Well, once again we have been very remiss in our blogging duties. Things have been a bit crazy around here recently! We’ll try to get back on track and get you up to date will all of the happenings asap!

Meantime, here’s to a bright and exciting new year!

I am surprised at how many people still don’t know this one. For some reason, Apple doesn’t share this as a regularly recommended maintenance process.

If ANYTHING is acting up on your mac, there are two things to do immediately that almost always resolve the issue.

1.) Reset the P-RAM
You say “What?!” I know…. but it is quite simple. Reboot your computer (or shut down and start it up again). Immediately on the reboot or start-up press AND hold the following four keys simultaneously: Command Option P R
Continue to hold the keys until you hear the Apple “bong” three times and then you can release them. I could explain what this does.. but why? It would really serve no purpose. Let’s just call it cleaning out the cobwebs.

2.) Repair Disk Permissions
Go to your hard drive and click on: Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
In the left hand window click once on your hard drive and then in middle / bottom of the window, click on “Repair Permissions”. This can take some time – maybe 10 mins…

That’s it, you should see better performance and elimination of “glitches” .
I do this a couple times a month and it keeps my systems running smoothly.

This month we are featured in an article in the November 2008 issue of PDN (Photo District News). If you get this magazine the article is called “Stock in the Company” and is located on Page 59. If you subscribe online, you can just go to pdnonline.com and type “stock in the company” in the search box and it will bring up the article.

In short it discusses the trend of corporations shooting their own “in house” image library. This is something we have been doing for clients for years and more recently have been marketing as “Corporate Image Libraries™“.

Check it out. If you don’t have a subscription but still want to check out the article, click here.

Billboards that we did a photo shoot for a few months back are popping up all over town. They are for the new VW Routan. They are directed at the Latino market and we have seen them throughout Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside counties. Here is one of them:

Here is a second billboard for the Routan that we shot a few months back. Keep an eye out for them, but drive safely!

Well it has happened again. Getty Images (a stock photography agency) has swallowed up another competitor. A while back Jupiter Images merged with Workbook Stock. And today it was announced that Getty has purchased Jupiter for $96 million. I have been with Masterfile for about 9 years. I think they are the only significant “non-corporate” player still in the game. Corbis is probably still considered #2 behind Getty.

I have also been with Jupiter for about 2 or 3 years. But now I guess I am with Getty….
It will be interesting to see how this affects the stock photography market, which has certainly been suffering as of late. I must admit I have not been fond of Getty’s practices in the past. They have been decidedly not photographer friendly!
But earlier this year Getty was acquired by Hellman & Friedman – a private equity firm, so who knows, maybe their attitude towards those who actually create the work that keeps them alive might be a bit kinder than in the past.

But a colleague of mine mentioned that she had heard commission splits might get changed to a 70/30 (guess who gets the 30!) so things might get even uglier.

At any rate, I am just hoping that the advertising industry overall has learned it’s lessons and gotten over the fad and will come back to commissioning original work like they should!

I was silly enough to think that the pixel wars were winding down and would soon come to an end. It’s crazy! We currently have the highest MP cameras available in each respective format. But Hasselblad has recently announced both a 50 MP and 60 MP product both due out next year. They have also subsequently scrapped their trade-up program because, “they say” they are reducing price point on everything to a level that makes the trade-up program unnecessary. And just two weeks ago, Canon announced their 5D Mark II with 21 MP at $2500!!

I am not sure if the price drop is a good or bad thing, but we all knew it would come eventually. But I am really still surprised at the increasing megapixels. So many clients don’t even know what to do with that many megapixels!

And whatever money we save as a result of lower camera prices will be completely offset by the added expense of storage required for all of these huge files!

I am a huge gadget / tech freak and always love getting the latest greatest thing, but I must say that part of me longs for the days when you would buy a really good camera and it would last you a career!

Two months later and I just realized that we had not shared ANY of the imagery we did for UnitedHealthcare this summer. One my favorite shots is the one below. This is an image built from four separate shots:

1. The Hillside
2. The Shrubs
3. The Signage
4. The Sky

We got up in a helicopter on a very hazy morning, (the schedule did not permit us to wait for a gorgeous day) and shot a series of hillside shots. I had passed this spot many time in my life and always wanted to use it for some kind of shot. This image finally gave me the chance. We scouted the hillside about a week earlier from the air to make sure it would work. Of course the day we scouted was much nicer than the day we actually shot. You might ask why we didn’t just use the scout shots, well there were several reasons. We were scouting from a fixed wing aircraft, not a helicopter and we also were not using a gyroscope on the scout which helps to steady the camera. The helicopter gave us much more flexibility in moving around the hills and in getting different angles. We were also able to get in much closer for some, and having the door on the helicopter open made it much easier to shoot.

