You can quit, and they won't care, but you'll always know.

He's nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready

Right here, right now... Fatboy Slim boomed out across the water. 2,000 heads bobbed in the early morning sunlight, ready to get started. After months of training we are right here, right now. The canon fires and the water erupts into a foam of arms and legs. I'm right there in the middle of it; Tarzan swimming, kicking, punching, breathing and surviving. Ironman Arizona 2007 has started. It is going to be a long day.

The swim pretty quickly settled down. I'd heard all the stories of black eyes, goggles getting ripped off and kicks to the head but it didn't feel any worse than a typical age group wave start. The first few hundred meters were a crazy mess of bodies but then it calmed down for me and I settled into a comfortably easy rhythm. No reason to push it yet so I just warmed up slowly. Stroke. Roll. Breathe. Stroke. Roll. Breathe. My hip flexor had been starting to tweak over the last few days of taper and I could feel it when I kicked too hard - not a good sign so early on - but I just got on with it. The turn-around seemed a long way past the far bridge but soon enough I was coming back towards the Mill Avenue bridge and I'd finished the swim. I was pretty happy to have swam 1hr 12min for 2.4 miles - right around where I thought I'd be.

The wet suit strippers did their magic and I was off to transition, running through the throng of cheering supporters. I call out my number and someone hands me my bag. Quickly I find myself inside the frantic mess of the transition tent. I work my way to a quieter corner and find a chair to sit on, start going through my bag. Sunscreen, bike shorts, top, sunglasses, shoes and helmet on and I'm ready to go back out to the sunlight and noise. I step out of the tent and get more sunscreen applied and then run in my bike shoes to get my bike. Someone yells my number through a loud hailer and a volunteer gets my bike for me. This is a full service event! We have it easy - all we have to do is swim, bike & run for a while - someone else is always dealing with the logistics. I jump on my bike and ride out to the course. I hear Amy Ewert cheering for me right as I leave on the bike - so many people out here that I know, such great support.

Out on the bike course I settle in for the long haul. I'm expecting to take a bit over 6 hours but I want to start out easy and not push too hard. The temptation is certainly there. The bad thing about being a faster than average swimmer is that most of the fast bikers are behind you and spend the whole ride passing you. But that's just a case of keeping the ego in check and racing your own race. So people pass me and I spin along at 100 rpms, feeling okay, starting to eat, drinking a bit and feeling great. I get to the turn around point and I'm still feeling like I'm flying easily. Then I turn around and find out why. For some reason I never notice a strong breeze when it is helping me - but you sure notice it when it is right in your face! 20 mph sustained winds with gusts up to 35 mph had really helped me on the first half, but not on the way back! I just struggled along with everyone else, finishing the first loop and still feeling great. I'd trained for this, a bit of wind wasn't too much of a worry. At one point a helicopter appeared over a mesa, from out of nowhere. One minute I'm in a quiet desert, then there's the roar of the chopper. Flying low, following the leaders, it was just another indication that this wasn't just another triathlon - this was the big one and I was right in the middle of it.

I was playin in the beginnin, the mood all changed

About 3 hours into the ride I realised that I hadn't needed to pee at any point. My stomach was feeling bloated which for some reason I'd taken as meaning I was drinking too much - but the problem was exactly the opposite - I was getting way behind on my hydration. Luckily I realised that, along with how much slower I was suddenly going and I really started drinking a whole lot more. Nuun, electrolytes, 2 bottles of water every 10 miles. But the damage had been done by that point. I was getting slower and slower but feeling like I was trying harder and harder. Not much I could do about it but keep drinking. and drinking. and drinking. Soon I was stopping at every water stop to pee, but still drinking and trying to get back on top of things. The end of the second loop was windier again, dust clouds were starting to obscure the course and the tumbleweeds were on the march. I saw a few blow across the course, 4 feet wide and moving fast. Some poor guy blocked one for me and got knocked off his bike for his trouble. Somehow I made it back through town and headed on my third bike loop.

