I will shoot area athletes of all ages. For most sports, I will keep to my one to three athletes per event for best results. All images will be posted on a private website and will be available for ordering at my event prices. Check out the 2008 Services & Price List for more information.

As with all my other packages, I shoot with professional sports cameras and lenses and noise reduce all images using professional software. My images are printed on the finest papers and I offer other products (from bag tags to magazine covers to press books), giving you access to the finest line of sports products around. I promise you will not be disappointed and the memories will last a lifetime!

Why did I do this? Well the initial impetus was that I needed an online ordering site for large events (e.g., weddings and fundraisers) where many people would order and a paper ordering system would be too time intensive for me. After searching many different options, I settled on SmugMug's Pro account because they have, by far, the best client experience of anything else I reviewed. They also very recently upgraded their papers, so now they are using Kodak Supra Endura paper on their premium prints and I only offer premium prints. Now I can offer a fulfillment system whereby you can order prints with a credit card, you handle the crops, and they get printed and sent directly to you.

For my individual clients, the SmugMug gallery is just for viewing and you cannot order from it. You still use the paper order forms. Prints from my Stow Musings Galleries also have a manual paper ordering system since I don't get overwhelmed with requests. These images all get processed by Miller's.

In general, I think this will make a much better experience for my clients. I hope you like it. Let me know what you think! I have the Pro Account for one year, so I'll reevaluate the system next year before my account expires.

Technology-wise, my office/studio/gallery space is all set up. I've enhanced the online previewing capability for clients and this new system seems to be working out better.

Other technology news: yesterday Nikon announced they're finally going to compete with Canon and introduced the D3 (full-frame, FX) and D300 (DX) cameras and a bevy of lenses which will be available before Christmas. Right now I'm on the sidelines. The D300 is a big jump up for sports shooters. The things I care about that make it better than the D200: high ISO performance appears to be much better, 14-bit color depth, better autofocus, UDMA support, and a high resolution 3" LCD. The D3 is a bigger upgrade, but I'll probably wait a year or more for the expected "D3x" which will undoubtedly be a high pixel count full-frame on par with the newly announced 22MP Canon. Your images won't suffer as a result of my waiting. I can still produce stunning 20x30" prints for you with my current gear, processing workflow, and labs. Come to my studio and I will be happy to show you.

Now we're buying school supplies and getting ready for my sister's wedding. I'm still trying to decide whether I'm going to take my cameras. I'm afraid I'll drink too much and forget where I put them, so I'm leaning towards not taking them even though I know I will!

The image on the upper right was what I consider to be my best image from our trip to upstate New York. It was shot from a very country road (over the span of 20 minutes and 50 frames) with a herd of cows behind me and a very understanding family waiting in the car. The lake in the distance is Cayuga Lake, one of the Fingerlakes and right outside of the Village of Aurora around where my wife grew up. This one was taken with the Nikkor 17-55/2.8 lens at 55mm using my B+W circular polarizer at f/7.1 and 1/125s. In Photoshop I warmed it up a some and increased the vibrancy and sharpened some. Of course I shot in RAW. I used to shoot newspaper work in all JPG but now everything I shoot is consistent: RAW NEF that I then batch convert to JPG. Most of the time the JPGs are fine, but for large prints or when I make a mistake I work from the RAW file. The final image showed up at my doorstep from Millers as a 20x30" mounted linen-textured print and looks stunning. It's now at the framer. This will replace Childe Hassam's Boston Common at Twilight which is a poster reproduction that had brush strokes added and it looks rather nice in a 4" thick frame with a wooden fillet. But I'm trying to get my images in my home and not other people's.

Half of the month was spent at my day job teaching a summer course at Boston University (BU). I shot many good images for that event that will eventually find their way to our BU websites and press releases. If you want to view them, check out this link. I deliberately didn't schedule anything for that time period, except for my sister's wedding shower.

For those of you who care, I've developed a love-love relationship with my Nikkor 17-55/2.8 lens. I use it on everything from news to events to portraits. I've shot several portraits and events this month and today shot a 50th Wedding Anniversary (no the image of the couple shown here is not celebrating their 50th; she is their daughter and the one who booked me). I was lucky the weather held up. Immediately after, it poured.

I'm quickly selling off my film gear and using the proceeds to purchase new digital gear. An old 35mm Konica camera funded a love relationship with my new camera bag. I formerly had only one large bag and found that I was wanting to have all my lenses at my disposal for paying events. So, I purchased a Domke J1 bag which is now my working bag and put all the rest of my gear in my LowePro Nova 5. The Domke exudes quality and while it's roughly the same size as the LowePro, it holds much more gear and is more functional (and, of course, was much more expensive). An old lens bought me an 8GB Lexar 133X CF card. Some really old but well-kept 35mm gear funded a Nikon SB800 speedlight and a Quantum battery pack to supplement my slightly inferior SB600. Selling old gear and buying new gear is like paying with Monopoly money. Just don't tell my wife that my Rolleiflex sale didn't completely pay for the 17-55. My pending Hasselblad kit sale will hopefully fund a new 20" iMac.

What else happened? I can tell you that my MacBook started to not launch certain applications and Photoshop CS3 was taking forever to open and was crashing all the time. After many fruitless customer service calls and forum searches and posts, I ended up doing a complete disk erase and reinstall and everything is now cranking like new. That took a whole six hour evening to do. And, yes, I did backup all my data! My backup is definitely part of my workflow. No, I don't backup after every shoot, unless it's really important. I do back up religiously every weekend to dual 500GB Lacie drives and a gold DVD. I bring my DVDs off site for security. A friend of mine suggested I do that even though I am really not that anal. Honestly! I just do it to do it. I figure if my house burns down, I'll have bigger things to worry about than where my original digital images are. After all, I have all the low resolution web galleries stored over my different web sites and those I back up to different machines after every update.

We'll be traveling the next few weekends, so expect to see images from our trips. Our plans will bring us to upstate New York (near Ithaca where there's some kind of hay festival), New Hampshire (Mt. Washington Valley and Franconia Notch where we go every year), and Western Massachusetts (Tanglewood, where the Boston Symphony performs and where we'll be sleeping in a cabin).

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.