As I’ve had some pieces sell from the show up at Framations, I needed to take up a new piece to them last night to fill one of the “holes” in the display, as well as moving around of some of my wall hangings to handle the other holes. As soon as I got there, I took a look to see if anything else had been reserved or sold. Nothing additional, but I’m confident that other pieces will fly from the walls before the show ends on August 5th. 🙂

The thing that was earth-shattering news for me was Amy and Sarah inviting me to become a resident artist at Framations! This is a very cool step for me, and a very big one. Essentially, that means that I’ll have some of my pieces on display at the gallery day-in and day-out in a 4′ W x 12′ H (approximately) space. There’s some other benefits from this, and I’ll hit on those once things get a little more firm. Watch this space, along with the Colin Wright Photography site, for more details about the my involvement with the resident artist program at Framations as it unfolds.

For now though, I’m trying to plan out the usage of my space, and exactly what to put in the shop. To say I’m excited about this is an understatement — I’m pretty sure my feet didn’t touch the ground the whole way home last night!

At my gallery reception on Saturday, one of the things I think I was asked the most was how much and what kind of retouching I do to my work. This question usually came as soon as someone found out I was shooting digital. Fair question, in this day and age, I suppose. For me, the answer is white balance, maybe some contrast or brightness, and some sharpening, and that’s about it. I may tweak a twig or a spot from my camera sensor, but what you see on my prints is just about exactly what I saw in the camera.

Now, to be clear, I have no problem with folks adjusting images. Sometimes you need to, especially as the craft starts heading toward high dynamic range images — cameras just aren’t built to capture light across the broad spectrum of an HDR image. And of course, there’s other kinds of tweaks, I’m sure.

However, there’s a limit to what I’d do. For some folks, that appears to be a little less the case. Check out this article detailing a photo of Faith Hill, and what happened to it in the hands of Redbook magazine. Read the article, read the link about why they hated Redbook doing this, and see what you think.

I think they hit the nail on the head. The image was retouched to make a 40-year old woman look like a 25-year old woman, taking away so much of the humanity that was in the original image. I guess that’s what passes for editing nowadays: a distortion of the truth. Ya know, that’s one of the things I love about photography — the bare-naked truthfulness of the image through the lens — and I just hate to see that go out the window for the sake of making a lot of folks buy a magazine.

Alas, a mountain out of a molehill (or a FaithHill), I’m sure, but sometimes ya gatta call ’em like you see ’em!

The reception for my show at Framations was tonight. What an incredible night!

I spent a good part of the day fretting over the reception. I don’t know why I was so nervous, but I was. The butterflies beat the inside of my stomach most of the day. And even through this morning, I was trying to get the finishing touches on things for the show.

My big job this morning was to put together a flyer that described my work, and what kinds of things I could produce. Framations has a holder for business cards and flyers next to my images, and I figured I oughta fill it up with something! So that was a couple of hours of work, along with some printing at Kinko’s. Next time, I’ll try to figure out some way to print the brochures in color, or at least without doing photocopying. It works in a pinch, but it really doesn’t do my photos justice.

I also had to gather up all my small flats. I’ve been carrying these smaller, matted images around for a while. When we hung the work on Monday, Amy and Sarah said they’d be happy to make some space for those smaller pieces, so I lugged them along as well.

We walked into Framations just before the reception was set to start, and found that our caterer, Armando’s Flan Factory, was just putting the finishing touches on the set up for the show. From talking with Sarah and Amy later, it sounds like our caterer may get a few more opportunities from Framations. Cool!

Then we looked at the wall….. and discovered that one of my pieces was already on hold for someone for this week. How cool is that! I’ve barely gotten things on the wall, and already during the week, there’s been interest.

Folks started showing up just after 6pm, and truthfully, it’s all kind of a blur to me. There was so much family, so many friends and other photographers coming by, it kinda all ran together for me. I talked and talked, and toured folks through the images, my thoughts behind them, where they were shot…. my father would’ve been proud. He never met a stranger, and as I’m getting some years under my belt, I’m finding that same thing coming out in me. And for nights like tonight, that’s a great gift.

So how’d I do? Well, during the reception, I sold three large pieces, and several small ones. Had I not sold a thing, I would’ve been pleased, but I was absolutely dumbfounded that that had happened! I still can’t quite get my brain around the fact that folks are putting my work on their walls. In talking with Amy toward the end of the night, she told me that this was a very successful opening, and that I should be pleased. Pleased? Heck, I’m ecstatic!!!

With a little success comes a little work — now I’ve got to get some replacement pieces for the walls up there to fill the holes of the pieces that will be leaving this week!!!!!

Of course, with the night going the way it did, we didn’t take too many photos, but there’s a few out there. One day over the next week or so, I’ll go up and take some shots of the display for all to see.

There was a piece on The Exposure Project last week about the photography of disaster. With Katrina still fresh on the brain, and so many other disasters of a smaller and more personal nature in the news on a daily basis, this particular thread touched home with me.

As the tragedies have unfolded in Texas with all their flooding, I’m reminded of a thought I had during Katrina. While recording the events is important from a documentational perspective, the thing that strikes me more is the preservation of family histories.

With our little flood in the house last week, it brought home to me so much more the desire to protect the past, the images and knowledge of it, and to work hard to ensure that no matter what, mine’s preserved. But, what of the folks in harm’s way?

I think I saw something about this concept during Katrina’s time, but it seems to me that a better service we photographers could render than documentation of the devastation would be the preservation and recovery of the lives of those so afflicted by disaster. I mean, couches and cars and homes — while financially devastating to replace — can be replaced. Images from the past simply cannot. It seems by swooping in while things are still wet, images could be recovered and scanned before the images grow brittle and too hard to work with.

