eclecticism

Pure Cirkus, Fremont Solstice Parade (10,000th photo!), originally uploaded by djwudi.

Okay, so it’s not the most interesting or artistic shot I’ve ever taken. However, there are two good (or at least good enough) reasons for me to toss this up…

1. I’m finally finished with the Fremont Solstice Parade photos! Since many of the photos are deemed moderately unsafe (naked bodypainted bike riders and such) and may not be visible by default, non-Flickr users can use this guest pass link to see the entire set.

2. This photo was my 10,000th photo uploaded to Flickr. Ten thousand photos (and more, now). Wow. Impressive and scary, all at the same time.

Catching Beads, Fremont Solstice Parade, originally uploaded by djwudi.

All without spilling her beer.

As I work my way through my Solstice Parade shots, I find I have to keep reminding myself that it’s all part of the learning process — because I’m seriously second guessing a lot of what I did. It’s not that the shots are bad, really…just that they’re not as good as I had hoped (and don’t even compare to some of what I’m seeing from other people).

If I’d stood on the other side of the street I wouldn’t have been shooting into the sun, and I’d be using its light instead of fighting it and backlighting everything. Or, if I’d at least used my flash to fill in the shadows, then I wouldn’t have to be blowing out the sky to make the subjects visible.

If I’d set my aperture to the f/2.8 that the lens I was using would do, then I’d have more depth of field separation between the subjects and the backgrounds, and the photos wouldn’t be so ‘busy,’ distracting from the subject.

sigh

Ah, well. On the bright side, at least I am seeing these things (if after the fact), so I’ll know better next time.

All part of the learning process.

Fremont Summer Solstice Parade, originally uploaded by ChrisB.

I’m in the process of going through my photos from this year’s Solstice Parade — everything’s imported, named, and tagged, but I still need to decide which ones get fine-tuned and uploaded.

In the meantime, while there’s a few thousand photos up already (and it’s increasing by the hour) either floating around loose or in the group pool, this set from ChrisB really deserves to be seen. A high vantage point and a tilt-shift lens make for a look at the parade that’s very different from everyone else’s shots!

Ladybug, originally uploaded by djwudi.

Not quite as cute when seen this close up, are they?

Saw this lil’ guy crawling around in the grass at school the other day and wanted to see what I could get. Shot with my 24mm f/2.8 Nikkor reverse-mounted with a reversing ring, somewhere around f/16 or so, 1/8th of a second, handheld, with the onboard popup flash. At full size, you can see the hairs on the ladybug’s legs!

So. Incredibly. Cool. Here’s some more shots.

I just had someone ask me through my Flickr account about my photography workflow and sales experience, and I figured I might as well put my response up here for…um…posterity? Ego-stroking?

I’ve not yet started to actually try to shoot for a living (though it’s a nice dream), as school and work take up enough time that I can’t devote myself to my hobby. Still, for what it’s worth, here’s what I can tell you….

What is your photography work flow?

These days, I shoot pretty much everything RAW. I haven’t had the money to upgrade to Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom yet, so I use iPhoto for organization and sorting, Adobe Photoshop for RAW conversion and touchups, and then the Flickr Export plugin for iPhoto to upload everything to Flickr.

The basic process is this:

1. Shoot (lots!) in RAW (with my camera set to the Adobe RGB color space).
2. Import into iPhoto.
3. Name and tag everything (I’m using Bullstorm’s Keyword Manager to help with tag organization and editing, as iPhoto’s built-in keyword management is one of the least useful aspects of an otherwise excellent program).
4. Do a first run through the shots, tossing what’s probably worth uploading into an album.
5. Do a second run through the shots. Most of this run is converting the RAW files and doing any touch-ups (which I keep to a minimum, generally little more than exposure and white balance tweaking, occasional cropping, sharpening, and setting the color space to sRGB), but I’ll also make some last decisions on which photos will or won’t be uploaded.
6. Upload to Flickr, assigning shots to sets or sending to one group during upload. Later set management or submitting photos to more groups is done online through Flickr when I get around to it.
7. Do a third cull through the shots, selecting the best of the bunch to be printed out.

