Catch-Up

Two trips and the Thanksgiving holiday have really put me behind in my blog. But I have a couple of hours in a noisy hotel room to try and get caught up. What follows is what seems noteworthy from three weeks and two projects.

Gallery Opening

My gallery show at the Biscayne Nature Center opened on Saturday afternoon. It was a great turn out and I'd like to thank everyone who braved some truly incredible Miami traffic to see the photos. Lara and I were talking that morning about what a nice community feel Key Biscayne has, and when you narrow that community down to a group of water people, the Nature Center is an great place for everybody to gather. Many thanks to Theo Long and her staff for all the help in the lead up to the show. Many more thanks to Deblois for the music. Buy her CD!

I thought that the show looked really good. Lara's Eye continues to be the image that raises the most questions. And for some reason many people want to know how much Photoshop is involved in the prints. I think it might be a default question that starts a question about the process and ideas behind the images. And I also like to think that the question has a lot to do with making sure that photos like these are still swimming around.

Ironman

Lara entered the 2008 Florida Ironman Triathlon on Sunday. We heard that it sells out quickly, so she had her whole family on standby to hit the website precisely at 1pm in hopes of someone securing a spot for her. But it turns out that Lara was the one who made it through. She was so excited. So thus begins the year of early mornings, healthy eating and "right" choices. Or in Lara's case, I should say EARLIER mornings, HEALTHIER eating and RIGHTER (?) choices. But you can follow the whole process on Lara's blog. Her first entry sounds like it might have been written by a WWF wrestling promoter, but she tells me that this is the kind of attitude needed to complete an Ironman. It should be an interesting year.

Caribbean Travel & Life

I had lunch with Dave Herndon on Wednesday on my way through Orlando. It was nice to get caught up on everything that has changed since we camped in the Dry Tortugas so many years ago. Life changes quickly! He gave me a copy of the December issue of his magazine which features Chris Cox's article and my photos from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Maybe because it is the most recent, or maybe because of the great portraits I shot on the trip, or maybe because it was something that Lara and I worked on together, but this assignment still feels like my best for the magazine. But it wasn't until I discovered the St. Vincent and the Grenadines booth at the DEMA show and was able to show the magazine to everybody that made the trip happen, that I really knew what it was to feel good about an assignment. It was so fun to stand around with all of the great people from the tourism department, Young Island Resort and Indigo Dive and talk about all of the great spots that we visited in July. After so much time on the island for Pirates of the Caribbean and then this assignment, SVG has many good memories for me.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center Gallery Show - November 10th 2-5PM

This afternoon I picked up the promo cards for my upcoming gallery show at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center. It took one rejected attempt, but Ser-Mar did a nice job. There is a huge difference between these cards and the product offered by Modern Postcard. I don't know what the coating is, but they look almost wet. Very glossy. Tthe show opens on November 10th. Click on the image for more information.

Design District

I have been back and forth to DistrictLab the last few days. The drive from the beach into the Design District is always good for a couple of reasons. 1. It's close and the traffic is almost manageable ... compared to most places in Miami. 2. It involves the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which is as Miami as roads get here. (All it's missing is the cruise ships.) And 3. The closer you get to the Design District, the better the design gets! Between the cement factories, the Target stores and the guys living in vans are murals worth driving out of your way to see. But by far the best is the easiest to find. Right where Biscayne goes under 195, a man and a woman stand in the sun. Their shadows against the wall make it seem like they are standing in the grass, and his hands and expression might be apologizing or might be imploring. But it is her hips that turn my head ... every single time I drive by. Don't tell Lara, but it might be love!

Sloooow

When the assignments slow down and then stop, there is really only one thing to do. Marketing. I have spent many hours in front of the computer designing a new promo card. The results went into the mail yesterday. It is a little anti-climatic to spend a week looking at images and fonts, another week matching editors and addresses, and a weekend labeling and stamping to then simply hand 500 cards to the post office. But that's the drill. The best that can be hoped for is that the card finds a home on a photo editors wall or in a file, but more likely the card gets one glance before landing in the trash. Such is the life of a promo card.


I really like the design part of the process. When I put these two images together ... Dave in his Kayak and Lara at the university pool ... I felt a relation between them. Motion, expression, composition and color were elements that drew me to these images. That was two weeks ago. Now I think that I might have had one or two specific magazines in my head when I chose the photographs. My goal with these cards is to convince any editor that water and underwater offers a fresh look for any magazine. I'm just not sure that these two images suggest that idea. But the good thing about a marketing campaign is that I have another shot at it in two months.


Something else that I noticed in this process. I do not always immediately recognize THE shot in a roll of film. This image of David on the Calchec River didn't even make the blog when I first wrote about the trip. Three months later, it is one of my favourite images.

Swim

Lara and I swam at the University of Miami pool yesterday. It had been a long time since our last visit, but the scene hasn't really changed. Most of the students still lay around the pool catching rays, and three or four people are in the pool swimming lengths. (I might say that university was nothing like that for me, but it might be more a comment on my age. Or the fact that I went to school in Toronto.) Lara is extremely focused on distance and speed these days ... two things that will help get her through a triathlon next year. I have to admit that years as an underwater photographer have ruined me for any kind of lengths. There is just too much water to look at, too many possibilities to consider. Lengths require me to turn off the creative side of my brain, and water usually has the opposite reaction on me. (How is that for a reason not to swim lengths?) After the workout, we spent some time shooting the details of a body moving through a lane of water. Lara is very patient when it comes stuff like this. She learned long ago that "one more time" has no real meaning to me, even though I say it after every shot. And she patiently continues down the lane as I try to swim in the same space that she is using. Only a swift kick or a hard bump from the housing gets a reaction.

I have been using my AquaTech housing for these images. The thing I really like about this housing is the Canon 580EX strobe underwater. It permits great things like second curtain sync on a slow shutter speed, or a hi-speed sync on a 1/2000th of a second shutter speed. This opens up so many ways to capture motion, and control the background. I am anxious to see how far above 1/250th of a second I can get with the Ikelite strobes in my Seacam housing.

New Promotion

Two new places to find my work went up this week. Taking Larry's advice, I now have a portfolio on both Workbook.com and Blackbook.com. (Larry has decades of experience and a huge amount of talent, and I am always thankful that he is so open to helping.) There is a lot of great work up on both sites, and it is nice to see that my portfolio has something different to offer. Water is the simplest theme that runs through my images, and it is my hope that an editor looking through the portrait, lifestyle or travel section will see that is a theme that can apply to any story. I don't want to change what I do, but I would like to find a bigger market for my work. Links to my new portfolios are below.

http://www.workbook.com/portfolios/calver_t/
http://www.blackbook.com/TimCalver

New Website

My new website went up yesterday. Thanks very much to Nadine Baurin at Creataria. (http://www.creataria.com) It was a great experience to work with Nadine. She took my website plans, trimmed away all of the bad ideas, added her own great thoughts, and delivered a beautiful site. On time. All while preparing for her wedding. I would highly recommend her.

The site went up sometime between late night west coast time and first thing east coast time. And for a while yesterday morning, it seemed that some sort of a big announcement preceded the update. In the space of a couple of hours, I had three calls for three different jobs, two of which were brand new clients and just a coincidence that they came on the same day that my new work went up.

Anyway, if you found this blog without going through the website, please check out http://www.timcalver.com