Half-Year Anniversary

Apple Country Photography is celebrating its 6 month anniversary this week and I thought I'd take a moment to look back on what's been accomplished. I've been honored to shoot dozens and dozens of sports, events, and portraits for the local newspaper, sports, commissioned family and children's portraits, and private events. You can check out the photo galleries to see just a smattering of what I've done.

My move to digital this past winter was looked at by me with disdain and skepticism as I had strictly been a film photographer for work for over 10 years, honing my skills using classic 35mm and medium format cameras. The move was done purely out of necessity since I really couldn't shoot the kind of action photos I needed to without modern cameras. I was also completely at the mercy of my pro film labs for their "interpretation" of what the image should ultimately look like and limited by their scanning and processing skills. I can say now that I'm completely sold on digital. I've built a completely redundant digital system around Nikon's professional line of cameras and the fastest lenses I could lay my hands on that cover a focal length range from an ultra-wide 12mm to telephoto 340mm (a 300mm prime with 1.4 TC) and I've been putting this equipment to good use, shooting many thousands of images. I've also upgraded my computer hardware and software. I'm an all-Macintosh photographer, using the brand new Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook and iMac with regularly calibrated monitors for perfect color correction and a redundant backup system that consists of dual hard drives and burning to archival DVDs.

After a months long search and many trials, I settled on two custom pro labs that are giving me unparalleled print quality: Miller's Professional Imaging and Simply Canvas. The above shot at Honey-Pot Hill Orchards in Stow, MA is by no means my best image, but it was printed to a 20x24 canvas gallery wrap and looks fantastic. It's proudly hanging in the foyer of my home. I think they will sell themselves as the quality and the look is truly outstanding. Miller's does all my straight prints and press products. I've ordered color and true black and white prints from 4x6 to 20x24 and have had them dry mounted as well as experimented with various surface textures. I've also created several soft- and hard-cover press books. I'm confident that the product offerings I offer are of the utmost professional quality.

I've been a sporadic Photoshop user for almost 20 years. I remember going to a 1989 product rollout from Apple at a hotel in Boston of the Mac IIci which sold for roughly $9000 and had only a 25MHz processor and 4MB of RAM! It took many minutes to do the simplest of Photoshop actions on an image and the engineer was touting it as a major advance. I yawned. Times have changed. I had never really got my hands dirty with the software until a few years ago with Photoshop 5.5 and I simply used it to resize my digital snapshots for my family photo galleries. Over the past 6 months using my new hardware, I have developed a digital workflow that works for me and I am most happy with the image processing skills I have acquired. I'm currently using Photoshop and Bridge CS3 as well as Adobe Camera Raw 4.1 and am producing wonderful images. For high ISO noise reduction I'm using Noiseware 4 Professional and for upscaling my images to really large print sizes, Miller's does their own software interpolation up to 16x20 and I use Genuine Fractals 5 for larger prints.

I've been fortunate to have booked several sessions for this summer and I'm available to shoot many more! If you live in my neck of the woods, you'll most likely see me shooting at area events and will see my images in my online photo galleries. I'll be shooting professionally and for my own personal portfolio as we have several family trips planned during this summer school vacation. If I've shot images for you, then let me know what you think. I'm happy to hear from you and potential clients will get to see what you have to say. Hopefully what you say will be all good! I've had a blast during this first 6 months and look forward to many more to come.