Home this week

I've been on a short break for awhile in Paris. Work pretty much sucks up every second of computer time I can handle in a 24 hour period. Some free time on weekends to walk and get to know the city. I have a few pics, not much time to post. I get back to Seattle this week and with every timezone I cross I'll be adding another hour of freetime to my day- I'm so over 12-14 hour days.
Gonna miss my Paris apartment.

Not my apartment ;)See the rest of Paris here.

Fiberglass and Megapixles

Just ran across the trailer for the documentary FIBERGLASS AND MEGAPIXLES. Of course I've always dreamed of being a surf photog, but on the other hand I could never imagine lined up on the beach with 50 other guys snappin' shots of the same exact thing. I don't have some profound artists statement touting my creativity, or uniqueness, I just know it would be tough to do for me. Who am I kidding? Of course I would do it just to say I've done it I guess.

And then you have the water shooters. That seems like a little different skill set required to get the shots. Even though I was in the line up with 50 other guys I bet I would get a certain amount of gratification just trying to get a shot.



Check the trailer for a great clip of Sunny Garcia's fin smacking the dome of a filmers water housing. That's one guy I would hate to have run into me.

Making Changes

Little surf and a little snow this weekend. Equally average conditions, but still a good time. Also started a new project this weekend and it's turned out to be a pretty big one- cleaning up my catalog of images. I'm not trying to implement anything different than what most serious photogs do, just better than what I've been doing. Basically it involves a lot of re- naming, importing, converting, and saving, a few hundered gigs of images.

Lost Images: honestly can't remember taking this. Nothing special other than single dude out catching a bomb.

In the past I imported all my RAW files, converted to DNG (with the embedded RAW file), processed the selects, upload a full res copy of the JPG to online site, backed up everything on mirrored drives, and save in batches to DVD. Sounds like a lot, but it's not bad as long as you stick to your plan and set up your programs preferences up correctly. I've done my best to stay consistant, although I'm not always perfect.

Lost Images: No matter how many times I see this one it still makes me laugh.

So I'm changing my naming convention, updating and syncing meta data, creating multiple catalogs in Lightroom to keep the file size down to a minimum, and making sure everything is once again mirrored. Some old scripting skills have really made the job a lot easier. Not going to worry about the DVD backups right now. Hopefully I never will have to.

Best part about the whole process is coming across some hidden gems I've forgotten about.

Trying New Things

If you ask my wife what the plans are for the weekend she'll typically say she's going to try and get up to the mountains and I'll be surfing. This weekend I did my best to expand my horizons and take in a few different activities.

We never even made it to our seats...because with action like this you are always on your feet!!!!

I also learned that a zombie needs to be closer than 40ft feet for me to get a clean head shot.

A Buck Hunter tournament was also on the agenda for Saturday night, but few tumbler glasses full of Jager got in the way. I was told I had a good time. Only thing I have to confirm that is a few bruises.

Keywords

Courtesy of StuffSurfersLike

Since I've just recently started contributing to this blog again its' been awhile since I've checked Google Analytics. The best part of G.A. is the breakdown of keyword searches that brings traffic to your site. Generally some results are informative, some disturbing, and at least one that makes me do a little research to figure out how the hell they ended up here. This time the lucky winner is "SURFERS PEE".

So when I searched for "SURFERS PEE", Slidesideways was #12 on Googles links. What does one need to know about surfers pee that they would need to check the second page of links? Here's what beat me out:

The Butthole Surfersx4
Stuff Surfers Like
FaceBook
Suite101
Daily Stoke

Anyone know anything about SEO? It may be tough to beat out the ButtHole Surfers, but how cool would it be to have the #1 blog when it comes to searching for "Surfers pee".