My second youngest is quite a character.

He’s quite a bit different from the other children - much more introverted, shy and sensitive. But he is also a trend setter - often leading the family in jokes told per hour and interesting inventions. One of his recent ideas is a new family holiday - entitled “Quensos Day” - that is focused mainly around the adoration of sugar cereal. According to him, it is celebrated November 13th and is marked by many bowls of Captn Crunch (3x a day) and a 1 hour break in getting to school. We celebrate our first in a few weeks - and something destined to be a family tradition.

This trend setting extends to fashion too - his go-to-school ensembles often show a hint of originality and style usually lost on 6 year olds. Here he is in his Fox apparel getting ready for school the other morning.

Rock on Steen. You’re my guy.

Remember last week when I mentioned I had a hard drive fail. And how important it was to backup stuff? Well, I had another one go down yesterday. This one was, I’m happy to say, in my Drobo. I sat down to do some editing on Sunday afternoon and instead found an alert that one of the drives had died. Dead. I quickly ran down to a local shop and purchased another drive to replace it. Worse, the drive was less than a month old and I paid a pretty penny for it.

The thing that really irks me is that Seagate won’t provide acceptable support for their defective drive. The last internal drive I had go bad was several years ago (it was a Western Digital I believe) and they shipped me a replacement gratis, with a box to put the defective drive in for return shipping (which was also prepaid). I was out zero dollars and had a drive within a day or two. Seagate? They pretty much told me I had to either wait two weeks (and pay to ship the defective drive back myself) or I could pay $20 to get the service the other guys gave for free.

Are you kidding me? was my reply. That is our policy sir.

And so I have a new policy: no Seagate drives. Sorry. You lose. Bzzzt. And don’t forget that Maxtor is owned by Seagate as well.

I had a photo shoot with two lovely young ladies yesterday. Here are a couple of the results I’m pleased with so far...

More to come as I go thru them...

Tags:Personal Work

Autumn in the Pacific Northwest is beautiful. Especially when we get a lazy, sunny day in late October that lets you go outside with a T-shirt and kick some leaves. Here are a few pictures from last Saturday...

Have a great day.

Its Lightroom Tuesday! Hooray! Huzzah!

Here are a few things from the world of Lightroom for all of you in the know kiddies...

1. Friend and LIghtroom engineer extraordinaire Eric Scouten has a series of articles on using Lightroom. Worth a read. Here and Here.
2. How to use Noise Ninja as an editor in Lightroom.
3. 34 new Black/White presets for Lightroom - from Preset Heaven.
4. Where to keep your Lightroom plugins
5. In case you missed it, Adobe released the 2.1 update to Lightroom last Wednesday.
6. Speaking of black/white conversions, here is an interesting discussion on the various options for black and white conversion.

Finally, I was given a free license to Showit, a tool created by photographer David Jay to make it easy to create photographic slideshows for the web.

It was pretty slick, and although I have quibbles about the design (surprise) it wasn’t too hard to figure out. For giggles, I put together a slideshow of a recent client’s photo-shoot and sent it to her. I suspect she is going to love it.

Recommended, although it needs to be an export plugin for Lightroom. That would make it really cool.

That is all this week. Have a great day...

Tags:Personal Work

Here are a few quick pictures from our trip to Zions National Park in September. Both of these were taken in the Zion Narrows trail.

And two from our return to Las Vegas thru St. George.

Have a great day...

Tags:Personal Work

At my wife’s family reunion this past August I brought my small Strobist kit and threw up a white sheet to take some quick portraits of the rabble - er um - peoples. I wasn’t disappointed and the best part was that half way through the shoot, the kids started doing funny faces and we just added those to the mix.

Sadly, part of our extended entourage had left earlier that morning so we didn’t get everyone. Regardless, here are the results...

Have a great day...

Tags:Personal Work

For those of you interested in purchasing images that have been featured on this website over the past few weeks, I would happily direct you to these two galleries...

All images are available for immediate purchase in a variety of print sizes on paper and mounted canvas.

Have a great day.

PS. I had a hard drive fail today. Most everything is safe, except I found that the Chron script I had running to backup my lightroom catalogs last ran on Sept 19th. The photographs are all where they should be, but it looks like I’ll loose a bit of time reworking some of my organizational structure.

What a pain. Backup now. Backup often. Honestly.

Here are a smattering of images from last week’s Moab Adventure...

A few pictures from the 24 Hours of Moab bike race that was going on while there.

And finally, a picture of the vistas on the drive down to Utah. This is somewhere on the Idaho/Utah border.

Have a great day.

Tags:Lightroom

Its Lightroom Tuesday!

