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I have photo credit on the website for People en Español. I don’t know if these will end up in a print edition or just stay on the web, but I’m pretty happy.

I have finished the redesign of the website. I just haven’t done the blog yet. So, navigation from the blog to the galleries is going to be a little clunky until I figure out how I want to do this.

Anyway, thanks to Jon Dobres for his input on the fonts. Although I did not choose any of the fonts he specifically suggested, he was correct in pointing out that my initial font choice was hard to read, and therefore, no bueno.

To compliment the new site design, I also designed new business cards, even though I still have 300 or so of the last batch. (I’m also tinkering with new letterhead).

Which side is the front, and which is the back is up for debate. The photo side will have a glossy coating, and the info side will not.

This is going to be a busy week for me. I had a shoot with a couple of trainers last Thursday, another tomorrow, and then a corporate event this Thursday. This basically means that when I’m not shooting this week, I’m going to be at the computer editing and touching up. Oh, how I loathe post-production. I’ve had a number of people ask me about my post-production abilities lately, and I’ve said that while I’m pretty good at it, it’s not something I enjoy doing, so I don’t really advertise that service anymore… I’ll do it as a paid favor for friends who get really busy, but I spent 4 months as a magazine publisher’s Photoshop monkey, and I don’t want to do that again.

Of course, spending all my free time through the weekend (I am very strict with myself about maintaining no more than a 7-day turnaround on digital shoots, regardless of volume) buried in Photoshop means I will probably not get my website redesign up by Thursday as I had planned. There’s not a lot left to do. I pretty much have 4 finished images to prep and 2 more from Lee’s Carrizo Plains trip to process for the Things gallery, and redesign the blog. The blog will the time consuming part, because I really want to integrate it into the website much more than I have in the past. I’ve been tweaking existing templates to make it look similar to my web design by use of graphics. I want to make it look like just another page on my site, but also design it in such a way that it can still be viewed independently of the rest of the website. That is going to be a small project, and may take a few days that I just don’t have this week. Other than that, it’s going well. I shot the product shot of the Hasselblad and the self-portraits and composited them together for the About page last week. Here’s how that looks:

I’d like to rewrite what I’ve written on the About page, but considering how long it took me to come up with what I’ve got… I hate writing anything remotely close to an artist’s statement. But since I will be dividing the work I show into commercial and fine art, I need to write something for the About page that reflects both pursuits.

I got a postcard from the college informing me that my application packet “has been forwarded to the appropriate division for review.” So that’s moving along. I expect I’ll meet with the dean in the next couple of weeks. I’m not being cocky. I just have a current full-time faculty member in my corner. That doesn’t mean I’ll actually get a job teaching; it just means that I will very likely get an interview with the dean.

A trip to Boston next month may be in the cards. Haven’t been there since October of ‘06. I don’t know how long I’ll spend out there yet, but it would be nice to rent a car for a day to drive up to New Hampshire to visit some of the new found extended family that I didn’t know about when I was living in Boston. It would also be nice to take some pictures. I did not do that when I was living there. Of course, the first two months I was there, I was on independent study doing an internship for my last session at Brooks, and at the time, I was so sick of school and the way they insisted I do everything that I just didn’t want to shoot anything. It took several months after I graduated to get out of that. So, I’d been back in California for a while before I was willing to pick up a camera again, and then it was several more months before I was willing to work on anything I’d shot.

This is why it’s important to always shoot personal work. I heard that a lot while I was a student, but never really took the time to develop my own ideas, as I was so absorbed in keeping up with the pace of the school. Brooks can definitely chew you up and spit you out if you let it. Anyway, as a result of devoting all my energy to assigned work, it pretty much ceased to be mine, and I lost most of the joy in photography. It took a good eight months of self-indulgent rehab to get to a place where I felt like my work was my own again.

So anyway, now that I’m back in that place, I’m very excited to go back to Boston for a few days to visit some of the friends I made and take the pictures I didn’t when I lived there. The big question for me is, “What camera(s) do I want to take?”

So, back in January or so, I was thinking I wanted to completely redesign my whole identity materials to something with a softer look, less machine-like. As I started playing with fonts, I ended up going in the opposite direction. I created this barcode logo, and loved it. I started playing around with designing my website around it, but kinda let it go until this weekend. This is a screen grab of the People page, under construction:

I really like this design. It’s very simple and clean, which is something I’ve been trying to move towards. It’s quite the departure from the brushed metal look I started off with 2 years ago. So, I’m quite pleased with the way this is starting to come together. I’ve decided to organize the thumbnails in such a way that I can show off commercial work and fine art in the same page, by placing all the commercial image thumbnails on the left, and the art image thumbnails on the right. And, I have added a PHP script that will randomize which image shows up on the page when it loads. So, I’m happily geeking out over here. I’ve got an idea for a new self-portrait for the About page, and I’m going to try to get that done by the end of next week.

Well, I’ve got a lot of little projects going on here and there. So far, I’ve scanned the black and white images from vacation as well as a few from Stephen’s birthday party. I still have several more to scan from American Flats, which is an abandoned gold refinery just outside of Virginia City, NV. I also have the color images from vacation, some shots of the Anti-Personnel Flowers at my grandparents’ house, and the night shots of the truck out at the abandoned church. This all takes a back seat to working on what I shot last night. Last night, I photographed a real estate grand opening for O Bel Sole, an exciting new housing development here in Lancaster. What makes this development special is that these are green homes. Fully integrated solar power generation, all sorts of insulation in the walls and windows, low-water landscaping. And this is not just the first development of its kind in Lancaster or Los Angeles County. It’s the first development of its kind in all of Southern California. Really cool stuff. My favorite feature is the little computer panel that’s in each house that monitors the house’s energy usage. Around 4:30, with plenty of lights on, the house was not only running entirely off of what it was generating, it was putting surplus electricity back into the grid.

In other news, the October issue of the Lancaster Photography Association newsletter is out. The article on me is on page 2.

I’m fairly pleased with the article. I do wish they would have mentioned a little bit about what I had said about my approach to photography, rather just saying that I think I have a unique approach and that I want to do my own thing. But, I understand they have limited space. The whole newsletter is available on the LPA’s newletter page.