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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?”

I was not disappeared after linking to the Naomi Wolff video. I just haven’t had a whole lot to say. But I’ve been keeping busy with assisting and shooting for clients, as well as shooting for myself. There have been trips to Malibu, Joshua Tree National Park, the Channel Islands (well, Santa Cruz Island, specifically), as well as one of Lee Bergthold’s weekend trips to the Carrizo Plains. I’ve been processing the RAW files in my free time, and I’ve finished Malibu and Joshua Tree:

Malibu, California; February 27, 2008

Joshua Tree National Park, California; March 23, 2008 (and one shot from Feb. 2007)

In other news, there is the possibility that I may move into teaching soon. This is very exciting for me, as I love helping people, and I love explaining things, and I love photography, so explaining photography to people and helping them to take better pictures would be a blast. I’m not going to say much else about that until it actually happens because I don’t want to jinx it.

Anyway, Llano del Rio, Carrizo Plains, and Santa Cruz Island pictures coming up as time permits.

The better part of my day was spent figuring out how to put that Flickr banner in the sidebar on the right. I would say I have a firm command of HTML, but don’t even ask me how PHP scripts work.