The Economy Hits Home

As some of you may now I have kinda been Harrisburg Magazine's main squeeze when it comes to photography for the last few years. With the downturn in the publishing industry, and the downturn in the economy in general, there has come a perfect storm of sorts. Periodicals are facing their toughest times ever. With media migrating to the web, and the economy making companies think long and hard about parting with advertising dollars, Magazines, and other print media, are faced with making hard decisions. Just look in the news these days and see how many daily newspapers have folded, or filed for bankruptcy.

Take a gander at this link: News Paper Death Watch. The name alone implies what it is all about. The first post there declares: "The [UK] Guardian announced today that it will cease print publication after 188 years and go Twitter-only. All future content will be formatted to less than 140 characters and the newspaper has launched an ambitious effort to retweet its entire archive. " Can you imagine getting your daily news in clips shorter than a Text message? Wow!

So these hard times have finally hit home, I had wondered how long it would take. Bench Mark Group Media, parent company to Harrisburg Magazine, have had to make some hard decisions lately, and trying to cut costs for image production is one route the powers that be chose to go. They are still trying to decide what route exactly they will take, I may still shoot some images for them, but no where near what I had done in the past.

I shot many a story for them over our 10 year relationship, and have met a lot of people in that time. I used to Joke that I had photographed everyone in our city at least once. I made a lot of friends and shot a lot of interesting subject matter. And created, what I hope will be, some life long friendships with the employees in their office.

Over the next few months I plan to highlight some of my favorite stories that I shot for them. I will be creating slide shows and posting links to the images here on my blog.

Onward and Upward!

4/2/2009- Update

I have just heard from the publisher at Harrisburg Magazine that I will still be shooting images for the publication. Back on a more traditional freelance basis. This is good news. I can't wait to work on my next assignment for them, looks like it will be the cover of their June Regional Guide Issue.

Death of a Camera

Two weeks ago my camera, a Canon EOS 40D, developed a fatal problem. The much talked about (on web forums) Error 99. This issue started mild. One error. Than a couple of days later a few errors. At this point I researched the problem on line and found some DIY fixes. Tried them and it seemed to do the trick. Then a few a days later the problem returned with a vengeance. While shooting a job the camera kept telling me "Error 99..." about every other shot. Sometimes I was able to go for about 10 shots or so, than it would yell at me again. By the end of the job the camera completely quite on me.

YIKES

I called Canon immediately upon returning to my office. They had me try a few things out and determined it had to come in for repair. Off it went. Bad thing was, my camera is just out of the 1 year warranty period! another Yikes. However, the Canon repair person told me that they do not advertise this, but they usually give a 90 day grace period on out of warranty issues such as this! So I was saved from the expense of paying for the repair.

One other quip about this ordeal is the fact that I have belonged to the network of Canon professional users for 5 years, CPS. They offer expedited repairs for their members, as well as loaners. Well this year they changed some of their requirements. One of which was what equipment allowed you to qualify for membership. I have lots of Canon gear, all of which qualified last year... but not this year, some of the stuff they consider too old, even though I use it all to earn a living everyday. Because of this I had to go through regular repair channels and wait 10 days for the repair/return instead of the CPS time frame of 3 days!

Well, I just found out that my repaired main camera is on it's way back to me. Can't wait to start shooting with it again!

Marley and..... Well, John!

A few years back I had the pleasure of meeting John Grogan and photographing him for Lehigh Valley Magazine. He's a very personable guy. I have to admit (sorry, John!) that I have yet to read the famous book. But a few weeks back, a very good friend and I went to see the movie. What a ride! If you have ever owned/loved pets, especially hard-to-train ones, this story will pull on every string your heart has.


My buddy and writer/co-adventure seeker Luke Rettig wrote the story for Lehigh Valley Mag. Here is a link to his site, and the story he wrote. I encourage you to stroll through his site and take in his other stories; he is quite the wordsmith, and an excellent storyteller. I went back and reread what Luke wrote. That combined with seeing the movie inspired me to finally read John's book, which I've now purchased.



So here are a couple more shots I took of John and his family's new lab, Gracie. She is better behaved than Marley was, and no less loved. I had a great time photographing both of them. I encourage anyone who has yet to read the book, or see the movie, to take it in one way or the other or both. You won't be disappointed!

An Autumn Walk

I love water. I need to live close to it. The larger the body of water the better. The Susquehanna River is no slouch in full filling my needs here. Though it ain't the ocean!! But I can deal. Walking along a body of water is very therapeutic for me, I try to do it often. Though it does not happen as much as I would like in the coldest of the winter months.

Here are a few shots from one of my October jaunts along this water way. Vibrant colors, movement and tree species juxtapositions all make for very cool compositions.

When shooting color I like to stay away from ultra contrasty, saturated colors. If these appear naturally well then, no problem. But my passion has always been, and remains to be BxW. When it comes to BxW I like to mold and shape the tonality of the image. My goal being to create great tonal relationships. With color images I feel a responsibility to the integrity of the image, so colors matter. If they are unnatural than the scene as I saw it is not truthfully represented. Don't get me wrong, I do fine tune color images so that I get the very best colors and tonal quality from them. I just try to stay away from fantasy. My first photography instructor made an impact on me with the following statement: A photographers job is to show the world to their viewers in ways that they have never seen it before. I always took this to mean showing the viewer what they are missing all around them- to accentuate the ordinary or show them a place/person/event they have not seen with their eyes, not to create something new for them to see.