It only grows harder, only grows hotter

This time around it was getting really windy. Close to the start of the loop, 5 metal signs with sandbags slid across the course towards me, then crashed down a few feet away. Another gust pushed me sideways across an entire lane, before I could even react. Things were starting to get interesting! I rode with the wind at my back for the next 15 miles, letting it push me along, still trying to get on top of my hydration as the day got hotter. Just after the turn around I passed my friend Laurie Curry and said 'Can you believe it, we are doing an Ironman!' she grinned back at me and rode on. It was great to see people I'd trained with doing so well - all through the bike I saw training partners plugging away, moving through the field. We'd cheer for each other and it really helped keep the focus and motivation going on a tough day.

The ride back to transition didn't seem too bad, even though at one point I was struggling to go at 14 mph - downhill. But eventually I made it back, through the cheering crowds, off the bike at the dismount line without falling and my bike was whisked away. One hundred and twelve miles done, 6 hours and 53 minutes later I hobbled through transition (nothing so grand as running this time) and grabbed my next bag. I saw Chris Sellers helping out at the transition tent and he took charge and got me organised. Getting the gear out of my bag, setting me up to get running. Once again out of the tent and off to the run course - just a marathon to go.

So here I go is my shot. Feet fail me not cuz maybe the only opportunity that I got

Twenty six point two miles to go. I checked my watch and realised I had nine hours before the course was closed. I could walk. I could probably even crawl it in that time. I just had to hold it together and I would finish. I started trying to run. The hip flexor that had been sore was complaining more loudly now. I couldn't do much more than walk. So I decided not to push it, at least for the first mile. Keep walking, keep moving. I'd run a bit when it was flat, walk up the slopes, jog the downhills and just try and not hurt myself any more. I was taking iced water at every stop, still trying to get the hydration back on track but I was still feeling tired after the bike. About a mile in I set my watch to beep every minute. Run a minute. Walk a minute. Run a minute. Walk a minute. I'd keep making this deal with myself, keep it going. Your mind starts playing strange tricks on days like this. I'd be running along (slowly) thinking 'okay, nothing hurts, I feel good, I don't feel tired, I can keep running this pace, keep it going'. Then I'd realise I was walking. No good reason, but I couldn't make myself run. Obviously my body is more sane than my mind. But over time, my mind won out. I'd run more, walk less. I kept drinking, filling my bottle with Gatorade which perked me up some more. I'd brought 10 Gu shots with me for food. I tried one and almost threw it up - that wasn't going to work! So I switched to plan G (I'd already used up plan B on the swim, plan C, D, E & F on the bike. Ironman is about dealing with things as they happen - so have lots of plans and stick to them. Any of them) and started scavenging on the course. Cookies were okay. Grapes, not so good. Jolly ranchers were fantastic! Anything and everything I could keep down with calories in them. Nine Gu packs bounced along on my back for the rest of the race, unwanted and ignored.

I saw my brother at the end of the first loop on the run, 9 miles in to the marathon. He'd flown out from Scotland for work and decided to drop by to watch Amanda & I. He said later he didn't quite realise the scope of what I was trying to do, until he got there. It was great to see him and I picked it up and ran some more.

You get a couple of race numbers, one with your first name and one with your surname. I'd decided to wear my first name and it was great. People would call out your name and lie to you at any opportunity. 'Looking good, Gordon' 'Looking strong, Gordon' 'Looking fast, Gordon' all lies, but certainly appreciated! I saw Amanda as she came back from her second loop. We stopped and hugged and then she was off - looking good, looking strong, looking fast. Some time on the second loop the chicken broth appeared at the water stops and I tried it. Chicken soup has never tasted as good! I'm not sure it goes too well with Gatorade, but I drank them along side for the next 13 miles.

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity

To seize everything you ever wanted-One moment

Would you capture it or just let it slip?

