I've pretty much finished going through and editing down my catalog, selecting and annotating images, to get it all organized and presentable for my rebuilt website. It's finally up and running here at: www.AspectStudioPhotography.net. The nice thing about it (and the main reason for the rebuild) is the integrated shopping cart and ordering system, which works really smoothly and easily on the front end (what visitors see) AND the back end, where I can manage and update everything so easily behind the scenes.
I looked around for quite a long time to find a hosting service that met my needs for professional quality design; easy to manage, self-fulfilled e-commerce (I do all my own printing); and slick, Flash-free presentation. PhotoShelter was the only one I found that has it all... short of a prohibitively expensive scratch-built site. I think it has a really clean, organized and interactive presentation that invites exploration and that's what I wanted. Looking ahead, I will continue to add, subtract and reorganize, I'm sure... but I think it's pretty presentable from this point. Please check it out if you get a few minutes.
Since I've been spending so much time going through my archives and adjusting past work, this week's Sky Watch was actually done a couple of years back, at Monument Valley in NE Arizona. Only at sunrise and sunset do you get these beautiful deep desert colors of blue, purple and salmon. This is one of the iconic "Mitten" formations, seen in the setting sun's low angle light. Check out the Sky Watch page every weekend for interesting skies from all around the world.
I guess I tend to have a one-track mind... I'm still working at sorting and editing my entire catalog and therefore just haven't had much energy for writing on the blog or visiting around. It's good though that I am reworking a lot of old stuff with a fresh eye and eliminating a bunch of images that never were quite right. I haven't been out to shoot at all for several weeks, partly because of this and partly because we've been getting a lot of snow on the mountain and it's been a chore just to stay mobile.
This one was made last winter while we were still living at the coast. I spent an afternoon pretty much just sitting on some rocks and shooting the huge waves of a winter swell. The light got really strange and interesting reflecting off the water towards the end of the day, producing this nicely abstract effect of the water and sky blending together. I've caught this blue and gold effect several times and I really like it. The power and dynamics of the ocean are fascinating to watch when it's this active, but hard to capture just at the right moment... really just have to shoot a lot and hope for the best:)
Visit the Sky Watch home page every week for great skies and nature images from all over the world.
I've been really involved with the reconstruction of my main web site and probably will be for a few more weeks, but at last I'm making some good progress after finally deciding on the design and functions that I want. Designing stuff for myself is always way harder than doing it for someone else, and if things remain a little slow here at the blog, now you know why... getting out to shoot is kind of on hold until I get this project to a certain point.
It's also a useful process in another way, because it's forcing me to go back through each and every image (a huge task) and re-evaluate all of them, edit out some of the less than ideal ones from my "official" collection, and create comments and keywords for the rest, to make everything search-engine friendly. Self-editing is difficult, but I think very important.. no one at any level creates a perfect gem every time and knowing when to say "nope... not quite good enough" is tough. Anyway, when it's far enough along that I'm comfortable for people to see it, I will switch my domain over and let every one know to go and take a look.
This one here is from last fall... and might look familiar because it is a variation of one that I posted previously in my article about film a few months back, but this is a more polished version. I had many others from this trip that I was going to post, but kind of got sidetracked as I often do. If the rocks look volcanic in nature, they indeed are.. there are many large, amazing lava fields of black volcanic rock in this area, most thickly covered with aspens and SO beautifully colorful in the fall. This stream is the outflow below a small lake and was a great location to shoot in the early morning... the trees and rocks are nice in themselves, but having moving water in the scene always adds something extra.
I've been struggling to clear out from last weekend's huge snow storm all week, so today I felt like a little break from the winter stuff....
This one goes back to January and is the result of one of those "holy crap!" moments when some magic light just happens and the whole situation changes instantly. After working all afternoon on a rather cloudy and overcast day, I made the mistake of packing up my gear for the ride home and was actually heading out of the park (yes, this is Joshua Tree N.P.), when the sun broke through a small crack in the clouds just at the horizon, casting a spell over the whole area. I could tell it was only going to last a matter of minutes, if that, and I wasn't really in an ideal spot subject-wise, but I decided that something was better than nothing so I pulled over, set up as fast as I could and managed to frame a few quick shots before it went dull for good. If I had a digital camera on the seat beside me as I might normally, it would have been easy.. but as I was shooting film, I had to unpack, set up the tripod, compose something, spot meter the scene and shoot, all in probably less than 2 minutes... pretty happy that I got something decent out of that situation:) It was definitely my pleasant surprise of the day.
Check out the SkyWatch homepage every weekend for more great sky images from all around the world.
