Going to Cody, Wyoming

I'm taking a spontaneous last-minute vacation to a ranch outside Cody, Wyoming next month and I'm looking forward to the photographic opportunities of both Eastern Yellowstone and the more open plains of Wyoming.  According to Wikipedia, Cody is a town of 8,800 people with a real airport, a newspaper,  and rodeos at least 90 nights a year.  According to The Internet, houses cost a couple hundred thousand dollars although it's easy to spend a million dollars on a really nice new ranch house on a huge piece of property. But I'm more intrigued by a different side of "The West" - the downfall, depopulation, and wasting away of lots of little towns across the American heartland that just don't have the stamina to keep going.

I have a book called "Ghosts in the Wilderness - Abandoned America" that chronicles various small towns and homesteads in the Dakotas, Colorado, and Wyoming that are simply being abandoned due to lack of people.  The photographs are large and wonderful - abandoned trucks, crumbling plaster living rooms, and wide open plains that remind me of the picture of Bunny Lebowski's Kansas homestead.

The reasoning behind the abandonment of small towns in America makes perfect sense - millions of acres of prairie don't need little towns every 10 miles anymore to take care of them.  People grow up watching TV and want to move to the Big City but nobody ever grows up and wants to move out in the middle of nowhere.

The formula for finding an abandoned town seems pretty clear - look for a highway and a set of train tracks that runs a long ways between two cities that are still surviving and scattered in between are probably a few towns under a couple hundred people and falling.

Will we find anything cool to take pictures of?  Will we have perfect weather for sunrise shots of the mountains?  Will we find a 1930's pickup truck resting ever so perfectly by the side of the road?  We'll see...

PhotoShelter Collection is shutting down - Why I care

I woke up this morning to learn that PhotoShelter is shutting down the PhotoShelter Collection stock website in a month.  I've been a member of PSC for about a year now and although I haven't actually had any sales, I'll still miss them. Why will I miss the stock agency that never sold any of my images?  Let me count the ways:

• I like the company: I was already a member of the PhotoShelter Personal Archive, which is a pay-for photo hosting/sales site.  They're good people!
• Allen M. is also one of the founders of SportsShooter.com which is a truly great resource for people interested in sports shooting.  They put a lot of work into building a good community that helps photographers worldwide, whether they're customers of PhotoShelter or not.  It's sad to see bad things happen to good people.
• Some sort of kindred feeling:  The PhotoShelter Collection was started right as I decided to treat my photography as a business.  The first time I ever took time off from my day job to do something photographic was when PSC held their "open house" of sorts in San Francisco.  I was took some vacation time, dressed up, drove up to The City, and listened to some great people talk about the state of the stock photo business.   I listened to Michael Zagaris and a bunch of other people talk and at the cocktail mixer afterwards I talked to Brad Mangin a bit.  Brad was there "to support the team" and he told me a lot really good things about the world of photography.
• Love of equality:  The coolest thing about PSC was that anyone could join.  It was the opening for part-time shooters like me to get our foot in the door of the stock world and get images up for sale.  They seemed to have some real street cred in the "Bitter New York Photo Scene" and they took it as their mission to include as many people as they could in the rarified air of stock agencies.
• Professionalism:  Joining PSC made me think about my photography differently.  Getting accepted there and paying attention to the editors, the School of Stock discussions, the blogs, etc. helped me learn a lot more about the "business" side of photography and see the difference between photography that's "pretty" vs. photography that's "salable".  It made me think about an efficient workflow for capturing, editing, captioning, archiving, and submitting images.  These things are crucial skills!
• Sticking up for the value of the little guy:  One of the main things the PhotoShelter people stress is that commercial use of photography should not be undervalued, regardless of who shot the photo.  We can't all be Annie L. but there can be some middle ground between the Big Guys and microstock.   Their $50 minimum price in the face of $1 microstock was their way of sticking their neck out for the little guy.

I have to admit - there's a lot about their view of stock that I never understood.  I don't like or even understand all the images they select.  I was often baffled by Editor's Choice images, and I'll probably never understand the New York photography/art/fashion/image/attitude scene, and I they never moved any of the 36 images I had live.

But I'm still unhappy they're closing down.

Wedding yesterday

I shot another wedding yesterday and overall, things went very well.  I had rented a Canon 5-D and the 15mm fisheye lens from BorrowLenses to have a better second body than my old 20, and it worked out really well.   The wedding was a leisurely affair, with pictures of the prep starting at noon, and me leaving at 8:00pm. It was quite the day, including 1,625 pictures!  Now the editing begins...

Things I learned:

I'd like to do future weddings with a pair of cameras with similar interfaces, since switching between the 5-D and the 40-D was a bit confusing at times.

Full-frame is the way to go.  It really takes advantage of the heavy glass I've been carrying around for 2 years.  The 24-70 is finally a semi-wide angle lens like it was intended to be!

Also, I'm gonna need more Compact Flash space...

Geo-tagging photos with GPS: It Works!

After purchasing a Garmin GPS and experimenting with the excellent GPS Photolinker software by Jeffrey Early, I'm happy to say that everything totally works!   I have a couple future feature wishes for various parts of the process, but overall, it's great. I'll go into a little more detail in an upcoming post.

Exploring GPS Geo Tagging

Ever since our trip to Jamaica, I’ve been thinking about geotagging images, where photos have lattitude/longitude coordinates “automatically” added into their metadata. The obvious use is to be able to pinpoint on a map exactly where a photo was taken is really cool, but there are endless other applications for this technology. The best case scenario for the photographer would be a camera that had a GPS built in and just recorded the lat/lon in the EXIF data every time you push the shutter. Problem solved. Unfortunately, there are no cameras that I know of have a GPS built in right now so photographers these days need to use a separate camera and GPS unit and some software to integrate the data afterwards.

That's what I'm investigating.  Stay tuned...

Bay Area Travel Writers

I went to the monthly meeting of the Bay Area Travel Writers this afternoon.  It’s an interesting, friendly group made up mostly of writers but a few photographers.  The main event was a 2 hour presentation by John Jerney about useful sites on the Internet.  It was a whirlwind of webtools, proving that you really could run an entire business from a web browser if you wanted to. Travel writers and photogs have a great dilemma when it comes to mobile technology:  To take a laptop with on the road and be burdened down by the size/weight of that, or to rely on “the Internet cloud” to store all your data for you and be at the mercy of Internet cafes, hotel access, etc.  John showed how a travel writer could use a suite of online tools (mostly Google based) to plan a trip, research destinations along the way, write about the trip while on the road, and maintain all the normal business contacts, all without having to carry any of your own data with you.

Photographers are a bit of a special case because we inherently deal with more data than writers do, and it would be really impossible to do any meaningful photo work without carrying a laptop along the way.  We didn’t take a laptop on our trips to Vietnam or Jamaica, but I’m pretty sure we’ll take a laptop on the next trip.