Help-Portrait Charleston was Awesome

Today’s Charleston Help-Portrait event was a little on the cool side (cold for some), but turned out to be a pretty successful event. It was very well received by the people that attended the Without Walls Ministry Christmas event. I was told that there were about 200 registrations, which meant that somewhere around 400-500 people got their photos taken. As an added bonus, the rain held off until after we packed everything up at the end.

I spent most of my time manning the laptop, editing the photos and printing them, so I didn’t get a chance to see much of what else was going on with the event and don’t have too many photos of what went on. I did get to see the faces of most of the people when they got their photos though. The looks on everybody’s faces made being out in the cool weather worth every minute of it. Made me feel really proud that I was able to be part of an event like this.

Not surprisingly though, there were a few glitches to deal with and there were several lessons learned, at least on the printing end of things. Because of the way things were laid out and the threat of rain, we weren’t able to have the cameras tethered to the laptops, so there were memory cards being shuffled back and forth by volunteers between the photographers and laptop stations. Not ideal, but workable. We ended up putting the cards along with description sheets into envelopes for the shuttling so that they would stay together and not get lost.

Portrait stations

We had 3 portrait stations set up and three laptops/printers for viewing and printing the photos on. We were only able to get two of them working though. Even though printing setups were tested by the printer owners beforehand, there were still glitches once everything got set up on site. Perhaps the cold had something to do with it. The first printer kept insisting that one of the ink cartridges be replaced, even after it had been. I spent the first hour or so wrestling with getting the second printer to print 5×7″ photos before finally giving up and switching to 4×6″ prints. That put me a good bit behind the photographers, so I had several stacks of memory cards to import images from while trying to get things printed. It also meant that people ended up waiting longer than planned to get their photos.

The printing ended up being a lot more chaotic than I expected. Memory cards coming in and going out, editing and cropping photos before printing, keeping track of which prints go with which ticket, people gathered around to see if their photos were coming out all made things pretty hectic.

Printing station

I did get my first experience with Adobe Lightroom. Pretty impressive piece of software. Too bad it doesn’t come in a Linux flavour. Another thing that held up the printing on my end was that Lightroom seems to prefer grabbing the RAW file over the JPG image. RAW images take quite a while to render before being sent off to the printer. It also takes a lot of memory and caused Lightroom to crash a couple of times on me. For future events, make sure the photographers’ cameras are set to take only JPG images. Makes things go much much faster.

Lesson summary from the editing/printing side of things:

  • Test the printing setup at least the night before. Then test it again.
  • People bringing printers should also plan to bring their laptop (or at least bring the printer driver to install on someone else’s laptop)
  • Time permitting, get together before hand to make sure people manning the laptops are familiar with the software being used to edit/print the photos.
  • Tethering cameras to laptops is probably the preferred way of doing things.
  • Shoot JPG rather than RAW. RAW takes too much time to process.
  • You probably don’t need quite as much ink as you think you might. Of course if you get what you think is enough, you’ll probably run out.

Chaotic and crazy as it was, I loved every minute of the event. Looking forward to doing another one in Charleston.

Fair photowalking

In the 10 years I’ve been in Charleston, I have never gone to the Coastal Carolina Fair.

This year I’ll be going for the first time, and meeting some fellow photographers there for some photowalking action through the fair on Hallowe’en. It’s bound to be an interesting time and I’m sure there will be lots of things to photograph.

Looking forward to having some fun out there and playing with some long exposure shots. Just need to remember to take my tripod with me.

If you’re interested in joining, meet me at the main gate (or just inside the gate) around 5PM Saturday (Hallowe’en). It’ll be fun!

Scott Kelby World Wide Photo Walk

This year Charleston is a location for the 2nd annual Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk and I’m helping to organize it, along with Chuck!

What is it? It’s a day (July 18) where hundreds of people/photo geeks all across the world will get together in groups and go take pictures. So far there are 400 locations all over the world with walks being planned.

For the Charleston event, the plan is to start the gathering at the Gazebo in White Point Gardens at 9AM July 18 and head up the peninsula from there. I’ll try to work out a route that will take the group through some interesting areas, but the route will be flexible. If people in the group know of other good spots to go to, we can do that. Afterwards, we’ll descend on the unsuspecting Tommy Condon’s for lunch and celebratory libations..

The photo walks are limited to 50 people, so if you want to go, check out the photo walk page and sign up.

I think what I need to do is get with Joan and have her help me plan out a route. Even better would be to get her to come along!

New bow

Finally got around to ordering a new bow for the viola a few days ago, and it arrived today.
Viola and Bow
Sounds a little rough right now. Still need to get the bow broken in with rosin and remember how to bow the strings. Can definitely tell the viola’s just a little too small for me (or else I just have fat fingers).
Now to see if I can re-teach myself all the viola-playing stuff I used to know.

Strings on the viola

While running errands over the weekend I stopped at a nearby music shop to see what they had for string instruments. Picked up a set of strings and a pitch pipe to help me get things into tune, but they didn’t have any viola bows in my price range. The ones they did have were very nice, but a little more than I needed at this time. Thanks to the pitch pipe and a few MIDI files I found online, the viola is now newly strung and sounds decently in tune, although the A sounds kind of odd to me. Maybe when I hear it with the bow it’ll sound better. Plucking the strings does make some very satisfyingly familiar sounds though.

Now I just need to find a bow and some beginner’s books.