The shrubs were also from this series of shots and made a nice addition to the bare hillside.

The following week we were in studio for the majority of the shots (we had done exclusively location work the first week). On one of those days we shot the signage. The signage was a scale model we had built and stood about 18″ tall and stretched about 8′-9′ wide.

Once we were done with all of the main shooting, we moved into the post-production phase and this was one of the first shots we started on, although it was probably one of the last ones we finished. It was during this stage that we added the nice sky and built the shadows and composited it all together.

I am hoping to get more of these kinds of projects, I love shooting from the air and it is great fun to pull an image together out of many elements….and have it work!

Last year I did a post on Staying Inspired, in which I shared a photo I had taken of my favorite instructor during my time at Art Center, Archie Ferrante or more accurately;Arcangelo Dante Ferrante. I took the photo about 10 years after graduating from Art Center during a class I was taking to re-inspire myself.

Yesterday a colleague who is on the Photo Department Faculty at the Academy of Art in San Francisco contacted me and indicated they were naming the Digital Lab up there after Archie. Very Cool!! I was very honored though when he requested my photo of Archie, to be used for the plaque.

Archie is an amazing photographer and an even more amazing human being. He is warm, intelligent, loving, talented, full of life, and hilarious! He is always the first person I think of, when thinking of my time at Art Center.

Archie is no longer at Art Center, he left there some years back after not being treated so well by the powers that be at the time. But karma being what it is, those who treated him poorly have all been unceremoniously booted out! Yea!

I am so happy that Archie is getting this small token of appreciation for who and what he is. This marvelous man has touched many lives, brightened many days, and has brought craft and integrity to our profession.

Thank You Archie! We Love You! ……………Okaaayyyy Liiiiiights!!!!!

I am really not one to enter competitions. But this year I have been prompted by friends and colleagues to do so. Today a colleague of mine e-mailed me to congratulate me on being acknowledged by the IPA’s. This was news to me! So I went over to check things out and it appears that we got Honorable Mention for both the “Cowboy Chow Time” Shot in the Self Promotion category and the same for the series of “Cowboy Portraits” in the Portrait category! Kinda cool! – Thanks to everyone who pitched in on these shots to make them what they are!

This is a video on Creativity given by Sir Ken Robinson at the 2006 TED Conference that a friend shared with me. It is humorous and totally worth watching!

We recently came upon a great digital location kit. These days we have been shooting a lot close to home and have not been traveling like we used to. So even most of our location shooting around here has been such that we have been able to provide the client with a nice big screen to look at and haven’t had to worry too much about being lean and mean. But should we ever have the need I think we will seriously look into this shooting kit.

It is a self contained setup by a company called Tidy Pixels that holds your laptop, backup drive and enough battery power to go all day. It also has a Wacom Tablet which has really become our preferred way to work, as well as an effective light shade. It all is enclosed in a Pelican case and to us seems like the perfect solution for someone who is always on the move and does not require a big workstation on location.

You can get a lot more details and check out photos at their web site.

Yesterday we upgraded the software we use for our blogging and consequently had to revamp the design to make it all work. So we hope you enjoy the cleaner look and better functionality. We think it is easier to read and an overall better layout (while not being dramatically different). Enjoy your weekend and we’ll be back on Monday!

We just recently finished a LONG two day shoot for Volkswagen, for their new minivan the Routan.

We were doing the follow up web and billboard campaign for a commercial they were filming here in California. Focused on the Hispanic market, the job came out of an agency in Miami. We shot two 14 hours days on a Saturday and Sunday and did somewhere in the neighborhood of 125 shots in studio.

We were using the same family that was cast for the commercial, so they were already used to their roles and wardrobe, which allowed us to be a lot more productive. Some of the shots were of the family members demonstrating some of the features of the car. And the majority of shots were done against white (VW’s “look”).

Family shots are going to be used in conjunction with car “beauty” shots for outdoor billboards which are already showing up around town, and the individual shots are already being used for the animated web site here. In addition to the family we also where shooting the “family dog” as well as a frog that has a prominent role in the commercial. We have a few selects on our web site.

