Good news! We’ve put our order in for satellite internet service at our mountain Colorado home. No more dial up! I’m not sure yet when they’ll come out to install, but I’m hoping to have high speed internet service running in the next few days. When that happens, I’ll be back to posting articles and photos.

Can you imagine how it feels to a photographer to have to resize his pictures down to a tiny little thumbnail just to email them? How did we all survive before broadband? I mean seriously!

So, if you’ve been paying attention, I had wild and crazy dreams of taking my family and moving from sunny, warm, humid Texas to cold, snowy Colorado. After two long weeks of moving and getting settled in, things are finally calming down. Allow me to hit a few of the highlights from our move, in case you’re interested:

• Loading up the moving truck takes three days, not the one as expected.
• We get to Colorado, crash with my brother, and immediately all three of us get the flu. For bonus points, he has week old twin preemies at home. Not a good place for the flu to hang out. We leave and head to a hotel.
• We get up to our new home, a gorgeous log cabin in the foothills, and have to plow the road to get to the house. Upon arrival we scope out the road in my two wheel drive truck. I proceed to drive it into a ditch. I now know another use for that tractor other than plowing snow. Tire chains become a part of my daily life.
• My dogs get into a fight with each other from being couped up too much, roll down a steep ravine, and are hurt so badly they both have to be put down.

Whew, and that’s just the highlights! There were many other things that went wrong during this move. But now that things are calming down, I can honestly tell you that it’s all worth it. This place is absolutely amazing, and I love it more and more with each passing moment. As I type this I’m looking down on the frozen Cache La Poudre river from 28 acres of Rocky Mountain wilderness. There are bear, mountain lion, fox, and deer tracks everywhere in the snow out the front door. I would include a picture here, but for the moment I’m on dial up. Can you believe that even exists anymore? The only internet option here is satellite, and I’m looking into it.

The bottom line is that we’re here, things are calming down, and you’ll start seeing articles coming soon. I’ll pick back up with the Portrait Lighting For Beginners series too.

Cheers!

Allow me to share an experience I had from a recent portrait session. My wife and I shot a family in Austin back in early November. The little boy was 15 months old and walking just fine. Typically, when we photograph children that are older than newborns, we like to at least incorporate some outdoor settings into the shoot. Since we have a photojournalist style of photography, we decided to make the focal point of the session a playground where the family could play and we could capture the fun.

Let me start by saying that shooting people on swings is really difficult. Sure if they’re not moving then everything is great. But focusing on a target that is moving back to front is an acquired skill. Autofocus is out. Manual focus is the only way. I like to find a focus point, stand still, and wait for the person to swing through that depth-of-field and try to hit the shutter at precisely that moment. It works pretty well, but I still toss out about 30 percent of the shots because the focus is off. The wider the aperture, the harder this gets. Too bad I like wide apertures…

Then there was this shot. I don’t remember what I said, but it made all three bust out laughing. I’ve learned that to get that one great shot, sometimes you just have to go for it and the technical stuff be damned. There was no time to refocus; the moment would have passed. So I shut up and took the picture. The focus is off and the whole shot is soft.

When we were going through the shots from the session, we almost tossed this photo because of the focus. Instead, we recognized it as a capture of a family’s fun moment with a technical flaw. We decided to keep the photo and present it to the clients. Turns out they loved it. It ended up being one of the featured images in a custom designed 8×10 inch press printed book we made for them. Once they saw it, they ordered five copies as Christmas gifts. This made me especially happy I just took the picture.

So the moral of the story? You can pick apart your images from a technical standpoint all day long. You can put them on forums and let others shoot them down. But don’t forget to look beyond focus, white balance, and other details at what the photo really says. Sure, you should strive for technical perfection, but don’t let it hinder you. If I put this photo on a forum, it would probably be shredded as a horrible failure. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, because the clients loved it, and bought lots of them.

The post-processing on this image was done in Lightroom and Matt Kloskowski’s “Vintage New York” preset was applied to get the unique color scheme. You can get the preset over at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips.