Timing is Everything...

If “timing is everything” then so far this year I’ve been blessed. I ended my partnership with Savannah’s The Gallery earlier in the year, with the anticipation of pushing my work into other markets more receptive to the nude figure. I sold my share of the partnership to another photographer and at the close of business January 31st, removed the last of my unsold inventory from the building.

This past Tuesday, I received a call from a friend asking if I knew what had happened with The Gallery. When I told her I wasn’t aware of anything happening, she said during the latter part of the preceding week, there had been a fire in the building. Now, the space was completely empty.

Huh?!?

I called one of the current owning partners, painter Bobby Bagley to find out what in hell had happened.

The Gallery is located in an old Savannah building built sometime in the late 1800's, and occupies the ground floor and basement of the structure. On the second and third floors are apartments which rent mostly to college students. Bobby explained that in the early evening hours on a Thursday of the preceding week, a tenant in one of the apartments was smoking a cigarette and left the room to take a shower. The cigarette was not fully extinguished and somehow found its way onto combustible material, and the fire erupted. The fire supposedly did a number on the apartment where it started, and the automatic sprinkler system in the building activated. Fortunately, no one was injured or worse.

According to Bobby and much to my amazement, little work in The Gallery was damaged. The floors, walls, and ceilings however, are another matter. I’ve since spoken with another of the owning partners and she confirmed the water damage is significant. The space is now completely empty and undergoing repairs.

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The past two and a half weeks have been quite busy. In addition to some minor continuances of the hard drive crash, the necessities of the day job have kept me hopping. The foreseeable future offers little relief, and time for camera and subject will be sparse. If it sounds like I’m complaining, well, I suppose in a way I am. But make no mistake, I’m grateful to be busy and have paying work to do.

I’m hopeful to get some edits done from my two weeks ago shoot with Megan K once an early business trip, which begins tomorrow, is concluded.

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One from an early natural light session with Anna S.

Tripping the Light Confusion...

 Saturday’s session with new model Megan K was the first time I’d been in studio in several months and I must admit; I was surprised at how rusty I was. Nonetheless, it was a good session and several good images will come from it. I’ve managed a cursory first edit, but with the work-week starting, the day job is rearing its ugly yet reasonably well-paying head. Please be patient for a few days.

In the post preceding this one, I mentioned that when working in studio I feel I have more control over the environment. Perhaps I jinxed myself by writing about it beforehand, but rusty or not, this shoot started with more confusion than anything else. It wasn’t an issue of the environment not being under control, but one of me not being in control of the environment. In reality, the difficulties were minor and easily resolved; for example, there was the overhead and somewhat hard to access monolight that wouldn’t power-up, which turned out to be unplugged. Most frustrating though, was in the first few images light was coming in from an unknown source and knocking down shadows on the model. It wasn’t an overpowering light; in fact, I would have been hard-pressed to create a more precise fill.

My assistant and I tried all sorts of remedies to no avail; among them turning off all lights in the building, even those in rooms isolated and away from the shooting space. I began to question the accuracy of my light meter and camera settings. Finally, my assistant realized a monolight head tucked away in a corner behind my shooting position had been left on, but with the modeling light turned off. It was close enough and in proper orientation to slave off of my main light, and fired each time I pressed the shutter.

Once these little things were behind us, we pressed ahead and did good work.

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A Systems Crash Update…

Things seem to be going well. No new quirks have surfaced and I’m getting caught up. I’ve switched from IE to Mozilla’s FireFox, which I like tremendously, though it’s taking a bit of getting used to.

My office and ‘darkroom’ upgrade will happen this fall. Generally, my idea is to use an inexpensive laptop or ‘Netbook’ style system for the day job stuff and assemble the best, most powerful desktop system for my photographic work. I was hopeful to switch to a Mac; however, many of the day job clients require me to use proprietary software, which is of course, Windows based. For that reason, I’m afraid I’m stuck with Windows. The upside is Windows 7 seems to be a stable platform. Still, it’s a new platform. That’s the main reason I’m delaying until late fall to make a move.

