Alright... quick update on what happened with the timelapse at the rally, and then an explanation of why I've REALLY been neglecting my site.

Although I knew Rally Minnesota was going to be a small regional event and that I'd have a tough time getting the shots I wanted, I was not expecting things to go as poorly as they did.  Not that it was some huge disaster, it was just a bunch of things not quite working out as I'd planned that, when combined, resulted in too few clips (and crappy ones at that) and no way to make anything decent out of them.

It started well, being invited on as an official Event Photographer and getting special access to areas off-limits to non-workers, creating a well-mapped-out itinerary with a very thorough shotlist, and buying a new piece of gear that was going to get me some amazing onboard footage (a GoPro HD Hero).  But then things started to come apart.  First up was the weather: cold, cloudy, and drizzling pretty much the entire weekend, which meant no dust clouds, no magic hour light, a lot energy spent protecting the gear, and very few spectators coming out to watch the action.  Second was a mixup on the first day that saw my assistant and I assigned to two intersections as course marshals; instead of being able to roam freely and hit up the parc expose to capture the crowd, attach my new GoPro camera to one of the cars and have it shoot while going through a stage, or catch the cars launching at the stage start, we had to make do with shooting drive-bys (which don't make for very good timelapse) while stuck out in the forest until midnight.  We got our assignments straightened out on the second morning, and I did my best to make up for what I'd lost the previous day, still fighting the weather and failing to get anything even close to what I had envisioned.  We did shoot some decent stuff at the second service stop, but that alone was not enough to make an entire video out of.

We returned home with maybe half of the scenes I wanted, and many of them were borderline unusable thanks to poor conditions and composition.  However, I knew I'd have a second chance at the Ojibwe Forest Rally: no unclear assignments, the promise of decent weather, and a better understanding of how to get the shots I really wanted.  I turned my attention toward other, more pressing matters, waiting until early August to contact the media people at OFR and get the ball rolling again.

Literally the day after I emailed them the entire event was cancelled.  A post went up on the website explaining that 9 entries were not enough to make it work financially, and that was that.  I told the PR contact that if they could pull it back together next year, I'd still be interested in coming to shoot and continue my project, but now I'm thinking that traveling a bit farther to a bigger event might be more worthwhile (though I'm out of chances until next year for that, too).

There are now two regional-level rally races in Minnesota, both of which I plan to attend this year.  First up is the new Rally Minnesota, taking place near Park Rapids in late May; second is the long-running Ojibwe Forest Rally, taking place near Bemidji at the end of August.

I went to OFR in 2009 with a rented 70-200mm lens and snagged a few decent images (including a rollover crash) for it being my first rally.  Although there's still plenty of room for improvement with the type of shots I was going for that time, I wanted to do something different at the events this year.  Of the various photographic techniques I've been interested in, I narrowed it down to two that could both produce some awesome work at a race: 3D and time-lapse.

Judging from this year's CES, 3D is finally starting to take off, and it's never been easier to produce a stereoscopic image; the biggest problems now are actually putting the rig together and choosing how to view the final output.  For the latter, I had planned to do good old low-tech red-cyan anaglyphs cause it's cheap and easily translates from computer screen to wall-mounted print.  The former is where I ran into problems: Really Right Stuff seems to be the only place that makes a good slider bar, and like everything else they do, it's really expensive.  I wasn't too concerned about throwing down $200 to rent another 40D and identical lenses, but upwards of $1000 just to mount it all was out of the question.  Someday I will get a fantastic 3D shot of a rally car sliding through a motion-blurred cloud of dirt... for now, I'll have to settle for playing with DIY single-camera rigs and getting the basic technique down.

Making a compelling video (even a short one) is a lot harder than making a compelling still image.  I have experience with both, having taken classes on both in college, producing web videos at work for the past 3 years, doing photography as a hobby for 2 of those years, and always soaking up wisdom on either front through every photo I see and video clip I watch.  Time-lapse is the best of both worlds: largely automated and innately interesting despite minimal production, and perfect for compressing something extremely long into bite-sized chunks... something like a weekend-long race that has lots of stops, spectator interaction, and a wide variety of action.

Time-lapse doesn't require much in the way of equipment, either: a camera with a separate or built-in timer remote/intervalometer; a heavy set of sticks (aka tripod) to keep it stable; and an eye for good angles and gradual change.  Oh, and when shooting "in the field" you'll need tons and tons of memory cards and batteries: I'm looking at getting enough storage and power to shoot up to 10,000 images per day, dumping the cards onto a computer and recharging batteries overnight.  That will only cost a few hundred bucks, and I'll actually still own all of it afterwards.

So the less expensive backup option has won out again, and it's also the one that'll be the most work, but I'm really stoked for it nonetheless.  I already have a shotlist made out, I might be able to do a DIY motion-control rig to spice things up at OFR, and I might even get a camera mounted on one of the competitors' cars for a stage.

I decided to change hosts after hearing about the simplicity of Posterous from video podcast The Art of Photography.  It's a move that (along with the purchase of some awesome noise-reducing headphones) I'm hoping will lower the barrier to posting more often and especially posting on the go.

