Busy, busy, busy!

I took yesterday off from my "day job". I was getting further and further behind with my image processing. Last Friday night I shot a boxing card at the casino. Eight bouts of which two were amateurs, five were non title bouts, and the last was Chad Dawson vs Eric Harding NABF title bout of some sort. I am not a boxing fan so the fine points elude me. My boxing mentor, Ed Mulholland, has Chad as a client so I was sad Ed couldn't attend but glad I got great shots of Chad. I had about 1700 frames. And that was after losing a CF card with about 500 more. The down side is that it was a 4GB Sandisk Extreme III that cost me $450 a year ago. The up side is that I am awaiting from B&H a new Sandisk Extreme III 8GB card that cost a bit less. Since being screwed by Lexar I only use Sandisk cards.

Then Saturday afternoon I shot a VIP BlackJack tournament for five hours. Dumped CF cards to my P-2000. And then shot another 1000+ images of Kool and the Gang! Altogether I have a lot of images in the pipeline (I'll talk about my workflow another day.)

Fortunatley I recently purchased PhotoMechanic 4. It is a download and image management product that handles some issues that had been costing me a lot of time. It manages IPTC data very well which is why I bought it. But it also does great renaming, copying, sorting and uploading to FTP sites and PhotoShelter ... all things I use regularly but have had a whole smattering of ways to do it. And it knows the soft rotation flags and will rotate my images automatically ... something I used to spent an hour or two doing using software that came with my Fuji S2 Pro a few years ago. I expect that PhotoMechanic (from Camerabits.com) is going to save me hours and hours.

So, here I am today, back at work, between tasks. I have caught up on all but the BlackJack Tournament. But, wouldn't you know it ... tonight I shoot Los Tigres del Norte and that'll be another 500-800 images, sigh.

A couple of notes: I know my profile is not up to date ... Blogger seems to be having some issues. I will mention products and services that I use, but please note that I am not affiliated or compensated by them at this point and am not trying to do so.

I'm Baaaaaaccccccckkkkkkkkkk!

Chris Fritchie of Soundhole Photography asked me to do a blog. I have a blog. This one! It was just dead. So I will start it up again. I will share all the things that go on for me "behind the scenes" in my Live Entertainment photography business. Actually, I do Live Entertainment (including some sports) and I have one website client, Casa Cassara Vineyard and Winery ... I was originally going to do websites with high quality images, but the images very quickly overcame the website side since every ten year old can do better websites than me! Anyway, I am at my day job [computer programmer for the University of California at Santa Barbara, for the past 30 years] so I can only stay a minute, but when I come back I'll give the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of how I got into what I am into and then write about what is currently going on ... there is ALWAYS stuff currently going on for me, sigh ... including gigs, computers, software, camera equipment, lighting and studio, workflow (big changes recently) and my slow (some would say 'glacial') migration from Ulead PhotoImpact (which is excellent) to Photoshop and from JPEGS to RAW. Fill your CF cards! -Dwight