My research for the upgrade will begin soon. I’ll write about it aplenty, I’m sure.

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Here’s another from Michelle R’s shoot for The Bolton Street Sessions, silvery and soft.

More or Less...

Recovering from the crash has been more problematic than I’d bargained for. Fortunately, I’m back at 100%, more or less, and everything seems to be working. More or less.

Since the system was wiped and reloaded, I’m dealing with odd little quirks that I’d never experienced prior to the crash. For example, the speaker adjustment controls work, but I get no display of the volume slider; the Microsoft Word cut & paste commands don’t work consistently; and I lost every single address in my Outlook email address book.

Having said that, at least I’m able to do my job(s). Now the real fun begins. From three solid days of downtime, I know I’ll be in catch-up mode for a week or more. The office and photography system upgrade I’ve written about so much is indeed in my future and should happen this fall. Accordingly, I’ll try to limit my laments against technology, but I make no promises.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that my computer didn’t show me the “Blue-Screen-of-Death” as such, but gave me the “Blue-Screen-Finger” instead.

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As you may guess, not much has been happening in terms of photography. I have a studio shoot scheduled for this coming Saturday with a lovely, brand new model and I’m looking forward to it immensely. It seems that most of my thinking about photography has invariably led to me thinking of the crash and my stored data, and I suppose that’s not a bad thing. But after dealing with all of last week’s events, getting back in studio with my cameras and a fresh new body with which to work is just the break I need.

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Here’s something different with Anna, shot in the fall of ’08.

Back From the Brink

I've made it back, and amazingly, all seems to be intact. I owe a grateful 'thank you' to the geeks at Tweaks by Geeks for their efforts.

Here's the entry I wrote on the night of the crash.

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Last Sunday's session with mom to be Corinne B. went well. In a few weeks, Temperance Imogen Olivia B. will join the rest of us on Planet Earth.

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Fellow blogger and photographer Dave Rudin has been writing of his recent experiences with technology, most of them bad. I can relate; last summer, one of our television sets was taken out by lightning. Shortly afterward, my Windows XP system crashed, and crashed hard.

The television was toast. It would turn on, but not turn off unless the plug was pulled, but it continued to work for a day or two. Then, it began to smoke and buzz as soon as it was plugged in. In contrast, I was able to recover just about everything from the computer crash in mostly good working order, with the exception of two embedded applications: Adobe Bridge and Apple Quicktime. I also lost the drivers for the CD/DVD drive, but was able to download them and get the drive working again. My biggest loss, however, was Adobe Bridge.

Many people have told me they don't like Bridge. Coming from a film background, I work in PhotoShop as I did in the darkroom, with one image at a time. For me, Bridge was the digital equivalent of a light table, where I sorted and culled my negatives. For three days following the crash, I was on the phone with Adobe and Microsoft tech support trying to sort out the problem. There was even a three way conference call between us, at one point. After a cumulative 14 hours on the phone, the final assessment by both techs was to either wipe the hard drive, do a System Restore, or replace the computer. After all, the launch of Windows 7 had just been announced. I didn't like the idea of completely wiping the drive and am planning to upgrade this year anyway, so I opted for the System Restore.

In the absence of Bridge I began using the Windows Picture Viewer to sort my images, but found it extremely limiting. I couldn't see RAW files at all, only JPEG's, and the abilities to label and tag images were non-existent Since my anticipated system upgrade isn't financially viable for the foreseeable future, I began searching for a basic third-party image browser that was "Bridge-like."

I liked what ACDsee and other similar programs offered, but in order to do what I wanted to do with them, particularly where RAW files were concerned, I'd have to purchase one of the "Pro" versions.The costs were more than I was willing to pay. Eventually, after multiple postings on several photography forums and boards, I settled on the 'FastStone Image Viewer' free shareware through C-Net.

