When it’s snowing like this shooting just isn’t really an option, unless you’re after that blizzard look. But companies normally want their product highlighted, not the massive amounts of white dropping from the skies.

After being treated to two incredible days of shooting in SF the hammer of nature fell in a big way. Tried to pull off a two-day shoot in the mountains but the snow was having none of it. What they call snow showers up there is more like near-white out conditions in which shooting is nearly impossible. We were counting on clear skies, which in hindsight was a mistake. Then the weather closed in around the Bay Area so I bailed and took the red-eye back last night. Thursday’s edit shoot wasn’t going to happen in crappy weather. So the digi p/s is a mixed blessing. It takes very nice pictures but I honestly prefer the looks I get out of the film cameras I’ve used in similar situations. Something about the digi files is just a bit sterile. I mean, I can make them look like the film shots but it’s just not the same. Wonder how this shot would look shot with the Canonet and RSXII cross-processed. better I bet.

When you try to shoot spring/summer in January you need a little luck on your side. We got it, in spades. Two awesome days in SF, not a cloud in the sky, warm temps all the way around. It was great. The beach, Ocean Beach in SF, was incredible. But, of course, the luck didn’t hold when it was time to head up to the mountains to shoot the fall/winter component. Think snow, falling out of the sky. They call it snow showers up in the Sierra but it looked an awful lot like just plain old snow to me, too much to shoot in anyway. So we bagged the second day because waiting around an entire day for 20 minutes of clear skies just doesn’t add up. And since it’s going to be winter back home for the next 4 months we’ll be able to get it done back there.

The ‘08 travel begins today, flying out to NorCal for a double-up shoot. Do a spring/summer shoot in the city and then head up to Tahoe for a fall/winter shoot. Pretty handy. A lot of getting through the travel is inertia (or is it momentum.) Once you get going it’s easy to keep going but it’s the get going part that’s tough sometimes. One of the bonuses is the light this time of year out in NorCal is beautiful, it’s even starting to come around up here too. Then, to cap it off, I have a fun edit assignment I’ve tacked on the tail end of the trip. The old ride/shoot gig, which is always fun and very hard to beat.

When it wasn’t raining last week the road riding was sweet, so much so that I rode myself into the ground on Saturday. Pretty great. But now it’s back to winter. Went out to the old dairy farm again this AM and it was snowing pretty hard. I trudged into an old meadow that I guess doubled as the farmers’ car dump. There were at least four junked vehicles that I could see and likely bits of cars/tractors buried under snow that I couldn’t. Unfortunately the house was closed up because that’s where the interesting squalor is. To me this kind of post-agrarian northern New England aesthetic stimulates the eyes. It’s not your typical Vermont Life type view of the region, but more accurate and interesting. I think so anyway.

It’s 31 degrees, raining, and all our snow has been washed into the river. Days like this force me to get creative as I can’t sit another day in the office. So I trucked up to this old farm that’s recently been bought and is in the process of being torn down to see if there was anything interesting to shoot. The farm is right on one of my ride routes so I sort of knew what I was getting into, but not hardly. I could go on for paragraphs about this place and how awesome it was/is. If it hadn’t started pouring I would have spent hours shooting there. The farm house was built in the 1770s, the same family lived there from 1880 until this summer. They had 65 acres and 12 barns on the property. Dairy farmers. Imagine 120 years worth of shit stored up. Like everything from ancient ice skates to magazines to hand tools to old work trucks to….hoopty kids’ bikes. Everything. The squalor these people lived in is almost inconceivable, but at the same time very interesting. Shot this with the new digi point-n-shoot, my first ever, and was favorably impressed.

H-bomb dropped me a note reminding me I hadn’t posted in almost a month. Oh well. In the interim we rolled out to Berkeley for a nice Christmas, and some meetings thrown in to make it legit. Even shipped my Axiom out so I could get some riding in. I always forget how hilly it is riding out there, 2,600 feet of climbing in a 25-mile ride, so I suffered after my post-CX break. And now we have like 2.5′ of snow on the ground so it’s skiing for a while. Got my first P/S digi but haven’t gotten around to shooting with it yet. Looking at the year as a blank slate it’s a challenge to sort out what goes where and when. I have trips to China, Belgium, and California all within 8 weeks of each other in March/April. How’s that going to work? That’s what makes things interesting.