Here are some Lightroom related links from the past week:

• David Ziser has a cool video on using Lightroom (via Lightroom Blog)
• A belated “The Adjustment Tool is my Fav” article.
• Scott Kelby’s sessions at PhotoPlus East (I’m *not* going this year - too much time away as it is). Lots of Lightroom-related talkery.
• Want to remove items from an image in Lightroom? Go for it.
• Preset Heaven has some great Lightroom Prestes. Check out these for a Polariod look.
• How to import presets into Lightroom. I thought you might ask.
• How to straighten images in Lightroom.
• A new book on Lightroom techniques with minimal fluff. (via The Online Photographer)
• Photoshop CS4 ships! And a bundle with LR is also available for those times when you need to go to Photoshop (and with LR 2.0, it should be less than 20%).
• Matt Kloskowski (I have to look up how to spell that each time I type it) has a great new DVD for people wanting to get up to speed with Lightroom 2.
• WebMonkey has a great series of tutorials on why and then how to use Lightroom. (via PaxtonPrints)
• A skin softening tutorial for Lightroom (via PaxtonPrints). I pushed hard for this effect when on the Lightroom team.
• Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 Conspiracy theories. Having been involved in the development of both, it was a funny listen.
• Making the Switch to Lightroom 2 - Steve Paxton (a local guy I need to meet) has a great article on when/why/how to switch to LR 2.

Well, that is quite a list. Should keep you busy.

I’ve been going thru my landscape images from last week’s visit to Moab. Here are a few more that I’m quite happy with.

Have a great day.

We had a busy weekend. Soccer, ballet rehearsal, a movie, a photo shoot, attending “Night of the Living Dead” at the Children’s Theatre in Seattle. It was hectic and fun. Just what a weekend should be. And I even got part of a book read. I heart weekends.

Here are a few pictures fresh from the camera...

In other news, I got selections from several clients this weekend, so I’m going to be doing a bunch of printing. I’ve also noticed an uptick in book purchases (especially for the upcoming holidays). Books make great gifts and I’m happy to be doing more of these.

Have a great day...

Tags:Personal Work

Our trips to Moab are generally punctuated by two things: riding and visiting bike shops. The latter is generally to fix the things we broke on the former. Moab is a tough place on bikes and we generally need to make a few pit stops here and there to get back to snuff.

I’ve gone to many of the bike shops in the area, but my favorite is the new kid on the block: Uranium Bicycles.

Uranium just opened this spring, and they were the easiest to work with when I was looking for a quick rent when Aidan and I were in town this past March. From there we’ve just kinda tried to default to there because the people were spectacularly nice.

This past trip I got talking with Christie and she mentioned they were wanting to start a Flickr page for photos of the area - that wouldn’t stand considering I work for SmugMug - so I hooked them up with an account. One thing led to another and I ended up swinging back by the shop on my way out of town to snap a few pictures for them. Mainly for the website, but also just for fun. One of their mechanics was an interesting guy, and I figured a portrait or two of him would be really cool. We had a ball, with pictures galore of their two younger shop-girls as well as some stuff for their website. And next spring I’ll be back and we’ll do some riding and take some more pictures.

So here is to the guys/gals at Uranium (they guys are outnumbered, btw)...

Tags:Personal Work, Bikes

We rode the Sovereign Trail again Tuesday before leaving Moab. Again because its so much fun, although we did have a section of the trail to explore that we’d missed on previous rides.

The Sovereign Trail is a newer Moab trail - it was built in the last 5 years - and it is mercifully for two-wheeled riders only. For some reason I’d heard that it wasn’t very long and wasn’t that fun, and so I’d avoided it until this spring when we were looking for something new. I’m sure glad we did as its is really in the top 2 or 3 rides in the Moab area. Its just an awesome number that has a little of everything Moab can offer (dirt, slickrock, sand, more dirt).

Here are a few pictures from our morning on the trail...

Now that’s what I’m talking ‘bout.

Tags:Personal Work, Landscape

At the Dgrin shootout last week we spent quite a bit of time hiking in the dark. That is routine to a landscape photographer, but I’m not one of those. Not really. I tend to shoot people. On occasion, I’ll take pictures of urban landscapes, but I rarely am the type to get up massively early, hike a few miles in the dark just to be somewhere for the sun to rise on my intended target. Not that I don’t like doing such, its just not my modus operandi, as it were.

Here is a picture I shot at Natural Arch in Arches National Park last week after doing just such a hike...

I’m pretty pleased with it.

Tags:Personal Work, Bikes

This young guy was willing to show off a bit on some big rocks. Coolio with me.

Let me get my camera out of the pelican case...

Here he is trying to coax a friend into doing the same drop.

He did it too.

Riding Sovereign trail today before heading north. Hopefully not into snow.

Snow? Summer just barely ended...

Tags:Personal Work, Bikes

Here is a quick visual of our epic ride today...

We started from Uranium Bikes in Moab to shuttle up to the Hazard County trailhead at almost 9500 feet above sea level. We huffed to almost 10,000 feet before beginning our descent.

We rode all kinds of wonderful. Technical, fast, challenging. We dropped and dropped until we hit town at 3700 feet almost 5 hours after departing.

Sweet. I’m beat...

Tags:Personal Work, Bikes

Here are a few images from the past week in Moab. Can you tell I’m out and about shooting and not doing much editing/posting?

The Moab Maxim: ride/hike and take pictures...leave the editing till later when you’re out of that splendid desert.

And a panorama from Arches near Balanced Rock...

I’m on my way home tomorrow afternoon after riding the Sovereign trail system.

Tags:Personal Work