Why I shoot football

Every Fall I shoot a few college football games and I never get much out of it, monetarily.  So why do it? First off - let's talk about why NOT to shoot it.  Shooting football is difficult and expensive.  Sports shooting demands some of the most expensive equipment around, and football especially so.  The game action moves very fast and there are lots of people running around in front of you blocking the action so having the fastest glass and the fastest auto-focus helps out.  Even with field-side access you have to stay pretty far away, and when the action gets close, you generally want to move farther away lest you get overrun by a receiver flying out of bounds as fast as he can!  (with helmet, pads, and spikes - you don't stand much of a chance.)

A standard setup to go shoot a football game is two high-speed bodies (like the Canon 1-D) and four fast lenses (400/2.8, 70-200/2.8, 24-70/2.8, 16-35/2.8)  So around $15,000 - $20,000 of gear, depending on what else you add.  I've never shown up with that much gear but I've often rented parts of that kit to get as close as I can.  The game takes about 3 hours but you want to be there a little early and stay a little later, so really it eats half a day.

Then, let's talk about the editing time!   Editing 600 - 1,200 images takes a fair amount of time.

Did I mention that it doesn't pay well?  So why do it?  There are a couple reasons:

First of all, it keeps me fresh and on my toes.  Shooting football is good preparation for shooting a party or a wedding or anything else that moves fast and has no second chances. There's no second chance in shooting sports and that's a good mindset to be in for a lot of photography.

Second of all, it's fun!  I'm a college football fan and it's nice to get a third perspective on the game.  (First perspective: watching on TV.  Second perspective:  Watching format he stands)  Being on the field is different from being in in the stands.  You're really in touch with the flow and the electricity of the game.  The view is often better from the stands, but the energy of being on the sidelines is better.   By the way, I'll never understand those "special" people who are wandering around the sidelines because they won a contest or know somebody or whatever and are standing around, not paying attention, or texting.  How can you not be riveted to the game?  That's why you came, right?

Third, I'm a huge Cal Poly fan and letting the Athletic Department use my images is a small way to give back.  Cal Poly contributed greatly to my current situation in life and the least I can do is give a little back.  Sure - I never got much from the Athletic Department while I was in school, but this is a way to give back indirectly.

Book is done, and NPS map resources

My book of Yellowstone photos is done and printing! It's amazing to me how much work these things take.  After quickly throwing some images together I started a longer process of polishing it up, while teaching myself Adobe InDesign at the same time.   The official 0.9 version of the book has been uploaded to Blurb and ordered, and should arrive in time for Thanksgiving.  This is the first time I've used Blurb and I have no idea how it's going to turn out.  I've mentally prepared myself for it not turning out well so I'm fully expecting to have to adjust the colors and reprint it.

I like printing large so I went with their new premium paper and large format landscape size, which is 13 inches wide by 11 inches tall.  That means a double-truck spread is 26 inches wide!  (I included at least one full spread and a couple of 1.5 page spreads.)

While I was on Blurb's website I took a look at the books that other people have published and shared.  There are over 2,100 Fine Art books and 3,900 Travel books, so I'm not the first person ever to do this.  Oddly, I don't see any way to sort the books which means most of them will never be seen.

While researching some data for the book I went looking for a good map of the Yellowstone.  It turns out that there's a National Park Service office called Harper's Ferry Center, which is the map making division of the National Park Service.  They make a lot of their maps available for download in the original Adobe Illustrator format! These aren't just small, low-resolution maps - these are the actual files they print the park maps and brochures from!  Like all data created by the Federal Government, they are in the public domain.

Here are the eight different maps for Yellowstone that you can download.

Here are some notes about the maps which are also interesting.

I downloaded the full map for Yellowstone and then started hiding layers that just added clutter and ended up with a nice, clean graphic to use for the endpapers of the book.  I'll let you know how it turns out.

