New flash!

I picked up a couple of AlienBees flashes from Craigslist this weekend on my way to Jessie's graduation party in Sacramento. I haven't had much of an opportunity to use them, but we did get a couple of shots in the pool at the party:





I also got a beauty dish, which I'm very excited to use more of:

Austin: Inner Space Cavern

Denman and I visited Inner Space Cavern today. It was in the mid-sixties inside, but around 90% humidity, so it wasn't much better than the 100-degree temperatures outside! Quite a bit of fun though. I've discovered that getting good photos inside a cave really requires a tripod, so I'm only sharing one with the world:

Austin: Hike to the Capitol

Today Denman and I took a six mile hike up a creek bed to the Capitol building. Along the way we stopped at Whole Foods and had a fantastic smoothie and lunch. We took a bus home since neither of us really wanted to hike in the 90+ degree heat.

Austin, TX

I'm in Austin, TX for the weekend, visiting my friend Denman. It's HOT here, and I'm really not used to the heat.



We visited the Zilker Botanical Gardens:



and the Umlauf Sculpture Garden:

Now what?

Now that SoFoBoMo is complete, what's next? With SoFoBoMo, I had a set of ideas and a goal to push for. Now I feel directionless. I have some vague ideas for some more portrait work, but I'd really like to continue my set of magic and mystery.

Perhaps inspiration will hit suddenly. Perhaps I'll have to dig through mythology or fairy tales or fiction. Or, perhaps you, my fine reader(s?), have an idea? Please share!

Of Light and Life -- SoFoBoMo '09 Complete!

Last night, I finished my SoFoBoMo 2009 book, titled:

Of Light and Life

A big thanks to Melody, Meka, Christy, Ryan, Dore, Patty, and Katie. for modeling. Thank you Jessica, Christy, and Melody for helping carry equipment. Also to my readers Ian F. and Beth S. for encouraging me. And finally a tip to Mike for the ghostscript resizing tip!

On Reducing the File Size of a PDF

For SoFoBoMo, I need to upload a PDF of my book that is less than 15 megabytes. Since I intend to print my book, the PDF at high-res is 90 megabytes! After some research, I found that ghostscript can down-size PDFs by reducing the resolution of the images it contains. Here's the command to downsize Portraits.pdf (90MB) to Portraits_low.pdf (8MB):

gs -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=Portraits_low.pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook Portraits.pdf

SoFoBoMo Final Stretch

I have just five images left to make final adjustments on for SoFoBoMo. This is good, because my deadline is tomorrow! As usual, I'm cutting it close.

SoFoBoMo Photography Complete!

I've finally completed the photography work for my SoFoBoMo book! I put together the preliminary layout with 40 photos.. well past my 35 image goal. Now I need to finish editing and retouching the photos and finalize the layout.

A preview of the new images: