Well, I got a bit of interesting news today.  I’ve been invited to join Photographik, a web directory of the world’s “elite” photographers.

I’ve often been a critic of photographic associations.  On more than one occasion, I’ve made fun of articles that say “make sure your photographer is a member of a professional association”.  Why?  I’m a member of PPA, all that proves is that I give them $350 a year and I’m not a total dirtbag.

Photographik is different.  You actually have to be invited based on a review of your portfolio.  And apparently they really care, because they’ve been around for years and yet don’t have a ton of photographers listed.  For the Jacksonville area, Photographik only has three photographers, whereas TheKnot.com has 60.

I was really skeptical about their “elite” claim, I figured they really would just take anyone claiming to be a photographer (like TheKnot.com).  But then I looked at the websites of a lot of the listed photographers and, quite frankly, they’re intimidating.  These guys (and gals) are good.

So I’m a little stunned to be in the club.

I visit a lot of wedding photography forums.  They can be a good source of ideas and just plain entertainment.

Recently, however, there was a thread on one forum asking for pet peeves, things that brides/relatives/guests do that drive wedding photographers crazy.  Some were quite funny and some were very familiar.

What bothered me, though, was the number of comments that were hostile, bitter, petty, and downright angry.  There were more than a few that made me think “you’re in the wrong business”.

Weddings are happy times.  I love shooting a wedding, to me it’s a lot of fun and I always leave the reception humming, dancing, and pleased.  Albeit very tired.

I thought I had been in some windy sessions before. But Gayle and Gabe’s engagement session takes the prize. The wind had to have been 40 mph or more, I’ve never seen the surf so wild.

Those of you who’ve been around our church for a while will remember Taylor. Well, after all these years, Taylor and Josh are going to be married this December! Here’s one of my favorite shots from their engagement session the other day at Epping Forest Yacht Club.

I got this beautiful shot of Jennifer at her wedding a few weeks ago.

I just upgraded the memory in my Mac Pro tower again. I’m still tickled pink at how simple it is compared to a typical PC.

The process got me to thinking about all the memory upgrades I’ve done over the last 30 years (I got my first computer and my first camera the same year). The first was a system that was never meant for consumer upgrades, so I had to disassemble the case and break various factory seals to reach the memory, the total process took about two hours. As I recall, the 32K upgrade was $300. That’s right, 32 K (kilobytes). If you don’t know/remember, 1 K is 1/1024 of a megabyte, which is 1/1024 of a gigabyte. So that’s a cost of almost $10 million per gigabyte.

Then there was my first IBM PC clone from Northgate Systems in 1990. On that system, each bit of each byte was on a separate chip, so for each meg there were 9 chips (8 data + parity). So my 4 megabyte upgrade consisted of 36 individual chips costing $950, which works out to a mere $250,000 per gig.

A few years later, I came home to find my mom in a panic. I told here I was expecting a package to be delivered to her house (had to be signed for) that had cost me $1,200. She was upset because the package only weighed a few ounces, how could it be worth that much? I don’t think she ever understood what I was buying, but I was quite pleased with my new memory SIMMs, 32 Megs at the bargain basement price of $38,400 per gig.

With the massive files generated by our new D3 cameras, I found myself once again lusting after more RAM. A pair of two-gigabyte 800MHz error-correcting memory modules was a grand total of $99. As I’ve noted before, upgrading the memory in my Mac is trivially easy.

So, that’s quite a journey. $10,000,000/gig and two hours work down to $25/gig and less than a minute.

Samantha & I typically shoot 2-3000 images during a wedding.  One of the most difficult parts is downloading all those shots from the memory cards and sorting/categorizing them.  For one thing, it’s terribly tedious.  But, also, I get distracted by nice shots that I want to stop and look at further.

And then there are shots like this one, from the first dance, that just jump off the screen.  I love this shot …

I love my Mac. It’s a wonderful computer that works superbly. Day after day, month after month, none of the foolishness and bizarre breakages that were a constant part of using Windows.

I love my MacBook. All the wonderfulness of the Mac in a slim, lightweight package.

I love my iPhone. I’m still figuring it out, but so far it’s a hoot.

Apple seems to have it goin’ on in so many areas. So how come they can’t build a web browser that’s anywhere near as good as Firefox?

I’ve spent several days trying to love the new Safari 4. Especially since Safari is the only browser available on the iPhone and MobileMe will automatically sync the bookmarks. But, as with the previous three versions of Safari, I find myself saying “Firefox does this better”. Firefox is faster and the URL searching is vastly superior (start typing and FF will suggest URLs with that text anywhere in the URL or it’s description, Safari only matches if the URL starts with that text). I ran across several sites where the site didn’t render correctly.

But the real kicker was the password system. I literally have 852 different passwords saved in FF and Safari gives me no way to import them.  This strikes me as tremendously stupid when you’re trying to convince me to switch browsers.

Thankfully, I found a solution.  I’ve been using Foxmarks for a long time, which is a browser plugin that synchronizes bookmarks and passwords in Firefox on multiple computers.  I use it to make sure my bookmarks are all the same on my Mac Pro, my Macbook, and the Windows computer I use on my treadmill.  Well, well, it just so happens that Foxmarks has released plugins for Internet Explorer and Safari!  So, now I just keep using Firefox, Foxmarks keeps Safari’s bookmarks in sync with Firefox, and MobileMe keeps my iPhone in sync with Safari.

Apple, take note:  People are not going to switch unless a) you give them features that are far better and b) you make the transition very nearly painless.  With Safari 4, you’ve failed miserably on both counts.

We’re shooting an outdoor wedding next weekend and there’s a chance of rain.  But there’s just no way I’m running around looking like this guy …

My Apple-fication is complete.  Last year, after attending an seminar where a photographer was making lightning-fast adjustments on a MacBook, I started looking into Apple systems.  A few weeks later, I bought a Mac Pro desktop.  I was so incredibly pleased with the Mac that the next month I ditched my Dell laptop and replaced it with a MacBook.  The next month, we stopped using DVD and CD players in Children’s Church and I started using an iPod to run everything.

So, today, the last piece is in place.  I got myself a nice new iPhone.  This thing is just so cool!  Like all Apple products, there’s just such a nifty, sensible way that things work.  I’ve only scratched the surface of what I can do, but so far having all my stuff synchronize and work together is terrific.