It’s been a rough week.  My trip out of town at the end of last week was a littel more stressful than one would like and then I come back and almost immediately have a family emergency to deal with.  Everything is fine now, but I think I’ve undone all the stress relief the vacation brought me.

I did have a nice shoot with a model today that I’d rescheduled with after we’d had to postpone a few months back.  Not much that I’ll be able to post to the blog as I’m trying to keep it PG-13 and most of the work were nudes, but I’ll probably have something.  Of course between the vacation and other events of the week I’m quite a bit behind on my photos, including shoots that I did while on my vacation, but should be able to get some things online later in the week.

Sorry, but I need to vent here.  I had a location for a shoot this afternoon where I’m staying for a few days.  When I’d booked it three weeks ago, I specifically asked permission to use it for some photography and made no secret about the type of photography that I do.  I checked in yesterday and asked a few questions so my shoot would be as smooth as possible and cause no disruptions.

So this morning I get a knock on my door from the owner and he’s decided that he’s not comfortable with the shoot.  I respect that this is his place and if he’s not comfortable with this type of work I can respect, if not agree, with that.  But the time to tell me this is not three hours before the shoot, but when I booked or at least a few days before.  It put me in a rather bad spot with little hope of finding an alternative spot and if I did, a significant chance that I’d never get in touch with everyone involved in time.  We finally come to an agreement where he grudgingly lets me do the shoot as planned so long as I promised to be discreet (as though I planned to have naked women dancing next to the road) and not mention the place in any way.  So I will not mention the place with the photos.  Or anywhere else including to friends.

I understand that not everyone approves of nude and lingerie type photography, but I also think one should live up to an agreement once it’s made.  Keeping your word is an old fashion value too.

Update:

Just because it’s going to be that kind of day, one of the models didn’t show up, no warning and no contact, just didn’t show up after sending me an email late last night confirming she’d be here.  I understand that a model working TF* flakes out once in a while, but why would a model being paid not show up?  So I had to dump my idea and improvise on the fly along with the crap from this morning.  It’s days like this that make me want to put all my photography stuff up on eBay and start painting mountains.

Doing an outdoor shoot later today.  Hopefully the rain will hold off on us.  I should have some photos once I stop moving long enough to process them.

Forty years ago tonight man first walked on the moon.  There is probably not a day that I don’t just find that amazingly cool.

Had a nice shoot a few days ago with Chesney, a lovely model who is just getting started out.  A few photos from the shoot.

I had a good shoot over the weekend.  I hope to get some photos posted from it later this week, but my schedule is hectic so it may take longer.

I have an outdoor shoot tomorrow afternoon and I’m debating between two locations, both waterfalls.  One, Sill Branch Falls, I’ve visited and shot at before.  The other I’ve not and part of me wants to go there tomorrow for that reason.  I may let the model decide given there is a decent difference in the hiking distance of the two.

Doing more outdoor shoots, along with generally getting out and hiking more, has me thinking of getting a GPS for these treks.  I’m pretty good at keeping my bearings and stay to the trails, but it still seems a good idea to take advantage of the technology that’s there.  I thought of buying a dedicated GPS for hiking, but then remembered that my HTC Fuze mobile phone has a pretty good GPS since the update that came out early this month (before that it was almost unusable).  The question is does anyone know of good software for the Windows Mobile platform designed for hiking?

A combination of some cancelations and weather has left me with fewer shoots over the last couple of weeks that I’d expected so sorry for the lack of updates.  Somehow I didn’t think anyone would want to see a bunch of posts saying either “It’s raining/storming so I’ve had to reschedule my outdoor shoot today” or “The model for my shoot today canceled/rescheduled on me today.”  It always seems that these run in batches, so hopefully I’m through with a batch.  My next shoot is scheduled for Saturday so hopefully I’ll have some things to write about then.

Be looking for a tutorial on shooting silhouette photos in a studio setup that will be on the site later this week.

I saved the lost photos!  Actually I didn’t but a nice piece of free software did.

After the last post I remembered a program that I’d used to help a friend salvage some lost photos on a memory card back last fall.  I had done a great job and still had it installed on my laptop so I decided to give it a chance.  It managed to recover all of the photos except for two and it got both of the photos I really wanted to save.  All the lessons in the last post still apply, but along with that here are two free programs to help you out in case you forget like I did:

Smart Recovery – This is the program that saved my photos.  It’s freeware and written specifically to recover photo and video files from media.  The biggest feature is that is supports the camera raw formats for Nikon and Canon among others.

TestDisk/PhotoRec – Another nice pair of freeware recovery programs.  TestDisk is for more meant for you computer hard drive and big problems like crashes drives.  PhotoRec is like Smart Recovery a file recovery tool, but it’s a little more general purpose than Smart Recovery and can recovery Office files and Adobe files along with some less common formats.  In this case it couldn’t get the missing photo files back, but I’ve had success with it in the past and would use it for non photo/video files.

Here are two samples (unprocessed) of what all the work was about:

Updated – I tried another program that I was able to salvage the photos with.  See the next post for details.

Nothing sucks the fun out of a shoot like finding out you lost some great shots because a memory card bombed out.  Short version.  At the end of a recent shoot I agreed to shoot a short set up swimsuit photos for the model.  She had a bright pink bikini against a bright green background that I have that looked great.  It was a perfect combination of model, outfit, and lighting.  I saw at least two awesome shots in the quick set that would be posted here if I had them.  So I get back to my computer and attempt to pull the photos into Lightroom so the model can see them before she leaves.  It finds nothing on the card.  I realize that the card was an old one that actually used to be in a PDA that I stopped using about two years ago and I’d not formatted it before starting the shoot.  It worked fine when I shot with it, but now I can’t find the photos.  I put the card back into the camera and it now tells me the card isn’t formatted.  Where was that message before?  I’ve run it through a couple of recovery programs and neither found any of the files.  This is the first time that I’ve completely lost photos and I’m ticked off right now.

Lessons learned:

1. No matter how big of a hurry you are in, always format a card in the camera if you’ve not used it in the same camera recently.  Actually I think that I’ll start doing it no matter what.
2. When you are hurrying is always when you make mistakes so slow down.

The good news is that the other photos from the shoot are all fine, just that last set are lost.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.  It’s been a couple of crazy weeks with barely time to do anything including photography.  Finally I get to get back to some good work and I have a couple of shoots over the weekend and I’m looking forward to getting back behind the camera.  Still working on the gallery which I hope to have up early next week along with some new photos from the coming shoots.