Much to my surprise, I'm quite happy with it. It's not exactly 'Bridge Like' but it's close enough so that the learning curve hasn't been an issue. If you're looking for something similar; a basic yet reasonably efficient image browser, I highly recommend it. Did I mention it's free? (You can make a donation to the developers through C-Net if you wish.)

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Over the last few days, and for a few to come, I'm dealing with shoot planning and all it entails; the coordination of studio schedules and/or locations, assistants, models, etc. As mentioned in the previous post, I'll have a couple of weeks break from being behind the camera, as the next session is set for February 20.

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Here are another two of Michelle R. from The Bolton Street Sessions.

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A Post Crash Note:

Adobe Bridge and Quicktime are working once again! Even so, if I was asked to recommend an after market image browser, I'd still go with the FastStone Image Viewer.

I have to say, in the interest of full disclosure, that opting for a System Restore after the first crash was a mistake. Wipe the drive; it's the only way to be sure.

Still Waiting...

Today should be the day I have the computer back, hopefully with a squeeky clean hard drive and fresh Windows XP up and running. I talked to the shop late yesterday afternoon and they were continuing to back-up data from the hard drive onto one of their servers, so all seemed to be going according to plan.

I'm hoping to pick it up before noon today, and then spend the afternoon reloading stuff. I'm optimistic, but openly confess to sitting here with my fingers crossed.

More to follow - please stay tuned!

Crash Update...

Well, some good news for a change.

The BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) I was experiencing is due to a broken chain of code in Windows. The tech explained that trying to repair the code is typically unsuccesful. His suggestion was to wipe the hard drive and reload. As I'm relying on his expertise, and understood very little of what he told me when he called to explain the problem, I'm inclined to agree.

He assured me that wiping the disc would solve the issue and that my data would be backed up and transferred, all done hopefully sometime today. Then, it's up to me to reload software/programs such as PhotoShop, Quickbooks, AVG, etc.

The last suggestion he made was for me to re-format my back-up drive, as I've likely been backing up corrupted data unknowingly, but I'm not too sure how comfortable I am in doing this. I'm especially uncomfortable continuing to use a drive that may have had corrupted data stored on it. For peace of mind's sake, a new external hard drive for system back-up may be in my future.

If all goes well, I'll have my pre-crash entry posted, along with more images from Bolton Street by tomorrow.

Stay tumed!

Crash and Burn...

I suppose the irony can't be ignored.

Last night, I worked some of the images from Michelle R's Bolton Street Sessions shoot, then drafted a blog entry, which I intended to get posted this morning after one more proof read and edit. The subject of the entry was the pains and agonies associated with modern technology. Fellow photographer Dave Rudin's blog, Figures of Grace, has been a tale of technological woe recently, and it was his own clashes with technology that started me thinking on this topic. Even more bizarre, at least from the perspective of timing, Dave began 'following' this blog yesterday. I'm happy to see him here as I've been a fan of his work for a long time.

We've all dealt with computer headaches, and I experienced a severe crash last year. Sometime last night, it happened again. I woke this morning to a computer in blue-screen-shock and it has, thus far, resisted all attempts at restoration. I've spirited my wife's laptop to a local Starbucks, where I now sit nursing a tall, sugar laden coffee. It's been a stressful morning. I suppose I should be grateful I swore off all drink some 15 years ago.

I've written before about my previous crash from which I emerged mostly whole, with almost no gaps in data and only two software apps not functioning. In another touch of irony, a good deal of the post drafted last night dealt with me finidng a suitable replacement for Adobe Bridge, one of the applications lost in the first crash. For some reason, this crash has me worried; I don't know why, but it seems much worse this time.

I'll find out just how bad it is later today. While I'm sure it's a wierd coincidence, one of the cooling fans has started to make a dreadful sound. The computer actually sounds like it's experiencing pain. Ill take the groaning machine to 'Tweaks by Geeks', (I love that name!), a shop of honest to goodness geeks that have worked miracles in the past. Stay tuned.

Needless to say, there are no pictures with today's entry.