What a great concept, eh?! Maybe one day, that’ll be my calling. It’s certainly a worthwhile endeavour.

For weeks, I’ve been preparing the pieces for my upcoming show. I’ve been toiling over my Quad and my Epson, and have kept the framing and matting vendors in business.

Today, Sio, Darla and I went up to Framations today to hang the pieces, and record the guided audio tour. I gotta tell ya, I am absolutely thrilled with the display. I mean, I’m always thrilled to see my work hung on the walls, but these are the largest images I’ve displayed… and they are just flat stunning.

We shot a couple of photos of the display, but they don’t really show it off very well. I needed to use my big rig with a polarizer to cancel out the reflection from the street. (Note to self… next time, only use non-glare glass in the frames!) Come the reception on Saturday, I’ll get some better shots of the display.

Also, keep your eyes (and ears) peeled, as the guided audio tour, once it’s edited for Saturday, will land here as an audio file, ripe for porting to your iPod!

Anyone who’s read this for very long knows that I would like nothing better than to take my shingle on the road, and photograph nature full-time, and on the road.

I got a tickler on my newsreader today that referenced the site of a photographer named Bill Fortney. This guy founded GAPW, and will be leading an event in Montana (along with Scott Kelby) that I badly want to attend. However, it’s not his photography — which is excellent, BTW — that gets him a nod in the Deauxmayne.

It’s his love of cheeseburgers, a condition that I also suffer from. His take on the American classic is interesting, but is lacking a couple of the best burgers there are. He includes White Castle, but leaves out Krystal. How can you tackle the gut-bombing, gastrointestinal challenging mini-burger without including Krystal??? He also left out a local favorite of mine, Carl’s Drive-In, which is neither owned by Carl, nor is a drive-in, but is just about the best burger in The Lou. And they are the only place I know of where you can get root beer straight from a wood barreled tapper.

And he’s from Harlan KY, where much of Dad’s family hails from. Between that and cheeseburgers, he’s up on my list.

If ever you get to St. Louis, Bill, drop me a note, and I’ll introduce you to Carl’s. I think you’ll approve!

This lazy Sunday finds me still hacking my lungs up, with a headache and muscle aches from all the coughing, and just enough energy to doze through some TV. However, during some of my “up” time, I managed to get the Lightroom 1.1 upgrade done on the Quad.

I’ve read a bunch of stuff that led me to belief that the upgrade was quick (it was), but that large photo archives took a while to convert into the new catalog format. I’ve got over 55,000 images in my archive, and it didn’t seem too painful, although I did go watch the last couple of innings of the Cards game, so I don’t really know how long it took.

As some of you may remember, my work with LR has not been the best. Part of that is probably time and effort on my part. However, right now, I’m importing a bunch of stuff — kinda was waiting for LR 1.1 — and it seems like it’s a little faster. I generate full size previews, and pretty much do everything I can to slow it down as much as I can. 🙂 From what I can see, it seems that the new LR may be bringing stuff in quicker.

The next thing for me to try is copying my catalog over to the MacBook. Ideally, I wanna be able to look at my images on the MacBook — part of why I create the full size preview images — while not having to carry my whole library with me. Those previews aren’t big enough to work on, but they are definitely big enough to show off on-screen.

So, Scott Kelby’s book in hand, and his update on my hard drive, I’m giving LR another good college try.

I got word from Framations that the announcement cards are in. Here’s what they look like:

I should have mine sometime this weekend, and shortly after that, some of you should begin to find them in your mailboxes, maybe as early as next week.

I also was informed by Framations that the print ad was ready. Here’s what it looks like:

This is gonna run in the Post-Dispatch Get Out section, and in the St. Charles County Journal Weekender paper, both next week. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s about 300,000 folks that could set their peepers on that advert.

Yep, this is starting to get very real for me!

Photographer’s Journey ran a piece addressing a Nikon ad campaign which claims that anyone could take a great picture with the new D40. To that end, Nikon delivered a bunch of D40s to the residents of a small town in South Carolina, and let them play with the new cameras for a while to see what they’d come up with.

What appalls me is the arrogance of the piece. There’s an implication from one line in the piece that if you didn’t learn and practice using film and a darkroom before moving to digital, you just somehow can’t become a real photographer (my interpretation). What a pretentious view! If that’s the case, in about 30-40 years, there will be no real photographers, as there won’t have been film and darkrooms with which they could hone their craft before moving to digital.

What was also interesting was the the author’s contention that the photos these novices shot were no better than point-and-shoot images shot at a family function. These folks (may) have no training, no fancy lighting or lenses, and went out into their lives and bared it all for the world to see. That’s cool and transcends the criticisms of this article. Nikon’s approach is art in and of itself, but even beyond that, the images are good. Sure, there’s some that are better than others, but even no pro hits a home run with every photo. If that was the case, they wouldn’t be buying larger storage cards for their cameras, and cameras with faster and faster shutter frame rates, and would rely on catching a moment with only a single click of the shutter.

Is it fair to assume that putting a nice piece of gear in your hands is gonna make someone a great photographer? No — no more than putting a driver in a NASCAR ride is gonna make them a great driver. But what it will do is instantly give them an edge. Digital photography is the ultimate in instant gratification, self-taught learning, and a fast-track to learning photography if someone wants to learn. If they just wanna shoot photos of the kids, that’s cool too, and is no less important than the pro photographer who is shooting the latest thing — fashion, war, crime, party, wedding. They’re both telling a story with their images, and preserving a bit history. That’s the point after all; everything else is just so much fluff.