Somehow, someway I made it back to the transition area and headed out on my last lap. Looking at my watch I realised that if I ran this loop I could finish just under 14 hours. It was possible, but it would require some work. The previous two loops had taken me more than 1 hour and 50 minutes per loop, but I needed to do this one in about 1 hour and 40 minutes. Certainly possible with fresh legs. But now ? So I started running. Really running. Well, shuffling faster than I had been. It was starting to get dark by this point, the sun had set on the lonely Western stretch of my second loop. The field had thinned out as many people had finished, though some hardy souls were still just heading out on their second loop, heading for 16+ hour finishes or DNFs. Each time I passed someone, I pushed a bit faster trying to get to the line under 14. I focused on that idea and picked it up. I remembered an answer Peter Reid had given when asked about the deep, insightful thoughts he has during his Ironman-winning marathon runs. He said all he does is count his steps. So I counted my steps. 1... One foot after the other, 2... focusing on my cadence, 3... tapping out a rhythm with my feet, 4... running through the falling light. I was handed a glow stick to light me up and I wrapped it around my arm. I kept counting my steps. Running now, feeling finally good. One hundred and thirty miles after that swim start, I felt I'd finally warmed up and was flying. I was going to finish! I kept passing people. People who looked lost, walking almost aimlessly. Sitting on the kerb, head in hands. I passed people throwing up. I passed people walking. I kept counting my steps. I passed Jim Opre, that I'd trained with, and traded some lies with him 'Looking strong, Gordon', 'Looking good, Jim'. Finally another competitor caught me and passed me on the windiest stretch of the course. I fell in step behind him and drafted for all I was worth. We went back and forth like that for the final 4 miles.

He better go capture this moment and hope it don't pass him

Close to the finish now, I saw a big hat that I recognised. Ralph Stanley was up ahead and we congratulated each other - only a mile to go. I was going to finish! I tried to pick it up a bit more and run through to the finish line. Just before the final hill I caught up with Jim Curry, about to start his final loop. He had a long way to go but plenty of time to get there. I ran up onto the bridge and across down to the finish line. One last time past the best support you could hope for, from Nancy & Karen. I could hear the announcer for the people finishing just in front of me, then suddenly I was out of the darkness and quiet and into the noise and light of the finish shoot. I high-fived some spectators and ran for the line. I could vaguely hear 'Gordon McGregor - You are an Ironman!' but somehow I can't remember much at all about finishing. Just a huge sense of relief! Chris Sellers was again at the finish and it was great to see a friendly face. He caught me and guided me through the finish, t-shirt, medal and bake-o-foil blanket on. I looked back over my shoulder and saw 13:53. I'd made it well under the 14 hours. My last loop was 1hr 42, 14 minutes faster than the previous loop. What sort of idiot negative splits the marathon in an Ironman ? Then I was out to see my brother and to congratulate all the other great T3 athletes that finished.

32 of us started. 32 of us finished. A huge achievement on a day when over 10% of those who started dropped out. 3000 people signed up for the race. Of those, 2461 were still registered by race week and issued with numbers. 2068 actually got into the water on the Sunday, to start. 2066 finished the swim. 1860 finished the whole race before the 17 hour cut-off. 13 of the 43 professionals in the race dropped out. I finished and everyone from T3 finished too. What a day!

