Just Jacque

I finished my careful review of the catalog and sent off my list of corrections on Monday. It was a relatively short list, which is pretty impressive given the size of the book and sheer number of people touching it along the way. Most of the corrections were super nitpicky –  extra space here, missing comma there, a couple of awkward or unclear sentences, that sort of thing. You will be happy to know I purged one instance of the word scrumptious, which frankly should not appear in print anywhere. Honestly, it should be banned entirely, but my powers are limited.

One of the twenty proofreaders found an issue with a photo, but it had nothing to do with the photo itself. It was of a loaned item and it showed some damage that had been done to the item while on exhibit. Oops. The damage was very minor and will be repaired before the piece is returned to the lender, but obviously it’s not something you want showing up in a book. So we made a quick swap and replaced it with another photo. No one else found any issues with any of the photos. Except for me.

I found eight photos with bits of fishing line visible in them. Most of the stringed instruments had to be supported with fishing line when I photographed them in the upright position. In the early rounds of processing, I removed the line in Photoshop. But it’s a tedious process and as time went on, I left it up to the people doing the book layout. They were obviously much more skilled in Photoshop and could remove elaborate props like sandbags and stands. So the fishing line should be a breeze. Turns out there were quite a few photos where they removed the line from the gray backdrop but not across the body of the instrument. Well, shit, that’s the easy part.

The remnants of line weren’t visible in the PDF versions of the book, because of the low resolution. However, they were clearly visible in the original jpegs. So it annoys me that they were “missed.” I suspect the person doing the work didn’t think they would show up in the final images. And no, I don’t have super power vision – other people could see the line, they just assumed it was part of the instrument. So all of those images need to be tweaked, but fortunately that’s not a huge effort. We have a final review on Friday to go through the credits. I think I can see the finish line now.

I was back at the MIM yesterday photographing the Brazil event. I didn’t specifically go to photograph the event, the real reason I went was to take a cover photo for the new Circle of Friends brochure. Circle of Friends is MIM’s “membership” program. The Development (aka fundraising) team went through hundreds of existing photos in putting together the new brochure and wasn’t happy with any of them on the cover. They want an image that illustrates the excitement of visiting the MIM. What does that look like? They didn’t know, they just knew what they didn’t want, which was every photo they already had. So, your basic disaster in the making.

If I was getting paid as a photographer, I wouldn’t touch an assignment like this with a ten foot pole. There is nothing worse than a client who knows what they don’t want but can’t articulate what they do want. (Well, maybe there are a few worse clients – check out clientsfromhell.net for some horrifying and hilarious real-life examples) But the beauty of being a volunteer is that you can give it a whirl and if they’re not happy with the results, they still have to appreciate you for trying.

Since they had no idea what they wanted, I suggested that the Brazil event might make for some colorful and more interactive photo ops. Photographs of people walking through the galleries with their headsets on, viewing exhibits, wasn’t getting the idea of excitement across. They already had tons of great Experience Gallery images as well. So I thought if we could line up a few team members and their families to participate in some of the event activities, I might get lucky and stumble upon the magic photo.

Did I succeed? Who knows? I uploaded 50 candidates last night and sent off an email this morning. Hopefully I’ll hear tomorrow if I was successful. If not, I still took some good photos of the event that will likely be used on the Facebook page and maybe some future publication. That’s never a bad thing. More importantly, I needed to stop at the MIM anyway to pick up my proof copy of the BOOK. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was spiral bound and actually looks like a real book. I started proof-reading it last night and actually got a little emotional. But don’t tell anyone. I don’t want to lose my tough girl image.

Okay, yesterday’s macro flower photos were pretty conventional. Boring, even. Today’s subject matter is butterflies, so I’m not really amping up the excitement factor. Sometimes I just photograph pretty things in a straightforward manner. I can be a girl on occasion.

The Desert Botanical Garden has a butterfly exhibit every spring. Even though the butterflies are contained in a relatively small tent, it’s still hard to get close enough for a good photo. I was using my 100mm macro on my 7D, so it was a 160mm equivalent. I had to be right on top of the poor butterflies and try not to elbow small children while I was shooting. Supposedly there were over a dozen different kinds of butterflies in the tent, but I only saw four. This was the most impressive.

