New Safaris announced

I have posted my late January / February 2008 safaris online, and I fully expect to have yet another fantastic year of photographing the wildebeest calving season out on the Serengeti short grass plains. The most recent census of the wildebeest puts the population at around 3 million strong, and nearly 5,000 wildebeest are born each day during late January and February each year. The wildebeest like to give birth on the Serengeti short grass plains, as the grasses in the area are extremely rich with nutrients, which enable the wildebeest to enjoy healthy milk production for their young.

Come join me on either one of these exciting safaris, as I will be leading 2 safaris back-to-back. We will be visiting 2 locations in the Serengeti, along with the famed Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Manyara National Park and Tarangire National Park.

I will be away from email from January 22 until February 12, so if you would like to book on any of my safaris, you can contact Thomson Safaris directly to book on a trip. Their number is (800) 235-0289. If you are interested in any non-African photography workshops, please hold off on your emails until I return from Africa.

January 14 - January 25, 2008 Tanzania Photo Safari

January 24 - February 4, 2008 Tanzania Photo Safari

Spot open for Galapagos trip

I have had one cancellation on my upcoming Galapagos trip. If you are interested in grabbing the last spot, please contact me before the trip fills back up again. The person must be a male with sharing accommodations.

Namibia Portfolio [update]

Since I announced my Namibia portfolio last month, I have had wonderful success in finding these collections photos new homes. If you are interested in having your own, please note that I will be on safari for 3 weeks. I am fulfilling current requests for the next few days, and will have some time to print a few more before I depart.

More info on my Namibia Portfolio.

Darkroom Magazine

Darkroom Magazine has just been announced by The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), and it targeted to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users as a how-to resource.

From their web site:

"Darkroom" is written for professional photographers who want to get the most out of Adobe's groundbreaking Photoshop Lightroom workflow application, and published 8 times a year by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). Each issue features in-depth tutorial articles, innovative digital photography techniques, and timesaving shortcuts written by the creative experts behind Photoshop User and Layers magazines.

"When you look at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, you're looking at the future of the pro photographer's workflow, and a year or so from now if you're not using Lightroom, you're going to be left behind," said Scott Kelby, editor and publisher of Darkroom, NAPP president and the #1 top selling computer book author worldwide. "The integration between Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS2/CS3 creates the seamless, consistent, and efficient workflow that today's professionals need, and we launched Darkroom magazine to help these pros make the most of using these two amazing tools together."

Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibit, Houston

The Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year roaming exhibit is coming to Houston, and will be on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science from January 19 until May 6, 2007. More information on this exhibit can be found here. I am planning on heading over there at some point with another local photographer, Lazslo Perlaky, who also has an image in this year's exhibit.

My 2007 Resolutions

I have a long list of items that I either need to get done or desire to get done. Some are professional growing opportunities in my safari business, some are opportunities for me to grow in my creative photography, and others are just plain silly goals. So here are some of my 2007 resolutions, better thought of as goals.

At the top of my list is the management of my stock library. I have roughly 30,000 photographs taken in Africa, and they need to be organized, tagged, rated and edited. I suspect the tagging will be the most difficult part, as each and every image will need to have some fields attributed. Country, location and species are essential for each image. Once all of my images are tagged, I will go through and rate the images from 1 star to 5 stars, and then I will spend some time editing the raw images. The edits will range from simple exposure/white balance/contrast edits to more complex masking techniques in Photoshop. This will take a ton of time. I am thinking of only spending a few minutes per image if it has 5 stars, and much less if 4 stars or less. Keep in mind that I can have a range of 10 images that all have 5 stars, and they might be in a series, which means I can make nearly the same changes to all 10 images with the click of a button.

The purpose of organizing my images is primarily for easy retrieval by me or my stock buyers. I am now a member of Photoshelter.com, and will be uploading a massive amount of images to their servers in the coming months. My image archive will be available 24/7 for anybody who wishes to license an image of mine, and will be able to download a full resolution file quickly and easily. Photoshelter will also enable my print sales, and I will do the printing/signing/shipping from my studio. They do allow me to outsource the printing of my images, but I am never comfortable with anybody printing my images, as I need to be able to inspect each and every print that has my name on it.

Another goal for 2007 is much less cerebral. I have been working on a black and white look to my African safari images, and I need to get it to a point where I am happy with it. I am 80% there, but I just need some more time on it. I cannot wait for this to be completed.

I would also like to visit more locations in Africa in 2007, but this might not happen. My safari schedule is very full for 2007, as I am leading 5 safaris already. I might spend some time wandering around Tanzania for a week, photographing everyday life in rural communities.

What are *your* 2007 resolutions?

My digital filing system

I often get questions related to how I store my digital images on my hard drive, and why I do it the way that I do it. Keep in mind that this is my system, and not necessarily something that will work for other people. In the absensce of database driven applications such as Aperture or Lightroom, using a physical file structure has been a necessity for me.

First off, my folder structure:

_Photos\year\yymmdd 'job'\filename.xxx

All of my digital photos are stored underneath a folder called '_Photos'. I put an underline before the word Photos because it will sort to the top if there are other folders near it. After that I have all of my photos separated into different folders by year (4 digits, such as 2004, 2005 or 2006). Then I have a folder for each day or each job in a given day (if I happen to have more than 1 job or separate shoot in that day, they will be separated). For example: '06.22.02 Serengeti'. If this folder somehow gets separated from my '2006' folder, I know where it should go. I guess I could put in MMDDYY format, but this is how I started off organizing my images way back in 1999 with my first digital camera.

Then my file naming logic:

yymmdd_hhmmss_job_imagenumber.xxx

So, the year at the front of the filename, then the hours, minutes and seconds, then the job name, and then a 3-digit image number for that day, starting with 001. Why do I put the hours, minutes and seconds into the file? Simple. I often shoot with more than 1 camera, and this allows me to have all of my images in chronological order, even if I am sorting by filename in either OSX or Windows XP.I do have separate folders called 'Portfolio - Africa' and 'Portfolio - Africa Misc' that I place all of my converted raw files into. These are mostly layered Photoshop files in 16 bit, converted by whatever raw conversion application I was using at the time. This approach is going away, as I adopt a more database-driven approach, where it is not necessary to always export an image to be worked on in Photoshop.Well, there you have it. A simple, well defined structure on my hard drive for all of my images.

"Which Way?", Cape of Good Hope, Africa, April 2006
Canon EOS 5D + 24-105mm f/4 L IS

Namibia Portfolio

I am offering a portfolio of my 25 most popular images from Namibia, Africa. These photographs were all taken on a recent safari this past April. This portfolio has been in the works for a few months now, and just in time for the holidays.

The images selected are from four different locations in Namibia: Kolmanskop ghost town, the Namib Rand Reserve, the red dunes of Sosussvlei, and Serra Cafema along the Angola border. All twenty five of these images are printed on 11x17" Moab Entrada Bright White 190gsm paper with Epson Ultrachrome inks on my Epson Pro 4000 printer. Each image is signed underneath the image area on the lower righthand side. The printed photographs are presented in Moab Economy Folio portfolios to make the final price attractive.

The price of my Nambia portfolio is $495 for all 25 images at once. My last portfolio, 'Africa', was three times as expensive as this Namibia portfolio, which makes this a much better value. On a cost per print basis, each print is only $20.

Here is a link to the entire portfolio of Namibia photographs.

To order your portfolio, please send me an email. Each portfolio is printed and assembled on an as-needed basis. This portfolio will make a perfect Christmas gift for you or somebody you love that enjoys fine art landscape photography. If you order by December 15, you will have the portfolio by Christmas day. International shipping might affect this, however.