SWIM	BIKE	RUN	OVERALL	POSITION
1:12:35	6:53:35	5:30:32	13:52:34	1224

So here I am writing this, almost exactly a week later. This time, seven days ago, I'd be enjoying the beautiful blue lake and lights of the bridge in the gathering dark. The water that had been so murky and brown in the morning was a deep, tranquil blue, reflecting the twilight sky. It was a peaceful moment in the middle of such a hectic day. Made it all worthwhile. With the lights strung across the bridge and the desert sky above, I counted my steps and realised how lucky I was to be out there, doing this race, finding out what I can achieve when I just put my mind to it. Ironman isn't so much about the physical achievement, it's about the commitment. Committing to a goal that's bigger than you. Doing the training. Riding in the rain and thunder for six hours to Shiner, Texas. Running the 3M half marathon from the finish to the start line, then back again from start to finish. Freezing on a long, wet, cold ride out Fitzhugh Rd but finishing it strong. Swimming when the deck had ice forming on it. Getting out of bed on those cold, wet days. 3 hour rides on the trainer, watching Indiana Jones to stop us going insane. Lap after lap of Barton Springs. Running the damn dam loop on Town Lake one more time, then once more again. 100 mile rides out in Manor, getting chased by dogs and almost throwing up for messing up the nutrition. Finishing 20 mile runs that I wasn't even sure I could start. Turning up, day after day, month after month. Being consistent and being out there with Amanda. I'd never have finished without her and without all the other T3'ers that got us through. You can read Amanda's view of the race. So what's next ? A half-ironman in St Croix in 2008, maybe Ironman New Zealand in 2009. Lots of options. The first one is the hardest!

You can do anything you set your mind to

- Lose Yourself. Eminem

Vineman Half-ironman 2005 race report

all a blur

Now that I've finally finished the ironman training, I've actually started taking pictures again. We went out for happy hour with a lot of the others who we did the race with and I brought my camera along. Sometimes the accidents and playing around can give the most interesting pictures. Here I was shooting from the table, manually focusing and not really paying a lot of attention - just getting back to being familiar with the camera and the controls after about a month off. Lots of flare, lots of noise, messed up white balance and some motion blur all just add to the character and feel of this shot of Laurie at Little Woodrows in Austin. I pushed and pulled the colours a bit, to strengthen the yellow/ blue relationships and add some more depth. I really enjoy the Lightroom edit on the image colour adjustment tools for working these sorts of images. It gives a much more direct feedback to point at the colours and drag to change them, rather than working with some sliders.

We did it!

Amanda & I both finished and finished well. I got in just under 14 hours and still felt good. All 32 people from T3 that we trained with finished, on a really tough, windy day when 10% of the people who started, dropped out. We did it!

Ironman Arizona 2007

140.6 miles

226.3 km

That's about the distance from Glasgow to Aberdeen. Somehow Amanda and I plan on doing that distance, under our own steam, next Sunday. We start off with a 2.4 mile swim - about the distance across the Clyde, from Cardross to Greenock, then we hop on our bikes and ride for 112 miles - from Glasgow, that would get you to Fort William. Then, after that brisk 7 hour warm up, we do a quick 26.2 mile marathon on foot to round out the race. In one day. Without getting any sleep. Us and 2,400 other people. But we are ready.

This all started about a year ago - I got an email from Amanda: Topic: ironman AZ Date: 05/02/2006 From: "McGregor Amanda-A14120" To: "Gordon McGregor" registration is up!!!!!! April 15th 2007... Let's do it!!!!!!!

My first response was to tell her she was mad. So was my second and third responses. But after a couple of days, she wore me down (or actually, just signed me up anyway!) So we started on this crazy journey to finish one of the hardest races around. We joined a training group in Austin, called T3 and made a load of new friends. There will be 30 of us traveling out to Arizona to race together, which adds to the shared insanity. I took about 6 months just trying to get fit enough to start the training, dropped 25lbs and mentally got myself to a point where it didn't seem such a ridiculous goal. Then we started the training. 20+ mile long runs in the cold and wet. 6 hours freezing on a bike. Swimming in the dark and cold. Amanda kept better track than I did, but we've swam over 50 miles, rode over 2000 miles and ran 450 miles training since September. Oh, we are ready.

So we fly out to Tempe on Wednesday evening to start the final stages of this long journey. This is the time to really enjoy : the race. The training was hard, the race is going to be hard, but nothing is going to stop us finishing. Someone will need to drag me off the course. Plenty can go wrong, but I'm not stopping. 7am next Sunday morning, the canon fires and we take off in the mass swim start in Tempe town lake. 2000+ bodies swimming along side each other, punching, kicking, pushing and jostling for position. I can't wait. We are ready!

