Archive for March, 2009
Apple’s iPhone has many great features, but the camera isn’t one of them. I tried a couple of shots of early-blooming wildflowers on Pass Island at Deception Pass State Park this afternoon with results that I’m unwilling to share with anyone.
The nice big sharp display leads one to believe that photos will look good, but there are several problems. There’s no way to focus and the set focus is too distant to make nice frame-filling wildflower photos. I have several frames with beautiful grass widows (Olsynium douglasii) nodding my way and a blue sky in the background. But the flowers are soft and the background is sharp. In the bright sun it was hard to see the focus point.
Another problem is there’s no way to control the exposure. It’s completely automatic. In this photo of a friend who came along on the trip the highlights are badly clipped. There’s nothing Photoshop can do to retrieve detail from that level of overexposure. The iPhone apparently is biased toward shadow detail. I ran into the same issue shooting bright yellow spring gold (Lomatium utriculatum).
Color balance is also completely automatic. Under mid-day sun I think the results are too blue. I’ve corrected the color in Lightroom on the photo of Kay examining the grass widows, but straight out of the camera it just isn’t acceptable.
It’s a shame the iPhone camera is so mediocre because sometimes it’s nice to just carry one small device and not be encumbered by a pack full of heavy glass and camera bodies. For a blog entry a big high-res file just isn’t necessary. I guess I’ll have to go back to carrying at least my Canon S70 pocket camera when I don’t want the bring the big iron along.
In any case, today was a fantastic day to be out in the sunshine poking around to see what had come into bloom. Washington Park in Anacortes and Pass Island at Deception Pass State Park are two of the premier early-season flower spots around here. There was more blooming on Pass Island, perhaps because it’s a little more protected. Here’s what we saw:
- grass widows (Olsynium douglasii)
- beach strawberry (Fragaria chiloensis)
- western buttercup (Ranunculus occidentalis)
- spring gold (Lomatium utriculatum)
- red-flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum)
- small-flowered blue-eyed Mary (Collinsia parviflora)
- early saxifrage (Saxifraga integrifolia)
- field chickweed (Cerastium arvense) a single flower in a protected spot
- prairie stars (Lithophragma parviflorum)
- Oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium)
It’s interesting to note that most of these were blooming two weeks earlier in 2008, which was also a cool spring. Our spring of 2009 is even colder.
March 29 2009 | Native Plants and Photography | No Comments »
Friends and business associates often ask “how’s business?” I have to say that 2006 was my best year and there’s been a decline since then. Since my market has been tied to magazine and book publishing how my business fares is connected to how the publishing business fares.
This morning a quote caught my eye over on A Photo Editor: “Chicken Little, don your hardhat. Nudged by recession, doom has arrived.” I followed the link to an interesting post on Advertising Age by Bob Garfield. The basic thrust is that the mutually beneficial relationship between big media and advertising is going away. With the rapid rise of the internet, where most people expect content to be free, where the barriers to creating content are low, and where the supply of advertising is high the end result is a quickly receeding revenue stream and dropping valuations for media companies.
Referring to magazines, Bob writes:
In 2008, newsstand sales — the profit engine of the industry — fell 12%. According to Media Industry Newsletter, gross ad pages so far in 2009 have dropped a staggering 22% — that coming off a dismal 2008. In recent months, Condé Nast has folded Domino, Meredith has folded Country Home, Ziff-Davis has folded PC Magazine, Hearst has folded CosmoGirl and O at Home, The New York Times has folded Play, and Hachette has folded Home.
Over the years Country Home and Home have been among my customers. Bob doesn’t talk about books, because they’ve rarely been ad-supported, but two publishers in the gardening world have folded up shop in the last few months. Sunset Books is no more; likewise Meredith garden books.
Rights-managed stock photography through big agencies continues to consolidate and license fees are slipping. Will sales return as the economy improves? I don’t know but I’m skeptical.
So to answer the original question, business is deteriorating. Yet I’m optimistic that by changing directions and focusing my efforts on a more personal kind of photography I’ll be successful. For years I’ve avoided the business I now find that I enjoy very much. There’s great satisfaction in helping families remember important phases in their lives through portraiture. I’m excited about 2009 and hope to see some of you for a portrait session.
March 25 2009 | Business and Photography | No Comments »
I went to the Bellingham Chamber of Commerce Business After Business tonight and was delighted to find that our hosts, Curtis & Felicity Dye of Interconnect Systems had invited Pearl Django to come up from Seattle and make wonderful music for us.
The monthly Business After Business events are a relaxed way to socialize with other business people from the community. There’s always good food and beverages, but not always live music. And rarely is the music of the caliber of tonight’s affair.
There are often door prizes at these affairs. Tonight I was the lucky winner of one of two signed CDs by Pearl Django. I’ve been listening to these folks on KPLU for years, but this was the first time I’d heard them in person so winning a CD was a special treat.
Toward the end of the evening Curtis & Felicity danced to one of the tunes. No one else got up to dance, although the offer was open.
The pair of photos here were made with my iPhone and processed in Adobe Lightroom before posting. Fluorescent lighting isn’t the most flattering, but with care the phone captures the occasion. It’s noisy and low resolution, but sometimes that just doesn’t matter.
Thanks, Curtis, for having us over tonight.
March 19 2009 | Business and Photography | 2 Comments »
This morning I photographed the Burns family in their home near Whatcom Falls Park. It was a cool and rainy day so we decided to shoot inside. Cora is about 2 1/2 years old and was a delightful little girl. She really liked pressing the button on the flash meter as I checked the lighting on various shots.
Here’s a teaser video …
These photos were lit with an umbrella and a corded small flash. I’m really coveting a completely wireless flash system.
March 15 2009 | Photography and Portraits | No Comments »
This morning I photographed a young family in Bellingham’s Cornwall Park. The forecast was for possible snow and/or rain, but the morning dawned calm and partly sunny. It was still cold, only in the low 30s, at 10 am when we started but this is an outdoors family that was prepared for the conditions. Here’s a sampler from the session:
The little boy in the photos is about 20 months old and just beginning to talk. He liked throwing fir cones in the creek, collecting rocks, and going down the slide on the playground. He reminded me that little kids have a very short attention span so I had to be quick.
We worked for about an hour until the little one said “done” and headed toward the car.
Because my subject was so mobile I shot handheld this morning, using on-camera fill flash most of the time. I had set up off-camera flash for the first shot, but with a sync cable to the camera. It worked, but I’m really coveting some wireless flash triggers.
March 08 2009 | Photography and Portraits | 1 Comment »
