Lots of stuff (7/14/08) Lightning fried another monitor, so I'm now down two Viewsonic 19-inch screens in a few months. BreezeBrowser is making quicker work of the second wedding I've used it on (but I'm still learning some basic stuff about making it work well). My BVS batteries worked a treat for a studio shoot for a CD and book cover BUT something is awry with the company.

So I shot another wedding. Much smaller, more what I would think down my alley: funky, less formal. More about that shortly. Let me tell you how I finally delivered the folio for the first one: I printed the proofs on a Hewlett Packard CP1215 Color LaserJet on plain paper and packaged them in a utilitarian notebook in Staples presentation sleeves. Looks fine, although I needed to experiment some (and still need to experiment some more) to get the printer to spin out reasonable color saturations (default is too saturated) and tones (default is too dark).

BreezeBrowser Pro lets me review my take in RAW format without having to keep JPEG copies (as I did when I used NikonView for this purpose). The interface is similar to the vintage version of Nikonview but much more robust. It also offers excellent file-handling and proofing power. I used BreezeBrowser to make proof files with slightly reduced saturation for printing, then made "contact sheets" in PhotoShop CS2 and printed those (12 to a page , 3 across 4 down) on the HP. I finally delivered 615 images in the ring-bound proof book and on an index CD. For the next wedding, with this workflow in place, 500+ finished images with proofs on CD took only a few days of concerted work. I must be learning something. More thoughts and a few more BreezeBrowser notes below.

BVSPulsar, makers of my flash battery system, is apparently having some trouble. Their online catalog is showing "back ordered" for all items, and there's a lot of chatter on Digital Photography Review about fried strobes. I discovered all this when I went out to find a battery for the replacement 550EX I just bought on eBay. The link above takes you to a message about alternate batteries for the BVS system; the message is embedded in a thread which suggests that my experience with a damaged 550EX was a long way from unique. Damn. Some people seem to have great luck with the system, and when it works it works great. I'm not sure I'll use it with the new 550 --the 550 may just be a backup strobe and backup controller-- and I'm having second thoughts about using the batteries in my 420 and 430 strobes. On the other hand, when it works, it works very well indeed.

Take last week. I hung a cruiser bicycle off the high end of the porch and had singer, songwriter, and storyteller Michael Reno Harrell grab the handlebars and look up at me. (The concept and set-up was Michael's idea.) I shot down from the porch railing into a green screen spread on the ground. Joan, Michael's wife, held a floor fan close to Mikko to get the hair flying. I'd've liked to dedicate a strobe to the screen for easier extraction, but needed my 430EX for a hair light instead. SP2 controller on the camera, 420EX shooting down, 430EX backlighting, open shade on the green screen. I needed a lot of rapid flashes since the positions were hard to hold and the angles changed very, very quickly. After shooting a few tests, it took only a couple of minutes to add umbrellas and rearrange the lights to do fresh headshots before everybody got tired, then back to this set up until we had what we wanted.

The BVS system worked very well at a wedding a few weeks back, too. Writing up these notes is my mini-vacation from working my way through the take.

I've been discarding a LOT of images while reviewing them in BreezeBrowser because they were unsharp. With only about 5% of this second wedding to go, I discovered the "view high quality" mode. Many, many frames that looked hopelessly out of focus now look just fine. Will I reselect everything? Ask me tomorrow. I'll certainly make a quick pass for discarded gems.

When I go through a folder of images now ("ceremony", "details", "preparations", "kids", "reception", etc) I create three subfolders ("keepers", "discards", "workups"). Finished images go in the first; garbage in the second; RAW frames used to produce the finished images go in the third. When the upper level directory is empty, I've either made us of or discarded all photos in that category. Finishing a couple of hundred frames a day is plenty; after that, my judgement goes to hell and I start saving too many versions of promising images or throwing away perfectly OK shots which I just don't want to work on. Bad practice, either way.

When done, I have BreezeBrowser make proofs in a "proof" subfolder of each of the "keepers" folders. Then I renumber and encode the images ("IMG_2917b.jpg" might become "AM_rec_0110.jpg" for Adlhock-Maness reception frame 110). Sorting everything by timestamp lets me keep photos from two (or more) cameras synched up.

I'm using a Samsung 2943 SyncMaster as my main monitor and a crapped out Viewsonic VP930b to hold icons and tools. The twin of the latter was my calibrated monitor until it went black a few weeks ago; before that, this one had gone a little flakey -- dull with less than full color depth, some flickering. Lightning, I think, in both cases. When the one I'd been relying upon for my main work space died in the middle of two weddings and three websites, I needed something right now. Best Buy had this 24-inch widescreen at a less than breathtaking price, so, here it is. It has a dreadful reputation for calibrated performance, but it's gorgeous, and I think it'll be fine in my environment. I always sit right here, dead square in front of it, and by comparing old files to old prints, it looks damn close. I would have liked to have had the slightly more expensive version using the better LCD technology, but there was zero time to spend shopping around.

Wedding deliveries: I'm thinking I should just provide the high res files as part of the initial package price. I'll lose some money on prints and file sales, but make it up in certainty. I won't be spending tens of hours on spec fixing up images someone might buy or have me print. I'll end up giving the client a lot of images for little money per image, but I could still get print orders and will know what I need to produce at the computer. Added an external DVD writer to the kit to let me move weddings off the hard drive, make backups, and deliver the files. Next, we'll figure out how to deliver fully-realized albums and see if that's another way to go. Basically, it felt like I was holding the wedding photos hostage after being paid to make them, before being paid to print or deliver them. So I'm thinking I should just make that a single item and look for other opportunities (b/w folio, albums, centralized print source?) to add value.

:: back to the slow blog ::