100 Days

It’s been over 100 days since I started this daily photo thing. Seems like 100 years.

Wait. That didn’t come out right. I should start again.

It’s been 100 days since I started this daily photo thing. No one’s dead yet.

Gad.

The point is, it’s still going. I’m not good at reg­u­lar things like this so I count this as a real accom­plish­ment, frankly. And, it hap­pened in the face of a few photo-related bumps in the road.

Bump 1: Process

I have yet to fig­ure out how to reli­ably edit and post while trav­el­ing. Yes, the tech­nol­ogy is there. It’s the gump­tion that appears to be miss­ing. I’m really lazy when I travel and as soon as the work of what­everi­tis I’m doing is done, I tend to fall right to sleep.

Com­pound­ing this, the big photo trip in this last 100 days took me to Coal­mont, Col­orado and Eagle’s Wing Ranch to shoot a grow­ing herd of bison. The story is around this work­ing ranch at the end of the road from any­thing USA as they end their 5-year build­ing stage and tran­si­tion into eth­i­cal work­ing pro­duc­tion stage. I’d gone for the births — they were expect­ing 120 calves. I got one baby. One. Babies are born when they are born, no mat­ter what the species.

Bump 2: Technology

I made the deci­sion to migrate from my photo soft­ware part­ner of choice for the last six years (Apple’s Aper­ture), to a new part­ner, Adobe’s Light­room. It took me over a year to make this call thanks to the sheer mag­ni­tude of the move. See, each appli­ca­tion han­dles images in a dif­fer­ent way once you make edits to them. Crop an image, change it to black and white, what­ever, and Aper­ture makes a copy of the image and applies your changes to it. In that way, your orig­i­nal file is saved in case you ever want to go back and do some­thing dif­fer­ent to it down the road. That also means that when you make a move like I did, you end up hav­ing to export first your orig­i­nal mas­ters, the files that have been copied to make changes to, and the fin­ished ver­sions, the pub­lished images with effects applied.

Light­room han­dles this whole process very dif­fer­ently than Aper­ture, part of the rea­son for my move, and mak­ing all this line up in my head was tricky.

Why the big pain, Pete? I know you’re ask­ing your­self this. I did, too. The answer is scale. It isn’t hard to move a few hun­dred images. Maybe even easy to move a few thou­sand. But I moved 47,851 images from Aper­ture to Light­room and frankly, that num­ber stressed me out.

Upside, as long as I’m rant­ing: Light­room is scream­ingly fast. Scrolling through my nearly-50k image data­base, with orig­i­nals stored on a net­work drive, is sim­ply unbe­liev­able. I feel like I’ve just been jos­tled awake with smelling salts after being beaten in my sleep for 6 years by comparison.

Sec­ond, the way Light­room han­dles non-destructive edit­ing is a dream.

Third: DNG. I made the move and con­verted my RAW images to DNG and so far I’ve been very impressed. Color inter­pre­ta­tion is right on with how I remem­ber shoot­ing the images and file activ­i­ties are very fast and efficient.

Fourth: Oh my god PUBLISHING SERVICES. That Aper­ture doesn’t offer some com­pa­ra­ble fea­ture for what Light­room got SO RIGHT here is some­thing that should make Apple Aper­ture devs stay up all night.

Bump 3: Gear

When I switched from Canon to Nikon, I did it with the first full-frame Nikon, the day that cam­era hit the streets of Port­land. Lit­er­ally. I’m still shoot­ing with that cam­era reg­u­larly and I love it.

Last month, I made the call to switch from a tra­di­tional video cam­era to dSLR video, which my D3 does not do. So I had to add gear.

I went with another VERY new cam­era in the Nikon line, the D7000. It does so, so much of what the D3 does, and it does it so very well, in a much smaller pack­age. The early video projects I’ve taken on using this cam­era have been superb expe­ri­ences. It’s no RED, but for the stuff I do it’s absolutely perfect.

So these bumps, right? They all slow me down in their own spe­cial way. Whether I’m just look­ing for more sleep, deal­ing with new tools or new gear, they’re all forces act­ing in the way of me doing the things I gen­er­ally want to do, after all the things I need to do are done.

And yet, I’m still cel­e­brat­ing. The Daily Photo thing is a project I put on my own plate just to keep mov­ing for­ward. To keep look­ing at images in a new way. And with­out a spe­cific daily goal (photo-365 for a year and all that what­not), I’m find­ing I’m get­ting far more joy out of the process of pro­cess­ing than I ever have before, and that’s been a dri­ver all by itself.

If you haven’t dis­cov­ered the Daily Photo, here’s how you find it:

  • Sign up for the mail­ing list. This is by far the pre­ferred way of get­ting the daily pic, par­tic­u­larly pre­ferred if you’re me since that means I get  your email address and can send you love notes, and maybe a cake someday.
  • Like me on Face­book. Yes, I have a Pete Wright Photo “artist” page on Face­book where I post the Daily Photo as soon as it hits my site.
  • Fol­low me on Twit­ter. Links post there, too. Added ben­e­fit of Twit­ter is that you get more me, with other links to things that are fully awesome.
  • Visit petewright.co every sin­gle day. Yeah, I like my own site, but who are we kid­ding? You’re not going to do that. Just go sign up for the list and call it good.

That’s all for this update. Now, back to legos.