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.
