Thursday, January 14, 2010

Imaging USA 2010

I was fortunate to be able to attend the Imaging USA conference this week right here in Nashville! This is my fourth time to attend this event and it gets bigger and better every year. While the outdoor temperatures were FRIGID during the conference, the information was freely flowing during the sessions and the expo. I learned a lot from the various sessions I attended, especially the Adobe sponsored sessions on Lightroom and Photoshop.

The product expo was once again excellent and it seemed that photographers were opening their wallets to spend some of their hard-earned dollars. I especially enjoy the expo and the mini-sessions that the big exhibitors put on at their booths. I was really impressed with the work of Bill Farkes, Ami Vitale, and the other pro photographers that were showcased at the Nikon booth.

Once again, this show inspired me, but at the same time frustrated me. Inspiration came from a lot of new ideas and techniques that I saw. but frustrated with the fact that experience has taught me that I need to dedicate more time to my photography in order to become proficient with these new approaches and techniques.

Especially entertaining were the presentations by White House photographers J. Scott Applewhite, Paul Morse, and Rober McNeely and American West photographer Scott Bourne.

If you need some inspiration for your photography and great fellowship make plans to attend this conference in January 2011.

Friday, January 1, 2010

A good ending to 2009.

House, Franklin, TN

I was fortunate enough to have December 31st off from work and was joined by my friend and fellow photographer, Keith Misegades on an early morning shoot. We'd planned to try and get some shots along the Harpeth River hoping for some early morning mist/fog, but that didn't happen. So we went down to Franklin and just walked around looking for inspiration. I didn't record any great, but did manage to "see" a couple of good subjects.

2009 has been a whirlwind year and I'm amazed how fast the time flies by now! I'm hoping that 2010 is a good year and I'm hoping to have some more chances to shoot with friends.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Busy month!!!!

Wow!!! It's going to be a busy September-October for me. Here's my photography schedule for the the next several weeks:

September 11 - Independence HS Band football game performance - Thompson Station, TN
September 18 - Columbia HS Alumni Band - Columbia, TN
September 19 - assisting with individual & team photos for Franklin Baseball Club - Franklin, TN
September 19 - Williamson County Band Exhibition - Brentwood, TN.
September 26 - Columbia Invitational Marching Competition - Columbia, TN.
October 3 - Blue Devil Invitational marching competition - Lebanon, TN.
October 17 - assisting my brother Tom at Del Oro Marching Festival - Loomis, California.
October 24 (tentative) - shooting for Jolesch Photography at Music City Invitational marching competition - Nashville, TN
October 31 - shooting for Jolesch Photography at KMEA 3A/4A - Bowling Green, KY.

For those events with Blackburn Images, please check BlackburnImages.com for updates on when photos will be posted on-line!

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

August one-day photo trek.

Rutledge Falls, Tennessee

On Sunday, August 31st a friend, Keith Misegades, and I packed up our photo gear and headed south of Nashville along I-24 in search of some good photo opportunities. Our general objective was the Sewanee, Tennessee area. We got off I-24 and traveled south on Highway 41 (also known as Hillsboro Highway and Dixie Highway) towards Pelham and Monteagle. Near Pelham we spotted a nice looking barn (on the west side of the highway) with the usual “See Rock City” painted on its roof. There were fields of green soybean plants in front of the barn. Unfortunately the light was against us as we were basically shooting back towards the southeast and the morning sun wrecked havoc with any decent shots. We made the climb up Highway 41 into Monteagle and then headed east towards Tracy City. We spotted a small pond with a stair stepped rock dam with a nice cascade of water flowing over the dam. We took some long exposure shots of the water that produced some decent images. This would be a great place to catch some of the fall colors or in the midst of a hard freeze during the winter. It appeared that Littell Lake feeds this pond (Hines Pond) so it would make sense that water could be flowing year round.

We drove into Tracy City in search of the Dutch Maid Bakery. The bakery was established in 1902 and is on the Historic registry for being the oldest family owned bakery in the state of Tennessee. It doesn’t open until 11:00a on Sundays so we took a couple of quick snapshots and traveled on. Keith spotted an interesting building that proved to be a good photographic subject. A gas station that burned down several years ago (signs said $1.17 per gallon for regular gas). We talked to a man cutting grass across the street and he told us that we were standing on the site of a lot of dubious local history including a couple of murders.