I have to say there is something very enjoyable about shooting people on a pure and simple white background. The client seemed pleased with the results so we hope to see them again!

Okay I leave you with one of the frog photos….

We have really fallen off the blogging band-wagon recently. A lot has been going on here and we have been remiss in sharing.
We will do our best to get back on track and will start the process tomorrow!

As we wrap up the UnitedHealthcare Project this week, we are heading right back into another for Volkswagen. I was hoping to start posting some of the imagery from UHC, maybe some before and after images of the retouching, but alas it will have to wait another week until we are past this next project.
Sorry that posts have been so few and far in-between, but we are hoping to get back on track soon!

Meantime you can check out a few of the UHC images at the main web site by going to www.hursey.com > Portfolios > Recent > #’s 8-16…. or clicking here.

So in addition to the new Tripod Head that we purchased we also picked up a new Tripod. Our trusty Gitzo that we have had since 1988 has served us well an frankly is still a perfectly good tripod (eBay – here it comes) but it was time to upgrade, for one main reason. Our old tripod is a tank. As in “Very Sturdy”, but it weighs as much as one as well. And frankly we carry around so much gear that any way we can lighten the load we are going to take advantage of! So when we picked up the new Tripod Head we also got a Gitzo GT3540XLS which is code for a Carbon Fiber Tripod. It is a bit longer than our old one but a bit smaller in circumference. But the biggest difference is weight! The new tripod is SO MUCH LIGHTER! It also has new locking mechanisms on the legs which makes it easier to extend the legs. And last but not least it extends much higher then the old one.

So it’s 2+ weeks later and we are finished with shooting our project for UnitedHealthcare. The shoot went well and now we embark on a few weeks of compositing and digital fine tuning. We’ll share images with you as we go!

We are heading into yet another two week shoot for UnitedHealthcare. This particular project is going to entail a bit more post-production retouching and compositing than we usually do. So although we’ll only be shooting for two weeks, we’ll really be busy for more like a month with all of the post-production work.

We’ll share some of the new imagery as soon as we have it!

We have added a new section to our online portfolio at hursey.com.
Check out “Recent” to see new projects and the latest imagery.

Well we haven’t posted in quite some time! Apologies. We have be in the midst of what seems to be a never ending cycle of upgrading and system maintenance. The list is long, but a brief version is a new shooting computer, a new printer, new internal hard drives for our retouching station, a new external disk array for the shooting computer and a new disk array for our image library. I really hope we can take a break from the upgrades for a little while. We should be able to as what we have now across the board seems to be the latest and greatest technology. So.. until the next “new thing” comes out, I think we might focus on taking some photographs.

And last but not least….

Hope this case study has been helpful!

Been out of town for two weeks so now just finishing up on this case study..
Here is the second to last image…

Here is The last of the cowboy portraits….

Well, slowly but surely we are getting these images up. We are a bit crazy this week with some shoots, and developing new portfolios, blah, blah, blah… at any rate… here is another portrait. Three more shots to go an we can finally wrap this one up!

Here is the second portrait from the shoot. These guys were all great and really got into the spirit of the characters!

Over the next few days, we’ll share the finals of the portraits from our case study shoot. We are getting the images back from our retoucher and can finally post the finished product!

Here is the first portrait

In revamping the web site we have also added some new “media” including recent interviews and Podcasts. Check out the Media Section to access them and remember to scroll down.

The Suzuki Association of the Americas did a short 10 minute interview with me about the “creative process” to use as a teaching aide for their music instructors. It revolves around the body of work I shot for the Pasadena Conservatory of Music.

You can check out the QuickTime Movie here.

If you have been following recent posts about the “Case Study” then you have certainly seen us mention doing post production work on the project. Quite often we do a lot in house. But when we get too busy or have something on the more complex side we have our favorite retoucher that we send stuff to. Lisa Carney. We have been working with Lisa for close to 15 years. We are nothing if not loyal! But besides that, she is great at what she does and willing to share her talents with others through seminars and workshops.

You have seen Lisa’s work in our portfolios and previous posts. If you are an avid follower of this blog then you have also seen where Lisa lives and works in this post.

At any rate, she has done all the work on the “Case Study” images and we shared the final group shot with you yesterday. The portraits are yet to come…

Check out her site both for retouching work and for workshops (online ones!!!!!)