Touching Base

Well, it has been a while since I have posted on here, so I thought it was time to touch base. The connectivity issues with Clearwire were finally cleared up in early September and getting them cleared up meant switching back to Comcast and making it clear enough to Clearwire that I was willing to take the 5 hour trip necessary to take them to small claims court that with the Better Business Burea getting involved, they stopped trying to keep me chained to their contract and accepted that I was NOT getting what was promised. This did involve a technician having to come to my apartment and not only confirm but define just how BAD my connectivity was. To paraphrase, it seems that the antenna I was lined up on at the nearest tower wouldn't let me stay connected to it, but kept trying to hand off my connection to towers I couldn't possibly connect to, but due to strange radio wave echoes around my apartment complex, the towers I was being handed off too could still detect my Clearwire Modem. Sadly, the modem couldn't detect the towers it was being handed off to. Regardless, they could not give me anything resembling a broadband or a stable connection.

So, why no comment since then?

Well, to begin with, from mid-September till late October I was busy doing photography related work with very limited internet access. I will eventually get around to posting those images and other related images I have on the galleries. The particular work was centered around the harvest at a medium sized local medical marijuana farm which I had been following through the entire previous year with occasional visits to document the progress.

After the time at the month or so at the grow site, I had another month where my ability to edit any of my pictures was put on hold, as this computer (the that has all the photo-software on it) was having serious issues that ended up requiring it to be sent in for warranty service. Thankfully I got the full shebang when it came to warranty extensions on this machine.

That would bring my excuses for inactivity up to late November, and since then I have just been too busy with other BS in my life to find much time to work on any sort of photography. In all, I probably have a back up of around 3,000 pictures that are worth keeping that are still in RAW format and untouched that I eventually need to get around to dealing with, but I wouldn't expect much till at least late February, as I doubt I will have time.

To give an idea of just how little I've had to done lately, my S5Pro's batteries are dead for the first time since I bought it. With any luck, the issues that have had me distracted will result in my soon having the funds to get the Nikon D300 I've been wanting to round out the SLRs I have to work with, as high res and high speed (both which the D300 is good for) are the two things I am currently limited in with the S5Pro and Sigma SD14 I currently have.

Connectivity Issues....

Well, my plans with getting photographs online has seen a serious setback. In short, I might as well be on dialup because Clearwire sucks... I uploaded images for the booth and for another gallery the other day. Took all day to upload about 380meg of images and the computer doing the upload is also my photo-editing box so it is busy whenever the net is taking forever.

I got online afterwards and over a few hours set up the Caravan Cafe gallery but the other gallery I wanted to set up still hasn't been finished as it takes a decent connection to get it ready. In addition to caption and keyword edits, it needs arranging and some limited online editing and until I have some bandwidth again it's pointless to even try to waste my time doing that.

So.... thank Clearwire for my delays. My connectivity has been good for little more than checking my email for the past few weeks and it's only getting worse.

Rave pictures up...

They were actually posted almost 24 hours ago, but 18 pictures from the silent Rave at OCF have been posted to this gallery.

The Rave is a popular event at the Fair since it was introduced, but it is a little rowdy at times and despite warnings I tried to give that it was getting loud and the Rave should be reminded that it is supposed to be Silent, they were having too much fun to take any warning serious and got shut down Sunday morning for too much noise.

Moving up on YouTube

Among other news, I posted this video on Youtube.



It was copied and turned into an advertisement, violating my copyrights, within 24 hours, but YouTube has since suspended the account of the offender and taken off ALL their videos. They were just copying other's videos and tacking an advertisement on the ends of them. Copyright violation aside, it has shot up among the most popular video from this year's Oregon Country Fair.

That video aside, I have gotten almost no editing done on pictures since my last post here, but they have been sorted. Issues with a monitor on the Fritz, some stability issues on my desktop computer, connection issues with Clearwire and a few other issues have used up half my monthly time on my cell phone in about 2 days dealing with various company's customer support folks. Today I hope is a boring day, as I have pretty much commited to finishing some of the pictures by this afternoon. Those would be the pictures around the Silent Rave put on by the booth I was with and they should be uploaded online by morning as the first of the pics from OCF 2008.

Finally, with the exception of my still having a bit of a sore throat, I seem to have recovered from whatever bug or allergy had hit me right after the fair.

Now, I'm back off. Have a little running around to do today that I hope doesn't take up too much of my time, but I really hope to put a dent in editing the pics today.

Fair photo's coming soon...

Wow have I been busy this week and I've just barely started on the real work. After a week at the Oregon Country Fair, I took over 2800 pictures, all in RAW. There are a couple hundred I accidentally got in camera jpg copies of too, like this one:


It is one of many images I took of the Sunday night fire dance show at Far Side parking, well out of public eye. I will not be using any of the jpegs except as comparisons, on this blog. I much prefer working in RAW and will get better images in the end as a result, where folks snapping jpg pretty much get stuck with what they get (like the image above).

The problem with dealing in RAW is always time, though. They are huge files and they must be processed in order to be viewed or printed. My workflow is not the quickest in the world either - It is limited by the speed of my computer, by my not having programs like Lightroom, and by every picture having to go through a first pass of processing with Adobe Camera Raw to convert them to Digital Negatives before I even start doing any real work with them. That's where I am now. Got home around 6:00 monday night and started work right away. I just now finished moving all the image files to the right harddrives and doing the first pass of processing. It is now that I can sit down and actually start working with the images and hopefully by the end of the weekend I will start getting galleries from this year up.

So what do I have this year?... Wow... I got pictures. Lots and lots pictures. I didn't shoot a lot of people shots this year, though can assure you those images will be out there for those that want them - most folks with cameras at the Fair seem to focus on people. What I do have is pictures of all the food booths and most of their menus. Having taken my good tripod this year, I got a number of long exposure night images from around the fair, as well as hundreds of fire dance images at various shutter speeds. I will also be putting up many images of a belly dancing show and an african drumming and dance show, both on gypsy stage, taken from a vantage point it took a ladder to get - The ladder was borrowed from my booth and I was looking over the fence at the front of the stage, when all their photographers were being seated off to the far right of center stage.

In all, it was quite a year at the fair, and as I get images and galleries up, I will definitely be putting up more posts here and sharing more about my experiences at the fair, and I expect a good half of the images are ones that the public couldn't have taken. For those unfamiliar with the fair and what the public is in relation to the fair, anyone that has a ticket or pass that is only good for the day hours that the fair is open are public. There are various types of passes that are not public passes: camping passes for vendors, elder passes, crew passes, media passes and more. I was at the fair with a vendor's camping pass, working with Caravan Cafe (booth 41) right next to Gypsy Stage.

I would be signing off from this post and immediately getting to editing pictures, but after a week of moving files around and pre-processing, I'm probably taking most of the rest of the day off before I start seperating the pictures by subject, processing the keepers and setting up galleries. I need the break as I have been fighting a sore throat, scratchy cough and stuffed up nose since Tuesday.

Neglected

Wow, have I been neglecting this site, if anyone has actually visited it. Not that I haven't done any photography work. Fact is I spent a couple days working on editing and printing pictures for a friend last week but I have been far too focused on another blog I been working on and the projects around it to do much here. Likewise, my online galleries at smugmug continue to be neglected.

And here this is the only one of the blogs I've been tinkering with that I actually have any contact information up.

Setting it up

Okay.. Got the basics of this blog set up. Don't expect I'll do a lot with it soon, but it is the beginning to getting serious about doing something with my photography efforts. Not sure how far I'll take this, but I've definitely made the first step.