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I’m so excited that I’ve got half a mind to scream out loud. I’m excited about photography again recently. There is a photo contest coming up, specific to and located in Death Valley. I’m trying to figure out which photo(s) to enter. I’m limited to two entries this go around, so I’ve got to choose a little more carefully than the shotgun effect of the last one.

It’s exciting (expensive), frightening and wonderful all at once. Over the years I’ve fallen more and more in tune with Death Valley; it’s solitude and it’s quiet beauty. Few people go high up into the mountains and even fewer wander outside the tourist areas of DV. I like these lonely areas, I find serenity there and am reminded of Buzz Aldrin’s famous description of the moon as, “Magnificent desolation”. What a perfect description for Death Valley.

I’ve even applied (by submitting some sample photos) to a stock photography company.  I’m excited for a lot of reasons lately.

You may remember a spanking I received a year or two ago at the SCVPA photo contest.  Time marches on, my tears have dried and my wounds have healed and I entered another local gallery’s photo contest.  As you can probably guess by the title of this post, I did much better this time around.  I entered five total photos and took first place and honorable mention in landscape category, as well as an honorable mention in the man-made scenery category.

Three new ribbons, 25 dollars cash money and a picture on the front page of the local newspaper.  I could get used to this high rollin’ lifestyle.  Small pictures of the pictures I entered are below, along with a shot of the dolla dolla bills I won.

I originally wrote a thought provoking post on big brain descriptions of each of the pictures, but I wrote that on my phone and somehow lost it.  Looking at these shots, I want to get back up to Bodie to do some more lens work as the place is just teeming with potential shots.  Even better I’d like to work there for a season and see all shots the behind the closed doors.  I obviously am getting back to Death Valley this year, once the temperatures are a bit more benign.

It feels good to get some applause for the shots I put up, we’ll see if this starts anything big.

So, as usual the big Sierra backpacking trip can be summed up in a few words:

• Tiring
• Beautiful
• Full of last minute changes

I’ll write more soon(ish) and put up some pics as well.  For now, just be content with knowing the two of us covered over 50 miles, had almost 14,000 feet of ascent over the trip, bagged two peaks; one a classic Sierra trek and one that had a 24 mile approach and a death defying nighttime ascent along with a bivy on top and we came back healthy and whole.

So, here are three pics from the trip and a request.

There are the pics, enjoy. The request now, I have recovered from the severe beating I received at the hands of the last photography contest I entered and entered another one.  This one is not so much a contest as an attempt to capture the lifestyle in Ventura County and it is creatively named, Capture Ventura County. 

The Ventura County Star (newspaper) is putting together a collection of photos to put into a book.  The photos are voted on (by you!) and the top vote gainers and editors picks go into that there book.  I’d be happy to have you fine readers vote for those you consider the best, mine you say?  Well I never would have thought.

So, I take a bit of pride or at least I did in some of my photos.  I’ve long been jealous of Vu’s photos, though I’ll be damned if I can find anything on his site that just showcases anything but his portraits, which are great but nothing I’m really interested in.  his candids and nature shots were what originally inspired me to buy a SLR camera and look at the world through a lens.

Galen Rowell and his fabulous Mountain Light gallery in Bishop kept me going with huge displays of stunning photos from around the world, though concentrating on the Sierra Nevada.  Going out to go backpacking with any number of people over the years has given me alot of opportunitiies to take pictures; most crap, some average and some maybe even okay.

I got an email from an old friend who just kind of reminded me how much I suck.  He gets paid to fly around in helicopters and take pictures and his pictures are stunning.  I could be wrong but as far as I know photography is a relatively new pursuit for Egood, as in the last four years, much like it is for me.  But looking at his work makes me feel like Sgt. Scholten squaring off against a drunk junior NCO…

Eric Good makes me want to sell my camera gear and buy crayons.  What an increditble asshole photographer.

Ouch. In a range of X-Y scores, I got 1X and 1X+1 for the two photos entered into the contest.

I have entered a contest, a photo contest. This is my first, I’m nervous. I don’t know how far I’m out of my league here.

I heard about it last Wednesday, I asked some people about which pictures to use for the contest. Keeping in mind a limited budget to print and mount the pictures, and even moreso a limited amount of time to do it, I narrowed it down to five pictures. I had those printed at 12×18 at Costco, which was the only place that would do it quick enough, but 3 of the five came back with printer lines very visible in the print. That explains why they were so cheap and fast I guess.

