Today is the day…. Sio and I will be going to Stage Left to hang my prints this morning!

I’ve had no butterflies about this whole deal, until yesterday when I started sending out notices and posting information about the exhibit on the bulletin board at work. That made it really come home for me, and that was enough to put me in a panic! 🙂

I’m sure everything will go well, and even if I don’t sell a thing, I’ll still be happy for having had the experience!

I guess it’s official — I’m cutting my own mats.

Beck and I went to Hobby Lobby, looking for some precut mats for my big show coming up in a couple of weeks. I didn’t really like what I saw, and once Beck asked if they had mat cutters, I found the Logan in my hands. Add to that a 40% off coupon, and I escaped for about $65 for the cutter — nice price and well, well within what I was willing to spend. Beck was even able to get some scrap matboard for me to practice with… for free!

I watched the video that came with it, which had one little lesson for my machine, and then set you loose on the world. Five minutes of training — woo hoo! 🙂

I cleared off the workbench in the shop, got things set up and started practicing. While I can already tell that practice will improve my cutting, I was real pleased with just how well things went. I’m sure to the ultratrained eye, my cuts aren’t as clean as they should be, especially in the corners. For me though, they look great!

So what does that save me? Well, a precut mat for an 8×10 image is about two to six bucks, depending on where I get it. I can get a full 32×40 matboard for six bucks (three bucks when Hobby Lobby has them half off). The math’s not hard to figure out from there.

This is a nice next step for me, and I’m sure it’ll give me something else to spend gobs of time on!

Man, I hated crashing my Microdrive on the trail last weekend. That’s the second time I’ve crashed a 4GB Microdrive under somewhat mysterious circumstances. No more. The difference in cost is just not that much between high capacity microdrives and high capacity solid state compact flash.

Just a few days prior to the drive crash, in an almost prophetic fashion, someone at work was talking about how cheap the 8GB CF had gotten. A year ago, that kind of card would’ve set me back well over $1000. That’s why the 4GB microdrive was attractive when I bought it two years ago for just over $200 — that same microdrive is now under $80, and 6GB and 8GB microdrives are more the rage. Even at cheap, having a higher possibility of crashing the microdrive versus the solid state CF makes the ‘drives potentially just too expensive.

After doing a bunch of diagnosis on the Microdrive, I got on eBay, and found someone selling an 8GB CF from SanDisk for a fraction of the year-ago asking price. It wasn’t the cheapest one out there — there are a ton of no-name cards out there, but I’m leary of somebody I’ve never heard of — but it was available, legitimate, and was located in the US. I bid, won, and today the card arrived.

It looked unused, but came in no packaging, aside from the plastic card cover. No biggie to me, but I do wonder a little where these cards are coming from and how they’re ending up on eBay. No matter. I popped the card in the 20D, formatted it, and started shooting. And it performed flawlessly.

I did some test shooting, comparing the speed of my previous speed demon card — the Lexar 1GB 32X CF. It didn’t exactly blow the doors off, but the SanDisk card did perform better. It’s rare that I need to shoot really fast. In JPG mode, the 20D was able to shoot about 50-60 images with the SanDisk card before having to pause to write. The Lexar card was good for about 40-50 images before pausing. So far, so good.

I filled the Lexar card, and loaded it in my card reader on the Mac, and it took about 3-4 minutes to copy the data across. The SanDisk card took only a couple of minutes to copy the same amount of data.

Now, none of my observations are scientific — Rob Galbraith does a much better job of quantifying CF speeds and feeds, so that’s a better place for real numbers. For me though, this seems like a good purchase, and one that will keep me happy for quite a while!

I finally put my order in with VistaPrint for my business cards. They should be here in a couple of weeks.

I think I did a good job getting this ready, and I can’t wait to see what they look like!

I’ve still got to put together announcement post cards, get those printed, and mailed out or hand delivered. Oh yeah, and then there’s all the printing and framing. 🙂

I didn’t realize it, but Moose Peterson has been writing a blog since the beginning of the year. He sent out an e-mail mentioning it. Sure ’nuff — here it is. It’s a fun read, and really seems to reflect his personality as I remember it from November’s DLWS.