It’s always a crap shoot when you’re doing a lot of macro work outside without a tripod. Lots of photos will look great on the tiny LCD screen but when you get them back home and start looking at them on a computer monitor – NOTHING IS IN FOCUS. I thought I was getting a lot of good images, but was incredibly underwhelmed when I started processing them. There was a reasonable amount of decent photos, but no real standouts. So you’re stuck with sloppy seconds for a few days, because that’s all I’ve got.

This is one of a handful of photos where the butterfly was in focus and sitting on a nice flower. I did clip the wing a little, but I think that makes for a tighter composition. So there.

Finally, I was lucky enough to get one photo from underneath, so the sun is shining through the wings. This guy looks a little tattered but he’s still a beauty.

We went to the Desert Botanical Garden last Wednesday. Actually we went on Tuesday and Wednesday, but unfortunately admission is free on Tuesday afternoons. Right after the sign announcing the free admission was a sign announcing that the parking lot was full. Apparently there are a lot of cheap people in Phoenix. Can’t say I blame them, since admission is $18. Makes the MIM seem like a steal at $15. As soon as we got past the line of cars waiting (!) for parking spots, we made a quick exit.

We arrived considerably earlier the next day and had no issues with parking. However, it was still pretty crowded for the middle of the week and the line to buy tickets was ridiculous. We didn’t have to pay for admission because they have a reciprocal admission policy with the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. My mom is a longtime member and kindly puts my name on her admission card.

We’ve never been to the Botanical Garden during the spring wildflower season before. The flowers were wonderful but I was dismayed to see nearly everything was covered with black netting. Apparently there are some voracious quail in the neighborhood and the flowers get decimated if they’re not protected. Being a gardener, I sympathize. Being a photographer, I was disappointed by how much it limited photo opportunities. But I persevered.

 

The hibiscus is blooming and this beauty is right outside of our patio gate.

Of course I had to experiment with converting it to black and white.

Then I decided to get really funky and push the flower to black.

I think this time I’m going to take the conventional choice and go with the color version as my favorite. But it was fun getting a little freaky.

I received a PDF of the “final” version of the MIM catalog a few days ago. The proof copies are being printed and should be ready by tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile, I have completed my painstaking documentation of all the “not mine” photos for the credits section of the book. Of course I had to count them. So if my math skills aren’t completely rusted over yet, here are the statistics:

• Total number of photos in the book (includes duplicates) – 413
• Total number of photos taken by yours truly – 352
• Total percentage of photos taken by yours truly – 85.2%

Let me just bask in those numbers for a minute. Aaah…nice. It’s an even higher percentage if you just look at the Gallery chapters, which are heavy on studio photography. Within those chapters, my photos account for 311 of 329, or just under 95%.

I was pretty adamant about doing all of the studio work – photographing 168 of the 172 instruments featured. The only exceptions were items that were extremely fragile (bird music box, African goblet drum), too heavy to move (Parlour Organ) or where the lender wouldn’t allow it (Eric Clapton’s Brownie guitar). In those four instances, existing photos were used. In case you’re curious, there are a total of 194 instruments featured, the additional 18 were photographed on exhibit either because they were too large and heavy to be removed or because the terms of the loan did not permit removal for photography. Numbers making my head hurt now.

Of course I photographed more instruments than what you’ll see published in the book – nearly 50 additional items were photographed. Part of the reason I had to go through and count everything was pure curiosity. My gut told me that 80-90% of the photos were mine, but I really wanted to know the exact number. Call it vanity. The other reason was I needed to feel that I earned this notation – which appears on the page with the publication information:

Edited by Karen Werner
Photographed by Jacqueline Byers
Designed by P.S. Studios, Inc.

I’m still a little stunned.