The race starts at 7am. Swim should be a little over an hour, maybe 1:15, so we should be on our bikes some time around 8:30am, then spending 6 or more hours riding around Tempe. If things go well, we should be starting the run somewhere before 3pm, right when things will be getting hot! Then the marathon. My best time ever was over 5 hours, but that was a horrible experience! I'm hoping for a slightly better marathon this time around, but all things considered, I think we should be finishing close to 8pm around the 13 hour mark. We have 17 hours to finish, before they close the course and tell us to go home, so I think I have a good chance of getting there. I'm ready. Just to give some frame of reference for friends & family around the world, here's the times. I'm not claiming to be hitting any of these marks though! This is just a rough guide. My race number is 694. Amanda is 2114. You can track us through the day at www.ironmanlive.com and see how we are doing. Though, if we don't appear, don't panic - it has been somewhat flaky in the past! There's more race details at www.ironmanarizona.com. Wish us luck! For Amanda's view on all this, check her blog.

p.s., Sorry for the lack of photo related blogging recently, maybe this explains in some small way, why.

brian

This shot came from playing around with a lensbaby 3G, with the creative aperture kit. In particular, using the star aperture and going out of my way to find lots of point light sources.

I'd met up with some friends to have dinner at Chuy's on Barton Springs Rd. We then went out to shoot some of the interesting neon on the various restaurants along the road. I brought along my lensbaby 3G as I really haven't spent as much time as I'd like getting to know how it works. Also I've recently picked up the creative aperture kit and knew that all the point light sources would potentially give me cool effects. I'm still finding the 3G an interesting lens to get to grips with. There's definitely more potential for in focus shots than with the 2.0, but I still have to get my fingers in tune with the various knobs and switches on the 3G. I keep finding myself trying to focus but landing on the lock release knobs, rather than the focus knobs. The juice bar on Barton Springs Rd happened to have some brightly coloured spot lights, that I tried to use for effect in this shot. Brian is standing under a green spotlight and I then used the lights from the bars on the other side to frame him with the stars. I found that to get really good stars, the point light sources have to be quite a long way back from the point of focus. This makes sense - the more out of focus they are, the larger they appear. Getting the relative distances correct took a bit of playing around. I also shot maybe 30 frames here to get one close to being in focus. That in general seems to be a challenge with using the lensbaby, but particularly at night. It is just difficult to see through that small viewfinder in low light. I also think I might need to dial in the diopter adjustment on my camera, to suit my eyes. There is a car passing in the background that created an interesting star trail from the brake lights - something to play with more I think with these creative aperture disks. The stars, being symmetrical also don't suffer from the inversion that occurs with a heart shape aperture. With the heart, the out of focus bokeh inverts if the focus point is in front, or behind the light source that is creating the shape. You can see this if you look at a light ray diagram ( which I might get around to drawing soon). It can make it a bit fiddly trying to get the effect you want with the disks, but a symmetrical aperture doesn't have that same issue, as it is the same reflected on any axis. I worked on this image a bit in Lightroom, using the 'on image' colour adjustments. These are great - you can adjust hue & saturation directly on the image, clicking on a particular region you want to modify and dragging the mouse up or down to change the particular parameter you are working with. In this case I made the background regions more red by adjusting the hue. Working with this, along with a graphics tablet is even better than with a mouse - I just click with the pen, on the image and drag - it feels very intuitive. I'm looking forward to trying this out for black and white images too - I think it has a great deal of potential.