[Where] or how do you market or promote your work?

I’ve never really actively done much promotion other than uploading things to Flickr and then telling people about it. When I can, I’ll let people involved in an event know about any event photos I’ve taken (sometimes by e-mail, other times through making posts in online communities focusing on an event or artist), or if I can identify and contact the subjects of shots, I’ll try to let them know directly. Other than that, I don’t do a whole lot.

Have you had any success with online promotion or selling your work through a website, if so which ones are you using?

Nothing major here, really. I’ve experimented with some of the services that have popped up online for helping people sell their work, but as I’ve never really taken the time to actively pursue anything, I can’t really report any great sucesses (or failures, really — I may not be selling much, but I don’t see that as failure when I’m not really trying to sell anything).

What few shots I have sold or had used elsewhere have happened more or less through blind luck — people stumbling on a shot through photo searches, deciding I had something that would work for a project, and asking permission to use it.

I have started getting a few people asking me to shoot events, but it’s not something I’ve started charging for yet (while it’s very flattering to have someone ask, I’m not entirely convinced I’m “pro” enough to ask for money…though I’m certainly not going to refuse if any is offered, either!). Right now, I pretty much just chalk it up to learning experiences, with possibilities for future benefit.

And if you can think of any other ideas for a photographer that is ready to start selling his work full time (my goal). I would greatly appreciate it.

Nothing much comes to mind, mostly because I’m not quite heading that direction yet. Good luck on your quest, though!

Northwest Folklife Festival, Seattle, originally uploaded by djwudi.

Work commitments kept us from doing a full weekend jaunt, but Prairie and I went out to wander around the Folklife festival on Saturday afternoon and evening. Here’s the rest of my shots from the day.

Finally. After nearly one month and almost six hundred photos uploaded, I’m done with this year’s Norwescon! As fun as it is, as much as I enjoy being there and playing photographer, and as great as it is to get comments from people as they find themselves in the photos…man, this took a while! Ah, well — good-natured grousing aside, it’s well worth it, and I’m looking forward to next year’s.

I’d already mentioned finishing up Friday’s photos a couple weeks ago. Last night, I finally uploaded the last of my photos from Saturday, the only other day I was there.

Saturday’s shots are pretty obviously divided into three sections:

• Random costumes as I wandered around the lobby and hallways of the hotel,
• the Hoedown in Space Saturday night dance at the end,
• and, of course, the post-Masquerade costume gallery takes up the majority of the set. There were lots of great costumes this year. A few personal favorites, in no particular order other than where they appeared in the lineup:
  • The Rocketeer,
  • the women of Starfleet (complete with Command Panties),
  • the Faun family (cutest family ever!),
  • the Satyr Handlers (especially the snow leopard and wiccabeast, evidently something of a central character for the group concept),
  • the Vorlon,
  • artvixn’s geisha kitsune,
  • Final Fantasy IX’s Freya in ‘trance’ mode (shiny!),
  • and, of course, the jaw-dropping Dar’Rushk the manticore (who battled a mercenary and Xena and Gabrielle, but befriended a unicorn).

Of course, that’s just a small (well, okay, not that small) selection of what was at Con. I did my best to get the best shots I could of everyone I could, and had a lot of fun doing it.

Also (and especially important for those people I got photos of): because I release my shots under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license (attribution/non-commercial/sharealike), you may share (copy, re-post, distribute, or transmit) the photos, provided that you give me credit as photographer (preferably by linking back to the photo’s page on Flickr, or at least to my Flickr, LiveJournal, or personal pages, but simply by name — Michael Hanscom or djwudi — will work in a pinch). Thanks very much for respecting this — since I’m not trying to make money off this photography thing*, what little recognition I can get is very appreciated!

Thanks much, everyone — enjoy the photos, and I’ll run into you again next year (if not sooner)!

* Though, if anyone would like to purchase high-quality prints of their shots, I wouldn’t be averse to discussing it…

I’m exploring ImageKind, which gives Flickr members (and others) a convenient way to sell prints of their artwork. It looks interesting so far, though I’ve just spent a few minutes poking around while I’m in between classes.

