Well, my original thought was to write to the blog twice per week, then it became once per week, and now it's once per month. Now I see July is almost over! Where did the time go?
Half of the month was spent at my day job teaching a summer course at Boston University (BU). I shot many good images for that event that will eventually find their way to our BU websites and press releases. If you want to view them, check out this link. I deliberately didn't schedule anything for that time period, except for my sister's wedding shower.
For those of you who care, I've developed a love-love relationship with my Nikkor 17-55/2.8 lens. I use it on everything from news to events to portraits. I've shot several portraits and events this month and today shot a 50th Wedding Anniversary (no the image of the couple shown here is not celebrating their 50th; she is their daughter and the one who booked me). I was lucky the weather held up. Immediately after, it poured.
I'm quickly selling off my film gear and using the proceeds to purchase new digital gear. An old 35mm Konica camera funded a love relationship with a new camera bag. I formerly had only one large bag and found that I was wanting to have all my lenses at my disposal for paying events. So, I purchased a Domke J1 bag which is now my working bag and put all the rest of my gear in my LowePro Nova 5. The Domke exudes quality and while it's roughly the same size as the LowePro, it holds much more gear and is more functional (and, of course, was much more expensive). An old lens bought me an 8GB Lexar 133X CF card. Some really old but well-kept 35mm gear funded a Nikon SB800 speedlight and a Quantum battery pack to supplement my slightly inferior SB600. Selling old gear and buying new gear is like paying with Monopoly money. Just don't tell my wife that my Rolleiflex sale didn't completely pay for the 17-55. My pending Hasselblad kit sale will hopefully fund a new Mac.
What else happened? I can tell you that my MacBook started to not launch certain applications and Photoshop CS3 was taking forever to open and was crashing all the time. After many fruitless customer service calls and forum searches and posts, I ended up doing a complete disk erase and reinstall and everything is now cranking like new. That took a whole six hour evening to do. And, yes, I did backup all my data! My backup is definitely part of my workflow. No, I don't backup after every shoot, unless it's really important. I do back up religiously every weekend to dual 500GB Lacie drives and a gold DVD. I bring my DVDs off site for security. A friend of mine suggested I do that even though I am really not that anal. Honestly! I just do it to do it. I figure if my house burns down, I'll have bigger things to worry about than where my original digital images are. After all, I have all the low resolution web galleries stored over my different web sites and those I back up to different machines after every update.
We'll be traveling the next few weekends, so expect to see images from our trips. Our plans will bring us to upstate New York (near Ithaca where there's some kind of hay festival), New Hampshire (Mt. Washington Valley and Franconia Notch where we go every year), and Western Massachusetts (Tanglewood, where the Boston Symphony performs and where we'll be sleeping in a cabin).