Adventures of a Quantum Cowboy

Ok, photos are underway I promise.  Right now I’m blasting a new Black Keys album and trying to get through some of the engagement photos I did for Matt and Dena last week.  I guess Liz showed her wedding shots to them and they liked what they saw!  We did a shoot down in Santa Monica, on the pier and on the beach, both digital and Kodak Portra 160vC.  Got some keepers.  The agreement I have with them includes license, so I will be blogging on some and posting some to my public wedding portfolio on the gallery.

Oh yeah, and I guess Liz’s brother is asking me how much I’d charge for a wedding gig in Redding… going to have to take a good hard look at my calendar and bust out the spreadsheet for that one.

EXCELLENT photo day at The Getty last month, and just got back from AZ with some shots from the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.  It’s moving slowly… between work, school, and theatre I’m getting my butt kicked pretty good, but photography is my zen so I’m not giving it up entirely!

The Gallery is undergoing a massive overhaul.  It was getting difficult to set pricing and sizing with the photos not sorted by format.  You can’t do some of the same things with a scan of a print from 35mm film that you can with a 10.1 MP digital image (at least, not with my quality of scanner).  The difference was manageable, until I just bought a Diana F+ 120 / Medium Format (more on this later).  The square aspect ratio and different negative size make it almost impossible to have the same print offerings.  So, under each format category there are subcategories by subject, which should still be amenable to finding what you are looking for… comments and feedback welcome.

I’ve added a category for greeting cards, which I will begin working on soon.  Enough people have asked me if I turn my photos into cards that I think I should probably get around to it.  If you have specific ones that you would like cards made for, please just send me an email or comment here on your favorites.

I’m finally getting to a huge backlog of unprocessed photos.  Some new ones have already been uploaded to the gallery, more to come!  I guess I should probably blog about them too at some point… sheesh, how do all my amateur hobbies turn into hard work and grand schemes?  /eyeroll.

As an aside, if you aren’t already, you can follow me on Twitter if you want.  It’s not particularly photography-related, but it might be… sometimes…

Hope everyone is well!

Ok, wow.  I don’t know if I still remember how to use WordPress, its been so long!  Anyway, so the new house is finally starting to look mostly the way I want it to, but there is quite a bit of work to do yet (I’m sure it never ends).  I haven’t quite gotten my photography lair set up yet, but at least the machine is operational.  Turned out that the copy of WinXP I had on there was not legit, so the activation period timed out while it was mothballed… I fire the thing up to find that Windows has locked me out.  So I ordered a new legit copy of WinXP Home off of eBay, installed the new OS, and xferred all my photos over from the backup drive.  Ugh.  I wish I could just pony up the cash for a nice Mac system for photography, but the funds just aren’t forthcoming these days.

Anyway, I’m up in Sacramento with the family for the holidays, and today is a nice quiet day at home… good thing I brought my entire drive up!  I’ll be combing through and posting today.  Hopefully multiple times, but we’ll see.

I hope everyone had / is having a great winter holiday, and that you and your families are well.  And please forgive me (again) for yet another long bout of not attending to my photography.

Just got internet at at MY new house!  w00t!  However, there’s been (and remains) a ton of work to do, as you may well imagine.  On top of that, the photography machine is still mothballed as I don’t have a desk to set it up on yet…. one more thing on the list.  Posts will likely be sparse for awhile yet.

The photography machine is still mothballed while I wait on my new house to close… hopefully by Monday that will go through!   I will remain a busy time though, with everything to take care of at the new place.

However, I do have some photos to post!  I’m in DC right now for the NASA 50th Anniversary Celebration, which was last night… happy birthday, NASA!  While I’m out here I’ve been doing some exploration of the city, as I haven’t been here since I was a little kid, and I really don’t remember much.

Funny story: so I get off the metro at the Smithsonian station, right near the national mall, I confidently mount my short lens, and prepare to take a gorgeous morning shot of the Washington Monument… and freeze, staring in disbelief at the LCD screen.  “NO CF CARD.” And I say to myself, “you have got to be f-ing kidding me….” But alas, yes, it’s true, I left home with all of my camera equipment except the memory cards. DOH! Fortunately I was able to buy some from the Air and Space Museum gift shop, but talk about fleecing… $32 each for 256MB flash cards!!! Ugh. So I bought two and I’m shooting on “medium fine” for this trip… I’m an idiot.

Fiascos with mem cards aside, I hope you enjoy the shots from the nation’s capitol.

Sorry, photos still delayed… I have to move out of this house by the 15th, so its a hectic time of packing and moving boxes.  Not to mention all the paperwork etc for the new house!  Will get to some photography soon I hope.

Wow!  What a great weekend.  I’m just wrapping up a trip out to Lake Tahoe with the fam and a whole bunch of family friends.  One the families we;ve known basically forever happens to own a time-share condo right near the water, and they graciously invited us out for the long weekend.  Notable outcomes: ended up $25 down when I left the tables at Harrahs, my doctor-ordered “low-cholesterol and high-excercise” lifestyle was totally obliterated over the course of the last three days, and… got some early morning dawn shots of the lake and waterfowl.

Another bit of interesting news is the fact that my workplace is switching over to the 9/80 schedule.  The 4-nine-hour days, 1-eight-hour Friday, 4-nine-hour days, 1 Friday off schedule should give me two long weekends a month to get some more travel and photography in… sweet!  I totally can’t wait.

Life has been busy with the preparations for the move (did I mention I bought a house?) and work overload as usual, but rest assured there are plenty of photos in-process for eventual posting.  Check back soon!  I hope everyone had a safe and fun long weekend.

Sweeeeeet… looks like the transfer over to the new domain and the WordPress blog worked quite smoothly.  I like the new look, and I hope you do too!  I may not have worked out all the kinks yet… if you notice something weird, please let me know, either by commenting on this thread (preferred) or by sending me an email (nalin at qcowboyphotodot com).

On the queue for stuff to post soon:

1. I just went early this morning down to PCH to get some early morning shots of the coast.  Those are in post-process as we speak…

2. Hung out in LA afterward, and got some shots of Grand Central Market and St. Vincent Ct, two interesting and historic districts in Los Angeles.

3. Awhile ago I took a historic podcast tour of Los Angeles, and snapped some shots with the old Pentax… turns out I was out of batteries, and didn’t have a light meter for the first time.  Stay tuned for my first experiments with photography sans electronic help!

Please note that the gallery remains on exposuremanager.  You can always view what I think to be my better shots by clicking on the link to “The Gallery” at top left.  Print ordering is also available from there.

Ok, so the gallery has moved back from Flickr to ExposureManager… enough people have asked whether or not I sell prints before, and the recent wedding shoot has sort of pushed the potential demand up further, so I’m back to selling prints if anyone is interested. Please click the Gallery link at right on the navigation bar or point your browser to www.qcowboyphoto.com.

I eventually plan to merge the blog and gallery into one site at the new domain, though I don’t see this as immediately necessary.

Almost done with the wedding photos… whew, I can see now why wedding photographers charge what they do… As per a license agreement, I will be posting certain images to the public portfolio folder on the gallery. About 260 digital keepers, and 59 Kodak Pro Tri-X 400 film keepers (out of 61… get *that* ratio on your digital…). Some of the better ones will be blogged about here of course.

Long time no update…. but now that theater is over for the summer, I’ve had a lot more time to devote to photography.

Upcoming soon: my first wedding shoot (w00t!), a historical tour of LA (done in black and white film with no light meter), and some shots from the beautiful mountain areas off of CA-126.

Stay tuned!