Way to go Moose — enjoy the blogosphere!

OK, maybe not, but it was fun.

This morning, Moose Peterson was on the Photo Talk Radio program from World Talk Radio. I thought I’d give the show a jingle, and I actually got on the air with the hosts and Moose — you can hear my call toward the end of the first segment. Verra cool.

And they’ll be sending me a LensPen as a promo for getting on the air. I guess this truly makes me a photo geek, eh? 🙂

This was followed by a bit from Wacom, a toolset that I couldn’t live without. I go back and forth on the confluence of tools in the Wacom 21UX. That’s the one with the tablet laid right over a 21″ monitor. It costs as much as a 30″ monitor from Apple, but it seems like scribbling right on the screen would be cool. Still, if one side of that breaks — the tablet or the monitor — you’re dead in the water until it comes back from service. I’ll have to ponder that one for a while. And, of course, I don’t have $2500 lying about to toss at a new monitor!

The preacher at our church is in Romania this week doing missions work, so today we had a pinch-preacher.  He seemed a good man, conversant with the Word, and delivered a good message.  His message was about the heart, not the physical heart, but the metaphysical heart.  Of note to me was a comment about passion and duty.

He made the point that so much of what we do, scurrying about upon the surface of this little globe, is done of duty.  Things are done because of schedules, obligations, expectations — all duties, dispatched well, but not what moves us.  Instead, we need to strive to do things that we’re passionate about, things that move us and inspire us.  Because they stir our hearts, it’s those things we’ll do well.  They are the things that we’ll dispatch as a labor of love, and that will further fuel the passionate stir within.  And those are the kinds of things that can be best used for service in the church.

Like I said, a good message.  And I didn’t even get the paraphrasing complete!

But it spoke to me, and with a great volume!  I know the activity I’m most passionate about, and that’s photography — duh!  :-)  Now, how to fuel that passion?  Well, my exhibit is one.  Talking and working with other photographers (the little clique of photographers that’s sprung up at work, seminars like DLWS) is another.  And frankly, just working through issues here in my blog is yet another.  All this keeps the flames stiring within me and that’s a terrific feeling.

In the end though, I would love to find some way of providing God service through this fire that is my photography.  I have no idea how my photography could help the work of our church or beyond, but if there was a way, that’d be something pretty special.

“Thanks for the peek into your work. It’s great and we’d love to feature you
in our space.”

And with those words, I have been booked into the first exhibit of my photography. I’m so excited I could just pop!

Lenny had pointed me to the owner of a local coffee shop, the Stage Left Espresso Bar and Cafe, whom I e-mailed last week. Lenny is always looking for places to show his work, and has been trying to give me the proverbial kick in the seat to get my work exhibited. Being that I’m still a bit shy about my work, he’s been trying to throw me some opportunities, and this was one.

Tonight I received an e-mail to let me know that she would like to exhibit my work for the month of August. The whole month! To say I’m excited is probably the grandest understatement of the century! Watch the sidebar for more information about the exhibit as I fill in the holes about the engagement.

Anyone who’s read my blog for any length of time knows that I really credit my father for kindling my passion for photography both in life and death. Dad was at one time a commercial photographer, and had been taking photos for all my life. It was only after he was gone that I found the torch he carried, and began hoisting it up on my own.

So it’s very meaningful to me that my first exhibit will encompass the date that would’ve been his 66th birthday (August 18th). I can think of no finer expression of my appreciation for his wonderful gift of photography than to honor him by holding this exhibit.

This one’s for you, Dad.

I’ve finished converting the 2005 photos to the new format — enjoy!

The 2004 photos are next.  I’d expect them to be done sometime this weekend.  The scripts are working marvelously, and I wouldn’t be surprised to have all the photos done by the end of the weekend.

The biggest benefit out of this process is that the images are now sharper, having been run by Photoshop CS2 through the nik sharpening filters.

Ahh, automation is a wonderful thing!  🙂