Bigger than life at the BRG!

So last February I spent the day over at the Boston Rock Gym photographing the Heart of Steal bouldering competition.

Through all the images I took, there was one that I felt nailed it for me. I had been toying with the idea of doing something big with it for a while but I could not decide on what.



Gavin, the BRG manager, told me he had the wall space whenever I rolled something out.

So somehow, not sure what made me think of it, I though about creating a multi-layered composite image that was derived from the original. So I must have printed out a dozen different pieces of this image starting from the parts of the subject that were furthest from the camera and matting and cutting out each part and layering it up as it grew physically closer to the camera. Starting with the background as the base panel, I made a cut out for the head and body, arm, then the wrist, hand and hold.

The finishing touch was using a gloss finish sealer on all of the subject and a matte finish on the background.

That combined with the actual depth of the image really made it POP!




After all that work I was dying to show the guys at the gym.

When the day finally came to bring it in, no one was there. I was so bummed! Well, you know what they say; fail to plan, plan to fail.



Here I am at the BIG unveiling (notice the horde of onlookers in the background).


Well anyway, one by one they all got to see it over the next few days and it seemed to be a hit.

The subject, Jon Glassberg got word of it and also posted it on his Blog. I was hoping he would like it = )


I was expecting it to end up in the changing area in the back, but was I pumped when they hung it up right over the front desk!


I have been climbing at the BRG for 2 years now. It has been one of the best things that I have ever done for myself both physically and mentally. I would highly recommend this to anyone. It is far beter than pumping iron at a regular gym! When you are there, you mind flushes of all other thoughts. Climbing demands your attention unlike a regular gym where I always found my mind wandering.











left:Here is Gavin with a little Vanna White action.


I was expecting it to end up in the changing area in the back, but was I pumped when they hung it up right over the front desk!




Plans are in the making for the "Heart of Steal 2010". I will have see what I can pull off this February.

CRASH AND BURN !!!

(above: me sinking my teeth into a 10,000 RPM Raptor Hard Drive)

This will go down in the history books as ASA Photographics worst week of computing EVER...at least we hope!!

So we come back from Labor Day weekend to find my computer on the blue screen of death.

After a day and a half of trouble shooting, it looks as if one of my hard drives crashed (I have multiple drives in my CPU). Now this would have been all fine and good if the hard drives were set up in a “RAID 1” configuration (where one mirrors the other). Then I could just boot and run off of the secondary drive. This is the way I thought I had set it up when I bought it and is the way I wanted it set up. No, no, no, it was set-up in a “RAID 0” configuration (in short, loose one, loose them both--why would anyone do this? you ask? Well, it is called "Striping" and it is a performance enhancing set-up, not a back-up system.) Won’t ever make that mistake again. We work extensively on our back-up procedures, so we have not lost any client data, (I repeat-WE HAVE NOT LOST ANY CLIENT DATA) but to replace my drives and start from scratch again is a time consuming and stressfull process.

Again, this will be the first and last time "Raid Zero" happens in our office.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, we start transferring work load onto Gail’s system and guess what…VIRUS TIME! Virus time like I have never seen it before. Her system is completely hosed!

We have been on the phone with our tech for days as he is in Florida.

It is now Friday night and we have turned our dining room into a temporary office with our two old laptops. Our desks where our workstations are looks more like a funeral parlor.




We had so much we needed to tackle this week. Among other things, we wanted to pump out a couple of prints to enter at the PPANE (Professional Photographers of New England) convention in Nashua this weekend. That dream died along with our systems this week.

Right now my system is being restored from a drive image I took a little over a month ago. This will put everything (software, e-mail, and all) back the way it was.

This is the EZ-Gig software that I wrote about on our “Photog’s Blog”. See that…I practice what I preach! That will save us a lot of time and aggrevation. God knows we don’t need any more this week!

Other than that the only thing that is making me feel better is this…
























A NICE BIG CHOCOLATE MARTINI

Gail hooked me up. It is Friday night after all = ).