Lead me not into temptation (especially bookstores)

A guy at work had a t-shirt that says "Lead me not into temptation" and then is smaller print below it says "(especially  bookstores)".  I need that shirt. I was wandering the streets of Palo Alto after dinner Friday night when headed into the Borders to see if they might happen to have any ultra-cheap, beautiful photography coffee books on deep discount.  :-)  A boy can dream, right?   Well imagine my surprise when I found Philippe Bourseiller's Call of the Desert for $12.95.

This is a really pretty, thick, large format coffee table book covering North Africa.  It's really pretty to look at but there aren't many words in it.  There are few stories about the pictures and the captions for the photos are all at the back of the book.  There are no page numbers which makes it difficult to find things.  Oh well - it's a pretty book.

For $12.95, I'll take it.  What else have you got?

Next up was a book about Ansel Adams by Lauris Morgan-Griffiths called Ansel Adams - Landscapes of the American West for $19.95.

This is a REALLY BIG BOOK, measuring 17 inches high by 14 inches wide.  There are a lot of double-truck images which work out to about 27" x 17".  This is a difficult book to read if you don't have a good way to support it!  The text is OK and there's enough background on each picture to give you a sense of why it's in the collection.

I've now spent a lot of time going through the various photography coffee table books I've got, gathering design ideas for the book on Yellowstone images I'd like to put together.  I've got more than enough source material - I just have to put it all together.

Adobe continues install stupidity in CS4?

According to this Hardmac.com rumor, Adobe's installer is STILL refusing to install the Creative Suite on case-sensitive file systems.  This is an issue that bit me hard earlier this year when I had to reinstall my Mac just to install CS3.  According to the same page Adobe is also disabling installs on SSD drives (flash drives, Solid State Drives, etc.) So if you just bought a MacBook Pro with the Solid State storage option to make a rough, tough, shock-resistant traveling photo editing station, you're out of luck!

It would be nice to see some sort of in-depth explanation from Adobe about why these limitations exist.  Combined with the superficial crappiness of the Adobe Installer (and updater) apps, little gotchas like this just make Adobe look bad.  The install is one of the worst parts of the Adobe experience - at least give us a little info so we don't feel like you're just doing it to us for the fun of it!

Does anyone out there know why these limitations exist?

Back from Wyoming/Yellowstone, and Adobe CS4

Although our flight ended up delayed by 24 hours, we made it back to California OK.  I got a lot of great shots and I've decided that I'm going to put a book together with my shots from this trip and our trip 2 years ago for Christmas.  I made a simple test book of my shots from Vietnam and I learned a lot from that experience.  I want to give it another try and see if I can do (a lot) better. Last time I used to book printing module in Apple's Aperture software and printing service and I was happy with how easy it was to use.  I don't actually own Aperture though and my 30 day trial is over so this is a good excuse to try some other tools.  The next logical choice would be Blurb, and I've downloaded their BookSmart software and I was surprised at how limiting it is, although people seems to really like the printing quality/value.   Luckily you can just upload pre-rastered pages from anything that outputs and use them purely as a printing service.   (As a side note, I believe that you can set up Aperture to output pages of any size and use Aperture for the layout without using Apple's printing.)

I have Adobe's InDesign and I've always wanted to get more familiarity with Adobe's Creative Suite so I'm going to give it try on this project.   On a whim, I went to Barnes and Noble to see if there were any books out for CS4 yet and to my surprise, there was already a copy of Adobe InDesign for Dummies on the shelf.  (Pretty fast, since CS4 started shipping last week.)  I checked the copyright page and it's copyrighted 2009!   Is that legal???

In Wyoming

We've been in Wyoming for a couple days now and everything is going well.  We're staying at a friend's hay ranch and we've taken a trip up to Silver Gate, Montana and spent some time in Yellowstone and had a quick trip to Grand Teton National Park. The wildlife viewing has been excellent and the aspens are beautiful.  Our Internet here is spotty but I hope to have some photos  shortly.