It’s a banner day when one relatively short outing gives me enough material to span four blog posts. Of course I did stretch it a bit with the poppies. After leaving Globe we made one more side trip to look for wildflowers. Not only was it a total bust, the road was awful. We actually reached the end of it, based on our GPS, and got on something like an oversized trail. Passed a few cattle along the way as well. The sun was starting to get a little low and it’s not really a great idea to go (near) off-roading in the dark. So we decided to bail and head back home. But not before taking a few photos of the landscape.

This one was so desaturated to begin with that it only made sense as a black and white. I also took a few random shots from the car as we were driving home. Most of them were horrible, as you would expect of photos taken at dusk from the window of a moving vehicle. But one sort of worked.

I think this is one of those images you either love or hate. It looks it could have been taken with a crappy camera forty years ago. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

After we left the somewhat lovely field of poppies, we wandered into the town of Globe to find some food. By then it was around 3:00 and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Okay, breakfast was around 10:30, so we weren’t exactly in danger of starving. Which was a good thing, because apparently you can’t get food in the town of Globe between 2:30 and 5:00. The population of Globe is around 7500, which by Arizona standards is a pretty decent size. No exaggeration there, outside of the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas there aren’t that many cities with more than 25,000 people.

The first two places we found served breakfast and lunch and both closed at 2:30. The third place was a bar. Now, it wasn’t exactly an extensive search of the town but when you’re hungry you don’t want to waste an hour looking for a restaurant. The bar served food, get this, starting at 5:00. We found this out after ordering beers. The bartender kindly offered to make us something, as long as it could be cooked in the deep fryer. Which was about half the menu anyway. So our lunch ended up being a large basket of fries. And beer, because beer is food.

While we were wandering around in our futile quest for something resembling real food, I took a few photos. It was a pretty typical small town, with a few old and kind of interesting buildings and many closed storefronts. But the really cool part was all of the flowering trees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once again, these seemed to work better in black and white. Of course the flowers were white to begin with, so I guess that’s not too surprising. Aaah, spring.

You did want to see more poppy photos, right?

That reminds me, I need to upload more stuff to my SmugMug photo albums. It’s such a pain in the butt to do here because our upload speeds are so throttled by DSL. A fact I was painfully reminded of every time I needed to upload photos for the MIM catalog. (Still can’t believe it’s almost finished)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bored yet? I am. But then I get bored of my photos pretty fast. I think that’s enough poppies for this year. Hopefully we’ll get more rain next winter and we’ll pick a nice, warm sunny day when the flowers are all open. You wouldn’t guess it from these photos, but it was actually pretty chilly. I think the temperature in this area topped out in the low 50’s that day and it was very windy. Don’t let the apparent sunshine fool you. I was wearing a sweatshirt and kicking myself for not bringing a jacket. Another lesson for next year.

About two weeks ago we ventured out to find wildflowers in the foothills east of Phoenix. Results were mixed. Through the magic of the internet, we did locate an area on Peridot Mesa that was pretty thickly carpeted with flowers. California poppies to be precise. Unfortunately it had been cool the previous evening and cloudy in the morning, so most of the flowers were closed up. If they had all been open, it would have been spectacular. Even with the flowers closed it was still pretty nice.

Had to include the classic solitary saguaro. Just imagine how it would look with the flowers open.

The dirt road we took to get to this spot was on the San Carlos Indian Reservation, so we needed to purchase permits to enter the area legally. It’s $10 per person per day and the kid at the convenience store who sold them warned us that we had to carry them at all times. The creepy part is that you need to give them your driver’s license and they enter your name and address into a computer when you purchase one. Which makes me wonder if they are concerned about you using one for part of the day and then passing it on or, more likely, they want to have a way to track you down if you cause trouble.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem to prevent rampant littering. The amount of trash we found was appalling. I have a number of photos taken from the crest of a small hill that are completely ruined by rusted cans and broken bottles scattered among the flowers. It was depressing. A few vehicles passed us while we were on the road, but of course, no one ever stopped and asked us to show our permits. That only happens if you don’t buy one. Still, it seemed like a small price to pay for the privilege of trespassing. We marked the spot on our GPS for a return visit. Maybe next year we’ll have a little better luck with the weather. Unfortunately, I’m betting the trash will still be there.