Category: Creative Work

My Right Brain at Work

Looking for a Father’s Day Gift? Now get 25% off Automotive prints.

Pardon the shameless self-promotion, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind my readers that prints of my car photography are available for purchase online. The above is a slide show of some of the shots you can buy. These are from the collection called “Action Shots”. Prints are available in various sizes, suitable for on a desk or hanging on the wall. They’s make a great gift for your Dad for Father’s Day, or anyone who appreciates cool cars anytime of the year! You can even have them framed and gift-wrapped! Right now through June 25th, I’m running a special for Father’s Day that gets you 25% off your order when you use the coupon code: “ThanksDad” at checkout.

To purchase your print select the image you want and click it. You’ll be taken to my online store.

(Proceeds go to paying for the upkeep of the online store first, and.. if I ever sell enough, a nice new wide-angle lens for making more great photos!)

Thanks for your support.

Looking for a Father’s Day Gift?

Pardon the shameless self-promotion, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind my readers that prints of my car photography are available for purchase online. The above is a slide show of some of the shots you can buy. These are from the collection called “Action Shots”. Prints are available in various sizes, suitable for on a desk or hanging on the wall. They’s make a great gift for your Dad for Father’s Day, or anyone who appreciates cool cars anytime of the year! You can even have them framed and gift-wrapped!

To purchase your print select the image you want and click it. You’ll be taken to my online store.

(Proceeds go to paying for the upkeep of the online store first, and.. if I ever sell enough, a nice new wide-angle lens for making more great photos!)

Thanks for your support.

Cascade Sunset Clouds

One

The weather here over the past few days has been dramatically Spring-ish. Unlike our traditional multi-layer blankets of grey, we’ve been treated to dramatic broken clouds and sunbreaks. This evening as we were finishing dinner (Nick made pasta and meatballs!) the dining room’s eastern facing windows began bathing us in golden light. A large storm cloud was over the Cascades and was being lit by the setting sun. Nick said I should get my camera. I stood up and looked outside, and noted the towering, spreading cloud top and said that I really don’t have a wide-angle lens wide enough to really and adequately capture the moment. Then I recalled that I had a step-up ring that fit my Olympus 0.7x teleconverter. I dug that out of the camera bag as fast as I could and screwed together the bits I needed, and scurried out onto the deck. Sure enough the 9.8mm equiv lens couldn’t capture the entirety of the scene. (You guys need to buy some of my photos so I can buy that 7-14mm lens! Click over there!—> )

I shot about 50 images, most in JPEG then finally remembered to switch to RAW as the sun finally sunk over the horizon.

Two

Today, after chatting with a few folks about the fixes in the latest rev of Aperture I re-downloaded/installed it (after nuking all evidence of its previous existence off my disk.) Oddly the pixels right off the sensor were pretty damn good on their own! I performed minimal adjustments. These three images are straight JPEG exports from Aperture. No round trips to Photoshop for my usual “save to web” treatment. Which do you like best?

Three

Farewell Aperture, for now.

At least this houseguest cleans up after itself!

My 30-day Apple Aperture trial expired. I ended up deciding not to buy the software though. Why?

$199 seems steep for an application that runs like molasses on my fairly well-spec’ed machine; a MacBook Pro 2.53GHz with 4 GB of RAM. I like Aperture’s RAW editing features. Once I got the hang of them that is. But… damn this application is slow. This was with a library of less than 100 photos. I note that iPhoto bogs down once its library exceeds 5000 images. Aperture was dog slow right from the very first image.

Every once in a while I would see some moment of brilliance, and think I was falling in love with the software. Then it would smack me with a spinning cursor and drive me away. I would hope that a trial period would show you all the reasons to love a new product, but in this case it just drove me back to using iPhoto + Photoshop.

I’m open to being convinced otherwise, so feel free to chime in if you have a differing opinion.

The Virtual Storefront for My Automotive Photography

Now you too can buy this image.

After years of consideration I’ve finally decided to take the advice of many friends and fans and offer some of my automotive photographs for sale. I have no illusions of this being a means to making a living, but if all goes well I’ll be able to buy a lens or two.

I’m using a service called SmugMug, that allows you to order prints, mounted prints, and framed prints which will be shipped to an address of your choosing. You can pay online securely using a credit card, and select shipping methods and whatnot. Given that print sizes may not match the file size you are also given the option to crop the photo to fit. There are also a few bits of merchandise for sale with images on them, as well as digital downloads for use on screen and print

I’m still working behind the scenes to get the store ready, so the shelves are not stocked properly, and some items my not remain in the inventory for long. I suspect I’ll be thinning the herd soon. Captions and keywords need to be edited too, but feel free to wander the aisles and check out the merchandise.

Having purchased a few prints myself for office decor, I think the sweet spot for size is between 14″ and 24″ on the larger side of the photo. This will become larger as I populate the galleries with newer photos from my G1 camera. I enabled the “camera info” tagging on the photos so if you see “Panasonic DMC-G1” in the info area the images should scale quite large. My older Olympus cameras made images that will likely start falling apart quality-wise at anything larger than 20″. Eventually I’ll remove all but the best images from the older cameras.

Prices are largely determined by the costs, but I’m open to feedback, especially from my core followers here on my website. For you guys I’ve arranged a “Grand Opening Discount” of 33% off anything and everything (except shipping), just use the coupon code “CheapChuckPics” at checkout.

The URL for the store is: http://photos.goolsbee.org.

Let me know what you think.

Early Spring

A Bloomin' Early Spring

We’ve had an exceptionally mild winter this year. Very little rain, even less snow, and since the new year, very warm temperatures. This tree usually blooms in late March, or early April. Here it is February 28th and it has burst out with color.

This is a shot from the G1, captured in camera raw format, with mild edits made in Aperture, then saved to JPEG using Photoshop’s “save for web” feature.

Photo: E-type Tach

Speaking of photography… Here is a shot I just snapped off with the G1, right here on my desk. This is raw, and unedited, exported out of Aperture 3, just to show how nice this camera & lens combo is (14-45, at 45mm here, manual focus.)

The tach is out of the 65E for a refurb and upgrade. It has been inaccurate for a while and that will be fixed soon. It took me several hours of work to get the bezel removed!