When it comes to BxW as long as the tonal relationships make sense I may shift them around more freely to make the image have more impact. Shades of gray instead of color reduce the world in the image to relationships of the elements with in the scene. This allows the viewer to more easily see what the photograph is trying to say. Since the colors are removed the viewer is placed in a position of voyeur instead of participator. After all we don't see in shades of gray. Where as with color images the viewer can feel the reality of the scene, these images are literal representations.

I Love to print BxW images. For the longest time after moving to digital I missed my darkroom. I sold it all in early 2003 when I bought my D30. But in the last few years I have come to appreciate my current tools. I print my BxW with an Epson 2200. This printer uses archival inks and has a great reputation. Although it is now about 3 (or is it 4) generations behind Epson's current printer in this model line, it still gets the job done. I like to print on Ilofrd papers they make some lovely surfaces that remind me of my days printing under the dim glow of a safe light and the smell of fixer hanging in the air.



To see more images from this collection please click HERE.

Fog

Wednesday, December 10th, witnessed the perfect conditions to produce delicate clouds that blanketed Harrisburg. Fog. I love fog. I love to walk through it, smell it, watch it and use it as a compositional element in photographs. A mist that undulates, hiding and revealing elements of a scene. Isolating beautiful forms from distracting backgrounds. And softening the color pallet just enough to produce romantic monochromatic color images or soft Black and Whites.

As I crossed the Susquehanna River, on the way to an appointment, I saw the fog consuming it. I nearly crashed as my jaw dropped upon observing the perfect scene that I was missing. I got to my appointment, ran my errands and made my way back home, which is 2 blocks from the river front. I changed into some boots, grabbed my G9 and was out the door. As I approached the river I could tell the scene had changed, it was no longer as mystical as it had been 2 hours earlier. But there was still fog, not all hope was lost.

So I started shooting. Nothing was happening. I wasn't seeing the image. I thought it was mostly due to the diminishing water vapor. So I started walking, my goal was to walk across the Harvey Taylor bridge and shoot over the islands in the middle of the river. This would help eliminate the distracting view of buildings on the West shore. But as I went along I decided to try going to the lower walk way that sits right next to the waters edge. I descended the steps from the lower sidewalk right up to the water. This provided the needed change in perspective I was looking for.















It got me closer to the fog and changed my vantage point just enough to allow the remaining fog to isolate the islands, and their barren trees, from the man made structures on the other side. Cool. Very Cool! I shot for about 1/2 an hour until I decided that I had really covered this location. That was all the time I could allow anyhow, I needed to get back to my office and work.

I like shooting this type of subject with my Canon G9. I can shoot with iso's from 80-400 and get a very nice film like grain. Really reminds me of my days shooting Tri-x. I am always astounded when I view the images later, this little camera's 12 megapixels and great lens really resolve fine detail! One of the keys to using this camera, I have found, is to shoot as if you were shooting chromes, expose for the high lites- and nail the exposure. There is just enough latitude in the shadows that I can pull out a bit more usable detail than one might think. I can make very fine looking 12x18" prints.





Please follow this LINK to view a couple of other images from that afternoon.

While there you will get a glimpse of the changes that are coming to my website. Hope you enjoy!

Show me the Money!

So here we are. Living the dream. Riding the wave of capitalism. So it goes, we see up years and we see down years. The price we pay for the freedoms and opportunities we have. Smart spending and saving is the way to ride it out, at least the way I am going to ride it out.

Perhaps if we all think of our neighbors right now we will have a less stressful time as we wait for the next upturn. Well, that is what brings me to the topic of this new post: Talking about money. What my services cost, how I arrive at those prices, and what I will be phasing in for the short term to help my customers out.

I have decided to implement some creative incentives that will hopefully help your bottom line. Please watch this space for more info in the near future.

More Site changes in store

It truly is never ending. Just when you think you have something under control -BAM- you realize that your master plan to rule the world flops because your (seemingly) simple web site does not like to render across all browsers!

So there I was, happy that I just needed to get a few more galleries posted to my site when a friend told me that things were not displaying properly in her browser, Safari. Than I look a bit closer and where one thing appears right in IE, it does not in Fire Fox. And vise-versa.

I had decided to stick with simple html (with a little bit of JAVA) I wanted the site to load as quickly as possible, to view well on all browsers, and be something simple enough that I (not being a web designer) could update and change easily. And to be able to do all this with out having to buy any software. Oddly enough, the problems that I have come across so far are not caused by JAVA, but rather by the html code.

I had plans to start learning and using css when this happened. In conjunction with these findings I also learned that using frames puts up a road block to web indexing services (those things that catalog the web and allow search engines to show my site in their lists of results). So here I am now, contemplating buying software. I can not afford to pay a web designer at the moment, add to that that I am a control freak, so I need a web authoring package.

I will be looking into several, but if anyone has any suggestions please pass them along. I am still going to put up 1 or 2 more galleries while I iron out this mess. But things will be changing, again, real soon.