After far too long, I finally replaced that little 10-stop ND filter that was stolen with the bulk of my PRO gear last year during the gallery showing. Should've replaced it much sooner, I forget so easily how much I love long exposures.
Ended up grabbing the Olympus branded grip/plate for the PEN-F as well. The tripod thread is in such an atrocious spot on that camera it never made sense to use it on a tripod. With the grip equipped with an arca-swiss rail, it goes great with my MeFoto Globetrotter (expected the combination to to look poorly weighted and generally off, but to my surprise the pair work well together).
A couple weeks back I ran into the nightmare scenario of a camera experiencing shutter death during a paid shoot. I was lucky, having gotten all the necessary images and the shutter crapping out on the very last shot. So, after a good 3 years in service, my E-M1 is dead, now but a decorative mantelpiece on my desk shelf. Made a good run well over 100K frames (a whopping 20K of which were apparently shot in the last 3 months alone, or so my backup drive tells me). I have a second E-M1 body in use as its current replacement, but this is the sort of event to push me more quickly than usual into the Mk. II variation of the same model. It's a justifiable upgrade regardless, 4 years is more than enough time to see real progress made in higher end camera models. The battery synergy being lost may be my only regret.
Still trying to figure out what to do with broader sharing of content these days. The catalog nesting on my phone of Snapseed edits is quite huge, but they typically don't see the light of day outside Twitter. Then again, I'm not necessarily sure it's something I care enough about barring those idle nights when I have nothing to do but think about these things. Been enjoying myself far too much lately with distractions such as billiards and, soon, biking. The Summer months bring a different flavor to one's sense of adventure and accomplishment. Definitely need to get that content off my phone, though... single point of failure and all.
Booking more shoots than usual this year outside my big contracts. Rather happy about that, independent clients are people who specifically choose me for my style of communication and (of course) work. Certainly affords me more freedom to produce a stronger product than the bounds of corporate style guides. Not that I don't appreciate the contract work, but it's nice to have the freedom to try new things (such as underexposing for the view out a window and blasting flash at full power to light the room - HDR the old fashioned way).
Generally clueless as to what I'm trying to accomplish these days, but enjoying the cadence of things right now (after a couple months of consistently low head spaces). I'd like to do more "candid" restaurant and brewery work, I think.
It's been neat running series of little photo projects to produce new ads. The caveat is the material isn't necessarily strong on its own what with attention paid to necessary copy space for text - Very empty images, really. But, as I said, fun to work toward as an end product, and the photography is just one part of the whole. That may very well be the driver I need to keep motivated in general... the conjuring of contrived but finite end products. Beats trying to piece together random, disjointed work into anything closely resembling a solid body of work. That's probably something they teach art students in college, I skipped that step.
I really need to get back into the mountains soon.
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