Emerald Bay Photography News and Updates

Last Friday, I witnessed an attempted murder.

The crime scene? Mirror Pond, Drake Park, downtown Bend, Oregon. April 14, 2006 - roughly 2pm.

The crime? The attempted drowning of a male Mallard duck by none other than a gang of fellow male Mallard ducks.







While obviously violence is no stranger to the animal world, we generally don't think of DUCKS as savage or ferocious creatures.

The attempted drowning seemed shockingly pre-meditated and coordinated, and left me frozen in astonishment, barely able to point the camera at the spectacle. I briefly looked around for a rock to throw at the party, hoping to break it up and free the poor under-duck, but no such luck.

And as I stood there, witnessing an agitated cluster of no less than 3 to 4 ducks at any time, grabbing the victims head with their bills and holding it under water, again and again - it occured to me that it's not only a dog-eat-dog world. It's also a duck-eat-duck world.

But before someone at PETA gets their panties in a knot, please note that I said "attempted" drowning.

Yes. The duck got away. Barely, I must say (in a couple of instances I thought he wasn't going to make it for sure), but he did.

Labels: Bend Oregon photographer, oregon stock photography, photography

I had never even considered Google Earth as a tool to help prepare for a photo shoot - but I gotta admit, that's a DAMN GOOD IDEA.

I got tipped off to it in a recent newsletter from the AIAP, an organization I'm member of. Alan Blakely, Director of the AIAP, writes:

"There are literally hundreds of cool things you can do with Google Earth, but let me tell you how I personally use it:

1. Determine compass orientation and sun angle of exteriors.
This is HUGE! I travel extensively, and one of the hardest things to determine when planning a shoot is "best time of day". My experience has been that the people on site are rarely able to tell me accurately which direction the building faces. With Google Earth I simply enter the address of the building and "fly-in" to the location and view its orientation -- amazing! [Note: WOW. That is indeed huge. Knowing the physical orientation of any location is an amazing advantage!)

2. Determine the effect of adjacent buildings, parking lots and potential conflicting businesses on a site.
Have you ever arrived at an out-of-town location with a limited amount of shooting time and discovered that your subject was in the shadow of an adjacent structure? With Google Earth you can predict these potential problems.

3. Find nearby accommodations and services.
Another huge deal for me. I hate booking a hotel in a distant city and discovering that my subject site is on the other side of town. Google Earth allows you to find nearby lodging, restaurants, etc.

4. Find directions to and from a subject site.
I realize that this is old stuff if you use Mapquest, Yahoo Maps or Google Maps. However, seeing directions plotted out on the actual view of the area is vastly superior to any written directions. Google Earth zooms out and draws the way for you.

Now, however cool that tool may be though for larger cities - Google Earth images of Central Oregon are nothing short of SUCKIE. Point in case:



In comparison - the Google Campus rocks regarding detail:



Duely noted too that the City of Bend has a similar web-based application - but after running a few searches and not turning up even obvious stuff like Mirror Pond, Wall Street or Cooley Road, I've come to the conclusion that the thing is utterly useless (never mind that it ONLY runs in MS IE, and not in Mozilla ...).

And admittedly, Google Earth may be more useful for people who travel a lot or specialize in archictural photography, but I thought I'd throw it out there nonetheless. I'm sure creative ways to utilize Google Earth for other kinds of photography can very easily be found.

Post in the comments if you come up with anything brilliant.

Labels: Bend Oregon photographer, photography, photography gear

For almost 5 years I was utterly faithful.

To my trusty Compaq Presario 7000, that is. It rewarded me with rock-solid performance, few hiccups, and a comforting hum every time I would boot it up.

But it finally came time to add another horse to the stable. Not being able to shake the suspicion that the Compaq would just lay down and die if it ever found out that I was even *thinking* of replacing it, I reached deep into my pocket and bought it a "companion" instead. Sort of the Ferrari to park next to the VW Bus to keep it company in the garage.

The culprit? Photoshop CS2. It flat out refused to run on my lame 512mb of RAM (oops - was that out loud? Those 512mb of RAM are not *lame*. Did I say lame? I meant ... moderately insufficient...).

And at the same time - whenever I was desperate enough to start it up - CS2 would give me hints and peeks at its awesome power that CS1 just couldn't deliver. The fact that I am flirting with the thought of making the leap to the 12+ megapixel Canon 5D made a computer upgrade an even more pressing issue.

So I consulted Digital Photo Pro magazine, and after some brain-storming sessions with my friend Jake, settled on a system he would build for me with the following gear:

- Chip: AMD Athlon 64 1GHz HT Dual Core Processor
- 4 gigs of RAM
- 3 Harddrives - one 74 gig, 10,000rpm drive to host the operating system and daily operations, plus two 400 gig, 7200prm drives in a RAID 1 array (meaning that they'll mirror eachother and I'll always have a backup of all the RAW and processed images that live there).
- 2 DVD burners
- ASUS A8N-VM Motherboard
- POWERCOLOR Radeon X800GT Video Card
- Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2

Since this new machine (Codename: The Beast) is now dedicated pretty much exclusively to image processing, I've networked it to my Compaq (Codename: Beauty) via a Linksys Broadband router, giving The Beast access to all the files on Beauty (and vice versa), plus the internet and all other shared devices like printers, scanners, fax etc. A KVM switch from Zonet let's me share the same monitor, keyboard and mouse between both boxes.

And how has it all worked out so far?

I would have never thought working in Photoshop could be such a boundless pleasure. For the first time, it executes commands, actions and file modifications without the hint of a delay - if I blink, I'll miss it for sure. (And that despite the fact that for some reason, only 2 gig of the 4 gig of RAM are actually operational - the next BIOS update by the motherboard manufacturer or Windows Vista will hopefully fix that though).

A recent project that took up 1.5 gigs on my CF cards was processed in roughly a quarter of the usual time - RAW conversion is now not a time issue anymore, so there really is no excuse not to always shoot RAW.

All in all - it feels like working at the computer the way it should have been (was?) intended: at the speed of thought.

And yes - it was worth every penny.

Labels: Bend Oregon photographer, photography, photography gear