Sunset over the West River in Jamaica, Vermont.

I took last week off to (mostly) hang out at home, play with the kids, rake leaves, and do odd jobs, like fix the storm door on the front of our house which was hanging on by two wiggly screws.  It was the first time I've spent that much time away from photography for probably 10 years.  It was a great break, especially after nearly three months on the road, but by Saturday night I was starting to wake up thinking of all the photo projects I need to get cracking on, which meant vacation was over.

So far this week, I've been doing various business-related tasks like marketing, invoicing, and planning for next year, but the most fun has been diggin through my hard drives and editing through the big batch of photos I've yet to process from our Connecticut River project.  Even though I try to keep up on this work during the year, I'm currently sitting here with about 4000 unedited RAW files from locations that stretch the length of the river.  While it may sound like a daunting task, I'm actually finding it to be a great review of what we've accomplished thus far on this project.  I'm also pleased to keep running into some great photos that I forgot about, as well as the memories associated with them.


Kayakers on the West River at sunset.  Brattleboro, Vermont.

The three photos in this entry were shot during the two hottest days of the summer, July 31st, and August 1st, when temperatures reached 100 degrees even in Vermont.  I was photographing the West River (a major tributary of the Connecticut) during these two days, and I remember spending most of those two days actually in the river, wading, floating, and swimming.  Talk about getting involved with your subject matter.  I didn't bother to do any hiking, but being part of the river those two days certainly helped my see some great river pictures as the light got interesting.

If you're wondering how I edit and process 4000 RAW images, you'll need to wait for another day and a super-long post.  The short story though is that I edit and caption my RAW files using Adobe Bridge, then use Adobe Camera Raw to process those images into Tiff files.  I use as many of the batch processing options available to me in both these programs, because processing 4000 images, one at a time would just be insane.  Once I have the tiff files, I then clean them up (they're usually a little dirty from dust on my camnera's sensor) using the Spot Healing Brush and Clone tools in Photoshop CS2.


Joe-pye weed on the bank of the West River in Jamaica, Vermont.

One great part of shooting digitally is the ease of transporting images.  Marcy and I and the kids are going to Chicago for a week-long holiday visit with Marcy's family, and I'll easily be able to bring along all of these RAW files and work on them whenever I have a free moment.  Try that with slides!

Well, I guess it's time for me to get back into the hard drive...

Cheers!
-Jerry

        

 

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