Backing up is hard to do

I have a problem. I take pictures. Lots of them. Gigabytes of pictures. Many of them I actually quite like and I'd like to keep them around. But I shoot digitally and the one constant fact for digital storage is that it fails. All the time. Hard drives are just little time bombs spinning away, ready to destroy your data. So, at the first level, I make two copies of the images when I load them on to my computer. Straight from the memory cards they get copied once to a directory on my local PC and once into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. The local hard drive on the PC is a fast RAID 5 set-up, to give speed and some redundancy. Those are the copies I work on. The larger (1 Tb) NAS box is at the end of a 1Gb ethernet connection, which still somehow ends up too slow to work on. But it is fine for secondary online storage. When I work on an image, I store the final Photoshop version, with all the associated layers. This lets me go back and edit an image or easily recreate a print at different sizes. I've been caught out before by not keeping these files, thinking I could just recreate an image from the original RAW file. Then someone wanted 40 images with a short deadline and I had to turn down the opportunity - so now I keep the PSD files. Those can be 250Mb each. They get sync'ed to the NAS box as well, using Unison. I also occasionally go through and cull the terrible images. I don't believe in keeping everything from every shoot - there is plenty of bad stuff to cut out. But that takes time and if you are in a hurry, you have the opportunity to delete an important image. So the lazy approach is to not clean out things often enough.

So with all that, I must feel pretty secure, right ? Well - not really. Now I have a couple of copies of my images, so that's good. Except the drive space on the local PC is a bit tight, so I occasionally have to delete images from there. So I'm left with one copy on the NAS box. Now it is RAID too, so I have some protection if a drive fails in there, but I still only have one copy in the online storage. A virus on my machine could go on a rampage across the network corrupting files. Something less malicious but more common is that I could do something stupid and delete the files. Lighting could strike the power cable (Texas has a whole lot of thunderstorms) and fry my computer and the NAS box. Sure I have surge protection and UPS on all the power supplies. But not the network cables, so there is still a vector. I don't think I really trust the $30 surge protection from Fry's anyway.

So I make backups onto DVD. Well, occasionally I do. Problem is I can easily produce enough data to fill 2 DVDs each time I take my camera out. Sitting there, backing up files to DVD is a fairly long & boring chore so it doesn't get done as often as it should. Then those DVDs can suffer from the usual bitrot of all digital media. So to be on the safe side, you really need to burn 2 copies of each DVD. Suddenly that is 4 DVDs any time I pick up the camera and several hours of popping back to the PC to swap over disks. Then the pile of disks starts to well, pile up.

Even at that point, now that I've got my RAID backup & NAS and stack of (mostly fictional) DVDs. I'm actually thinking of buying another NAS box and only occasionally powering it up and connecting it - doing a weekly or monthly backup of the online NAS box to that as a stop-gap solution. But then I worry about those hard drive platters that are sitting non-spinning and worry if they'll start up each time or what that sort of operation does to the Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) of the hard drives.

What happens if the house catches fire ? Or we have another typical Texan biblical flood ? Or if we get burgled ? So maybe those fictional DVDs need to be stored out of the house - but I don't know where that would be. We have a small safety deposit box in the bank, but it isn't going to fit all those DVDs. A larger disk format would be fantastic. Blu-ray or HD-DVD promise 25Gb or 50Gb writable disks. That's just about perfect for my needs right now. I just wish it was a bit more affordable and more importantly standardised. But then - do I need to do duplicate copies of the blu-ray DVDs ? Is there any faith that they won't suffer the same fate as DVDs or CDs now ? A few years lifetime in careful storage before the errors start to appear ?

I suppose I could shoot less, but why would I want my photographic process to be dictated by the availability of secure storage ? I've yet to see a solution that would give any confidence that the images were secure from accidental deletion when online or store enough for easy off-line maintenance. Please, please, please - if you have a good solution - let me know!

