saved and user experience.