Now for some news:

2 years ago, before I started blogging, we took our first ever family vacation to go backpacking in the Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon.  This involved driving for 2 straight days halfway across the country in one tightly packed minivan on an equally tight schedule, with the temperature going from -10 degrees when we left Minnesota to 90 degrees when we stopped in Arizona.  I was still sharing a camera with my brother at the time, and with a rented 10-22mm wide angle lens, we managed to get a handful of decent, if opportunistic, images between us, despite the intense pace of our trip.  I was left wanting more photographically, especially after driving back through Monument Valley and being too exhausted to stop even once to shoot anything.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when we started planning a return trip.  This time, it was going to be different: we'd have multiple vehicles, the Canyon was our only destination, we'd have the entire week of Easter there, and we were going to split up into two groups; a "lazy" group staying up on the rim, and a "hardcore" group going all the way down into the Canyon.  Being in the "lazy" group would give me the time and the base of operations to really explore and shoot some good deliberate landscapes, and maybe even dabble in anaglyph 3D if I could secure funding for the extra equipment.

And then the reservations filled up while we were jumping through hoops related to our group's intermediate size between "regular" and the next largest campsites.

We're still trying to figure out what we should do instead with that week of scheduled time off: Go all-out at a different but equally amazing location? Choose something smaller, closer to home, and therefore cheaper, and try for the Grand Canyon again next year? Or maybe scrap the wilderness idea altogether?

(Pun intended) I've reached an impasse with this whole photoblogging thing.  The last few months have marked a slow decline in the frequency of my posts and even the picture-taking itself... I'd long since given up trying to maintain my original weekly schedule, but now I seem to be struggling to get in one good session per month.  Part of that is because I'm getting in more hours at work (not that I'm complaining; more money means more photo gear, after all); part of it's because I've been wanting to do more studio setup type stuff, but don't have the space for it; or because I need specific equipment I don't have and can't afford; or because I feel I've exhausted my surroundings; or because I have nobody to go out shooting with... the list goes on. More importantly, I've also been increasingly dissatisfied with the content of my posts.  They're sort of instructional, but not quite; sort of a summary of events, but nothing very interesting happens; sometimes a little bit of a self-critique, but limited to technical aspects.  I never really had a good idea of what the posts were going to be about when I first started, but now that I've been doing it for a little while, I'm finding out that half-assing those areas is not working very well.  I've got a few ideas as to what I could do to focus my content, the biggest one being a concept-through-completion look at larger projects, spread across several posts.  At the very least, I need to find a niche (or niches) and stick to it (or them), instead of writing a long post on every random shot I take.  That's not to say I won't keep shooting that stuff; I'll just be confining it to Flickr. No matter what the content changes to, I don't think I'll ever make it back up to one post per week.  Bi-weekly is probably a best-case scenario, though for now, I'll be aiming for one good one per month.

Early last month, I went to a bonsai exhibition at the Como Conservatory in St Paul with my brother and a couple of his friends.  I've been interested in growing bonsai trees ever since my second year of college when I had a cheap one from Target (which later became infested with mites and was thrown out by my mom).  This past Christmas, I bought a "real" one from an online store for my brother; it came with a little book full of tips and pictures on how to care for it, shape it and prune it, and start more.  Paging through that book renewed my interest in starting one myself, and since then I've had all sorts of crazy ideas about what I could do. But first I wanted to see what the so-called pros could make, so it was off to the conservatory.  Growing a realistic-looking bonsai tree is actually a lot of work, and it can take as much time as growing a full-size tree: almost all of the bonsai we saw were over 10 years old, with a few even stretching past 100.  Making it look like a normal-sized tree requires a lot of carefully considered pruning and wiring in addition to the standard repotting, fertilization, and constant watering.  Having some idea of where you want to go before you start is pretty much a necessity, and for those of us with no experience of what works and what doesn't, studying the masters is an invaluable time-saver. A wide variety of styles and species were represented at the exhibition, from tiny leafy trees in tiny pots, to a 3 foot tall sinuous evergreen, to living dioramas complete with rocky streams and mountainous backdrops.  One staple of bonsai decoration is the Chinese "mudman", a meticulously crafted clay figure available in various poses, but I only saw this pair conversing under the canopy of a small forest.  Another main principle is creating a strong trunkline and making it clearly visible: [caption id="attachment_510" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Canon 40D: 50mm @ f/2.8, 1/60th, ISO 200"] [/caption] This one is more of a "clump style", so the strong trunkline doesn't really apply, but it's certainly visible enough.  Combined with the bushy leaf bunches, exposed roots, and mossy "grass", it really does make it look like a regular tree, just smaller.  I used my short zoom for this shot, going with the longest focal length and widest aperture to get that short depth of field common to macro images, enhancing the look of smallness we associate with it.  The inside lighting was a little too soft to be believable, so for lack of other ideas, I processed it in a cloudy-but-contrasty sepia tone style (probably a little too warm for artificial realism's sake). Outside of the conservatory, there was another group of bonsai trees secured behind a chainlink fence that were on average much larger and obviously grown to be outside for most of the year.  They didn't seem to be "on display", exactly, and there weren't really any good angles to shoot them from, so we just moved on.  We made the mistake of going into the giftshop, where we discovered a corner of bonsai-growing supplies including pots, tools, wire, fertilizers, decorations, soil, etc, and spent entirely too long a time looking over it all.  I ended up buying a small rectangular blue-black pot and tray which I'll be using to start my own bonsai in... just as soon as I can decide what kind of tree I want to take a clipping from.