Finding the fun

Some days just remind me that I love taking pictures. It has been a couple of weeks since I picked up my camera, due to work, training, lack of motivation and all the things discussed in my last blog post. But at the weekend I met up with some of my friends from The Radiant Vista that were in town to do their inspirational photography tour. The first night we went out for dinner and everyone but me had a camera with them - shooting things, being silly, having fun. The next night out I took my camera too. I shot a few hundred, blurry, out of focus, silly lensbaby shots. Played around with the star apertures, didn't worry too much about getting things sharp - in fact for the best stars it pays to have everything out of focus. The results may or may not be that great - I haven't even really looked at them yet - but I had such a blast just shooting and composing and seeing the world through a lens again. I always forget how much I can lose myself behind a camera and just let go. I love the sense of calm and focus that I get when I'm working well with a camera. Letting go yet being in control at the same time, trying to balance the creative and the controlling voices in my head - the ones that want everything sharp with the ones that want to swing the camera around and see what happens. When the pictures work it is a huge thrill, but the process of shooting is where the real fun is at for me. The process changes if I'm on my own or if I'm shooting alongside other photographers, or shooting people as the subject. Shooting with people is a great way to make a connection, talking to them if they are in the shots, sharing the fun of goofing off and making interesting pictures if they have cameras. Shooting alone is a much more slow and calming process for me, that relaxes and energises. Shooting with people seems much higher energy when it works - perhaps being more draining but also often leading to more exciting results. I usually feel exhausted if I shoot with other photographers but I find myself riffing on ideas that I don't think I'd have purely on my own. I get a kick out of both styles, the loaner and working with others. There is much to be said for both ways to approach photography and I think if you only find yourself working in one way or the other that you owe it to your picture taking to push off in the other direction some times. Moving out of your comfort zone is a great way to surprise yourself and find new avenues to explore.

Dry Spell

I've been going through something of a photographic dry spell recently. I had a very productive flurry of activity towards the end of last year and the first couple of months of 2007. I made a lot of progress on shooting portraits, started to discover the fun of off-camera lighting and generally learned a lot and took a lot of pictures. Some of them were published and others feature amongst some of my favourites that I've ever taken. Yet here I am in mid March and I haven't really taken any pictures this month at all. Somewhere along the line I ran out of steam. Sure I'm training for a race that is only a few weeks away and that is starting to impinge on my thoughts. Yes, the training takes up a lot of my time, as well as mental & physical energy. But I've been training for this since March last year and I managed to fit a whole lot of photography in and around it for the last three months. So that can't be it. I've been working more hours at my job too, but I was working hard over those other three months as well. So where is the procrastination coming from ? It isn't that I have a lack of ideas. There are at least three shots in my head right now that I would love to go and shoot. If I start thinking about it I can come up with half a dozen more just as I'm typing. These aren't even half-formed - I can visualise how I want them to work out and what I need to make them happen. They are interesting to me, would push me in some new directions and I think would be rewarding to do. So it isn't a lack of ideas. The thing that is slightly different from before is that all of those ideas involve other people as part of the scene or as subjects. Suddenly it isn't just my schedule that has to line up, but I need to organise someone else and time it with them and the available lighting. But even that isn't so hard to do. I feel that I'd be imposing myself on them. I know I have more enthusiasm to take these pictures than most people have to be in them. Though I think looking more inwardly, it is really a fear that the pictures just wouldn't be good enough and that I'd be wasting someone's time. But I've dealt with that with all the previous shoots I've done recently too. The thing that has changed is that I was keeping a private creative journal - just a private blog that I posted about things I wanted to do and what I needed to do them. This log seemed to push me onwards to work out the next step along the way, each day. I've let that daily journal falter and I've noticed a marked downturn in how much photography I'm doing as a result. That seems to be the key thing that has changed and that I'm going to try to return to over the next few weeks. Maybe it was all the rain last night that made me realise this. But really, it was writing this blog post - at the start of writing I wasn't sure what I thought the problem was, but now five paragraphs later, I think I've worked through the issues in my head. That's just what the personal journal helps me do too - I just start writing about things I want to sort out and I mentally order and process the issues as I go along.