I’ve set a few photos available to sell — take a look, see what you think. If there’s any particular shots of mine that you’d like to be able to buy (or that you just think should be in there), let me know and I’ll get them added.

We’ll see how this goes….

Finally — all my shots from Friday of this year’s Norwescon are processed and uploaded (some shots are mildly NSFW — no outright nudity, some panties-and-pasties). There’s a few random hall costumes to start off with, and shots from the Stardance towards the end. However, the majority of Friday’s shots are from the Fannish Fetish Fashion Show: fashion sets from Notorious Curves and Fetishwear.net; burlesque performances by The Von Foxies’ Heidi Von Haught and Pidgeon Von Tramp, Miz Ginger Snapz, and Estella E’Strange; plus Project Fetishway and Fannish Idol; all hosted by the lovely Betty Rage.

I’ll be the first to admit that, try as I might, my shots likely aren’t going to be winning any photography awards. Still, I do the best I can, I don’t think they came out too horribly, and every time I do something like this I figure out a few more things to make things better the next time. Many thanks to spitkitten for giving me the opportunity to shoot the show!

Meanwhile, work continues on Saturday’s shots — and since Saturday has the post-Masquerade costume photoshoot, there’s many more photos yet to come!

Well, it took a couple weeks, but the photos from our Spring Break trip to Long Beach, WA are finally tagged, sorted, fine-tuned, uploaded, and even mapped.

Now to start on the nearly 2,000 I took at Norwescon….

I’ve updated djwudi.com (which I’m using to highlight my photography) to use Satellite. Since Dreamhost has a few security measures in place that needed to be worked around, I’m detailing my changes to the source code under the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Prairie and Penelope, originally uploaded by djwudi.

My girl and her latest friend — Penelope, a wonderfully soft, cuddly, pink bunny.

While I’ll freely admit that I’ve never been the gothiest of gothlings, I’m still at times very amused that I ended up with a girl who’s big into the pink and fluffy side of life. Just one of life’s odd little quirks, I guess.

I’m keeping my black wardrobe, though.

User Interface Overload, originally uploaded by djwudi.

On the one hand, I really like the new collections organization structure that Flickr just added. It’s not perfect, but it’s nice to have more control over organizing my photos.

However, the interface is getting…well, cluttered is about the nicest way to put it. By the time I’m looking at one of my sets, I’ve got no less than five different sets of toolbar/breadcrumb buttons above the pictures!

• Line 1 (constant): The global account options.

• Line 2 (constant): The main navigation menu bar, where every option (save ‘Home’ and the search field) is a drop-down menu with more options.

• Line 3 (appears when navigating within collections): The ‘breadcrumb’ trail leading from the user’s main page to the individual set.

• Line 4 (appears when viewing your own set, not visible for other people): Set-level editing options. 3/5 of the items are dropdown menus.

• Line 5 (constant): Set-level view options, available to everyone looking at the set.

It’s getting to the point where it’s UI overload — which is doubly grating on a site that’s normally incredibly well-designed and remarkably intuitive to navigate through. By the time all five toolbars appear, not only does it push the photos (which, I believe, are supposed to be the focus of the site) pretty far down the page, but I’m starting to lose track of which options are hidden in which set of menus or links!

Additionally, while the breadcrumb navigation (Line 3) is a necessary addition now that Collections allow you to organize your sets and collections up to five levels deep, it feels kind of abandoned — just shoehorned in somewhere — and quite possibly easily missed. Since that breadcrumb line is the only indication that a set is part of a collection and might have other, related sets ‘nearby,’ it seems that it should be better and more obviously integrated into the overall design. Perhaps somewhere around the set title and Line 5? Over the title, or either under or integrated with Line 5?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what the best solution might be. This just strikes me as an area where there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Did you remember to set your clocks forward today?

(Said in your best Crocodile Dundee voice) “You call that a zoom lens? Now, that’s a zoom lens!”

According to DPReview, there’s “no news on price, availability or weight yet.” Weight. Heh.

(via Carpe Icthus)