So, of the five I was planning to choose from, my choice was made by the fact that three were unusable. So, I entered two photos in the landscape category. Tomorrow night is the judging. I kind of plan to go to town tomorrow and check out all the photos entered into the contest as they are on display and see if mine compare at all. Depending on that scouting mission, I’ll decide whether or not to show up to the actual judging of the photos.

Wish me luck.

Congratulations to me; I have finally finished cataloging, keywording and deleting duplicates of my entire collection of photos. I started with over 12,000 pictures, after purging duplicates, triplicates and quadruplicates of photos I’m down to 8,284 pictures. This has taken about 6 months of on and off work.

I’ve rated most of them, keyworded all of them and worked up a few that I really like. Thank god for Lightroom, I can’t sing it’s praises enough. I wish it had been around when I started taking pictures a few years ago. My advice to anyone starting photography, especially digital photos is to get Lightroom or something similar. Photoshop doesn’t cut it for large scale workflows.

Now, it’s on to figuring out the best way to display them on the website.

This has been a shitty week, thankfully there’s only about 13 hours of it left. I can’t describe everything that is wrong in here, because it is after all a public journal. Anyone reading this knows enough about me to know that I don’t give out personal info easily if at all, but as far as stuff that I can and will discuss:

1) Sunburn, on my scalp, feet and ankles. I fucking hate sunburns because they are so easy to avoid and I know that I get them supereasy… so it’s really fucking stupid for me not to protect myself against them.

2) Poison Oak on my foreams and misc other places. 2nd on my hatred list is Poison oak, because again I’m super-susceptible to it and I know it. FUCK.

3) Backed my truck into a tree. Enough said about that I suppose.

I hope Vu would be proud of me for using the sidelighting correctly in this shot to emphasize the (new) textures of the tailgate. At least I’m learning more about photographic technique eh?

4) Tons of other shit that went down this week.

5) This is the last weekend I have off in August and it was largely wasted by me doing absolutely nothing exciting, new, or exploratory. That’s not like me, and I just have to blame it on 4.

Why am I so whiny lately?

I thought I had some exciting news today, as I found out there was another roll of film from the Banner peak trip that I hadn’t picked up.  So today I got it and the slides looked awesome, I was filled with optimism and hope, looking forward to see how they’d turn out.  Got home, scanned them and bleh, crap.  Sort of ruined my motivation for the day to be honest.  Don’t know if it’s the scanner (1200 dpi) if I scanned them wrong or what, but they came out looking like low res crap. 

So that’s my news for the day, plus I heard that my black ops, operation papoose lake, MWTC buddy Tim Deleon is coming back to Cali in a few months, AWWWW YEAH.

The couch is like my own personal kryponite, damn that thing.

10.19.03

We got a new couch this weekend, well we actually got it awhile ago it just got delivered this weekend.  I cannot find a spot or position on it to be uncomfortable, god what an upgrade from stupid futons.  Sita and I have had a futon since we first got married, and I guess I never really realized how uncomfortable they are compared to real couches before this.  So, comfortable new couch + Josh = Josh didn’t get as much done this weekend as he wanted to.

Good news with the new couch, we had to store the old futon somewhere, so we chose the garage.  With that in the garage, one of the cars has been officially displaced into parking outside from here on out, which frees up allot of room in there.  Room for a heavy/speed bag stand that Fong and I have been wanting to hook up for awhile now.  Scott used to have a speedbag in his garage on Stonehill, we would spend hours at a time hitting that bag.  The bag, when hit right sets up a rhythm (sp?) that you can listen to and forget your worries, it was very therapeutic.  Scott, come on down!

Other news, I got a Canon F1 to help me in my goal of learning how to take photos the right way.  I took it with me on the way to San Clemente this morning to get a haircut.  I wound up spending most of the morning down there since the 5 was lockjawed solid with beach traffic (hot weekend down here in SoCal, hit 80’s or 90’s inland on Saturday, crappy).  So I bought a couple rolls of film, since I only brought one and started taking pictures of surfers, birds and flags so far.  I didn’t even finish one roll of film, I think I’m a bit too cautious on the shutter right now. 

I am quite excited though, I’m really looking forward to seeing how the pictures turn out, I’m sure my excitement will be equally matched by my disappointment upon seeing them though.  Right now I’ve got the pictures stored in my head, and they look great in there, I just have a feeling that out of the 2 major settings my camera has, I screwed up all three of them.  I guess we’ll find out later this week, I just have to finish off that roll of film…

Back to the couch for me now though.