Laguna Gloria

I've just finished a 5 week portrait class at the Austin Museum of Art. The shot of Jennifer above was taken on the final session as an experiment with mixing studio strobes and outdoor ambient light. We were fighting against the setting sun to set this up while there was still some colour in the sky. I'm standing with a 6ft square softbox quite close to the model, on the camera right, shooting in manual mode with the aperture around f8 and the shutter set slow enough to pick up some of the colour in the sky. I'm actually triggering the strobe with a 580EX on camera, set at 1/128th power and pointing in the general direction of a peanut slave that is connected into the strobe power box. There's another smaller strobe pointing at the fountain to light it, set about a stop lower power than the main light. I like the composition of this particular shot because of all the acute angles, in the angled fountain, her legs, her arms and all through the shot. The side lighting gives some drama and mixing in the sky colour really makes the shot pop. This was really set up as a lighting test, there were another 5 people shooting at the same time as me, so it ended up as a slightly strange experience. Nobody was really very comfortable talking to Jennifer, giving her suggestions on how to pose or generally working with her to get good results, so it all came off as a bit artificial. I think some were maybe too shy to direct and others didn't want to be pushy when others were trying to get the shots too. I much prefer working one on one, with less of an audience of people around - I think that's mainly a lack of confidence but also I'm just not really sure what changes I want to make or what suggestions to make to improve the shots - something I want to work on more this year, by studying successful portraits and getting a better idea on how I want to visually compose the space. The portrait class was a good experience for me - to spend an evening a week on just this one subject, sharing my work with a dozen other people and getting to play around with some studio strobes. It also introduced me to some new photographers and made me spend some more time in the library studying some of the history of portrait photography, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and so on. I picked up some interesting ideas and got some more experience with lighting. A big improvement on trying to discuss this sort of thing on-line. It is always much more effective to just get in there and see how it all works. The theory is all well and good but the actual practice of moving the lights around and seeing the effect is much more educational for me. My main regret was that the class was only 5 weeks. As a group we were just starting to get more comfortable with each other and start sharing more interesting ideas and suddenly it was all over. I'm hoping I can keep in touch with some of the people that were in the class or even shoot with them in the future.

Ideas vs Reality

A somewhat flawed attempt at shooting with a lot of motion in it. I loved the colours in the latest dress that Amanda got, so wanted to shoot it with a vivid green surrounding, to really set off the orange & blue. I had this idea in my head to try and capture some motion in the dress and blur in the background, along with Amanda moving. Lots of motion & blur, but with some detail and sharp focus - out of focus and motion blur are pretty different things. Something that is sharply focused but moving looks very different to something thrown out of focus completely. The shoes in this shot are a good example of that - sharp but blurry. We went to Laguna Gloria on a very windy Saturday afternoon to try out this idea. On reflection, I think we should have gone a bit later in the day to get somewhat softer light. I also didn't have my head screwed on right, because the longest lens I brought was an 85mm 1.8. If I was looking for lots of background blur and shallow depth of field, something longer would have been a much better choice - next time I'm bringing the 400mm! The second silly mistake I made was that shooting mid day in Texas, on a bright sunny day isn't the most conducive to using slow shutter speeds. I wanted to pan the movement, to further blur the background and capture some of that sharp/ motion feel I mentioned - but that needs shutter speeds down around 1/60s or slower. 1/30s would have been ideal. Then combine that with wanting to shoot close to wide open, again for the shallow depth of field and you have a problem. Shutter speeds around 1/2000s make this tough! Even at ISO50. So next time, a polariser and/or ND would really help to make this shot work. The polariser will help the colours pop a bit more and saturate the way I had it in my head. The photo above has had the colours pushed further than I'd like in post processing, to get close to the idea I had - the polariser would be great in that respect, doing double duty as a 2-stop ND and saturating the end result. I quite like this result though, Amanda in the air, face sharp enough, still lots of movement and it has a lot of the design elements I had in mind for the shot. Amanda did a great job of running/ jumping around after our 18 mile run that morning! It was also just fun to hang out with her on such a beautiful day and do something fun. The kind people in my portrait class really seemed to like this result - even though I had a hard time getting a final print that I was happy with. I think though that what I struggle to accept is the difference between the image on the page and the idea that I had in my head. Some, very few times, those ideas come out in the end result fully formed. Other days, happy accidents occur and you go off in a whole new direction. This is just one that doesn't quite live up to the idea I've got still in the back of my head. I think I'll give this another go, just as soon as Amanda feels up to it.