Heading back towards Monteagle we made a quick lunch stop at the Monteagle CafĂ© and headed into Sewanee. Sewanee is home of the University of the South and includes many stone gothic buildings on its campus. We photographed the exterior of the All Saints Chapel, but once again the light didn’t want to cooperate. Being right around midday the light was pretty flat and the sky was a dull white. Again, we noted that fall colors would add a lot of interest to the scenes around Sewanee.

We travelled (still on Highway 41) west towards Winchester and discovered the railroad museum at Cowan. We photographed the locomotives and old station that make up the museum and enjoyed some conversation with a gentleman that was there photographing some of the old tools that belonged to the museum. He commented on the fact that we used tripods and that it was good to see that some people still knew good photographic technique.

Going thru Winchester we took Highway 55 out of Tullahoma towards Manchester. I had seen Rutledge Falls on Google maps and this looked like a promising waterfall. Rutledge Falls is on private land, but the landowner allows public access. There were several people at the falls swimming, but we waited them out and were able to get some very nice shots of the falls. The high cloud cover made perfect lighting for the falls, but we still had to be careful to not include sky in our shots or we’d end up with lots of blown out white areas. Again, fall colors would add a tremendous interest to images taken here and I kept making mental notes of when to come back in the fall.

After the falls we head back through Manchester and caught I-24 back towards Nashville and home.

You can view my edited shots from this trip at http://www.blackburnimages.com/albummaster.aspx?g=aug09trek

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Back it up!!!

I recently returned from 8 days of vacation (traveling with the drum corps my kids were performing with) and before I left I did the “right” thing and powered down all my PCs, laptops, etc. Upon my return I fired up my main PC to upload the photos I’d taken and was greeted by errors stating that my data drive was not available. After my initial reaction of “oh s**t!!!” I did some poking around including pulling the drive from the case and testing it using an external dock. I quickly determined that the drive was “dead”.

Fortunately, a few months back I had implemented a regular back up strategy. After trying out some online offerings I settled on using Genie-soft’s Backup Manager (www.genie-soft.com) to run nightly backups to an external drive. Each week I do a full backup with nightly incremental backups and rotate the drives each week always keeping one off-site.

After purchasing a new drive (1 TB Seagate Barracuda) I kicked off the Genie-soft Backup Manager restore. It took me a couple of days to restore the 400+ GB of photos and data as I was unusually careful to verify the restore and make sure I had the latest versions of files. The restore went off without a hitch and, at this point, I feel confident that I haven’t lost crucial files.

My words of advice from this experience is… “back it up, back it up, back it up!!!” I still had that panicky feeling when I determined the drive was dead, but am now very appreciative of the fact that I had a reasonable backup strategy in place. I can’t imagine the stress I would have had if I’d not been able to restore all those files within a couple of days.

Thanks again to Genie-soft for a great product!

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Photo shoot with Strat 5.

Healthways' Strat 5

A couple of weeks back I do a shoot with my employer’s (Healthways) corporate rock-n-roll band, Strat 5. For the second year in a row, they are headed to back to the finals of FORTUNE’s Battle of the Corporate Bands in Cleveland, Ohio. They recently won the Nashville regional competition. Thanks guys (and ladies) for allowing me to photograph you and good luck in Cleveland! Click here to see some other images from my photo shoot with Strat 5.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Worldwide Photo Walk

Fountain at Schemerhorn Symphony Center, Nasville, Tennessee

I participated in Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photo Walk on Saturday, July 18th. This is the 2nd year for the event and included 30,000 photographers worldwide wide on various "walks" and capturing images. Here's my best/favorite images from my "walk" around downtown Nashville in the early evening. Light was pretty flat and not much developed at sunset. I'd previsualized a few shots, but wasn't real happy with those. Let me know what you think... http://blackburnimages.com/albummaster.aspx?g=wwphotowalk