It's been a bit too long since my last blog entry.  As of late, I have been working on a lot of design work which has been keeping me from keeping this blog updated.  I have new photos which I still have yet to fully post... but I will do so later today.  The weekend of the Super Bowl I drove down to Las Vegas for a party (Go Saints!) and I left a day early to drive through Death Valley to shoot there, plus get photos of a ghost town on the edge of Nevada called Rhyolite.  A gallery of those images will be up this evening.

This weekend I am up in the Pacific Northwest.  I plan on heading up to Neah Bay and back today to shoot some of the coastline facing Victoria Island in Canada.  If I had my passport, I would have just headed to Victoria Island to shoot.  There's always next time.  I'll be processing these photos today and they should also be up this evening.

I am also going to be testing out the new Aperture 3 while shooting for the weekend.  There are some of the new GPS tagging features which should be a big help for an upcoming project.  I stayed away from Aperture before because it lacked adjustment brushes like Lightroom.  Sadly, Aperture still does not have adjustment gradients and I do not believe it has spot correction either (which Lightroom has) but I am trying to reserve any judgement until I have had a chance to put it through its paces.

Time to get the gear together and hit the road.  Come back and see the Death Valley and today's photos this evening.

I just completed a MySpace page design for my friends Manatee, a great new band out of Oakland, CA who happen to also be playing a new years eve show tomorrow night in Oakland at The Uptown with three other cool bands.  I will be there shooting photos of the whole thing.

MySpace is a horrible place to design for, but if you're a musician, you almost can't get away from it.  In order to make a clean looking design, I had to cut through a majority of the underlying content fields and place everything myself.  The result is a fairly clean design I think they are pretty happy with.

For the design, I also took the time to head out and shoot some photos of the band at their practice space in Oakland.  On my way, it started raining pretty hard... but by the time we were ready to head out, the rain had subsided enough to move around and not get too wet.  I am pretty happy with what we were able to capture with such little time to work with.

I also just recovered from a hard drive failure in my iMac.  I use Backblaze for backing up my computer and my external drive, so I was not worried about losing any files, except for my most recent stuff.  I do, however, keep pretty good on-site backups of my work too, so I did not have to use my online backup this time.  I've learned my lesson over the years so this was my least stressful hard drive failure since I have so much data redundancy.  I did also take the opportunity to put a 10,000RPM hard drive inside of my 24" aluminum iMac and I am noticing a significant performance boost.  Too bad I didn't have the money lying around for an SSD instead, but by the time I need a new drive I probably won't be using this computer anymore or they will be twice the size and speed and half the price.

This is a very brief blog entry to note that a site I designed for Rejo Jones, is up and running.  There were some initial domain problems with the registrar, GoDaddy... which just goes to further reinforce why I do not use them.  All issues are now ironed out and the site is up and running.  Stop by, take a look and tell Rejo what you think.  She still has some content she will be adding on her own, but the design and layout are complete. 

Site link: http://www.rejojones.com