Impatient to get back to the Austin routine.

The family's social director is not pleased with my repeated and prolonged 

absences in October and early November. I promised to get home tonight and stay put 

until Thursday, but then I'm back on the road for a corporate shoot

in fabulous West Virginia Friday.

As the bloggers, reviewers and vloggers stay focused on trying to whip up hysteria and lust for full frame sensor cameras and drones I have a different focus which mostly centers on using various kinds of cameras for real, paying clients on actual jobs for corporations, associations and various companies all over the place. As a kind of general disclosure I make about $100 per month in associate commissions from Amazon.com as a result of people clicking on links in my posts, and the reason for the small amount of income from that source is probably self-evident to frequent visitors here. I may talk about cameras but I have no placed ads or permanent links to vendors and I only occasionally put a link in an article, and those are generally for equipment ( or books ) that are so exemplary that I feel compelled to introduce my readers to them. In the last month I might have included five or six casual links to gear that I found useful in my every work day. And please keep in mind that my "real" work is making photographs and videos for picky clients at advertising agencies, and in-house marketing professionals, not making jazzy photos for readers or potential click through audiences. 

I did not go to Iceland for 9 days in order to piece together material for a vlog or blog post, I went there because a tour company hired me to provide photographic consultation to a group of non-professional photographers. It was a paid gig not a content creation escapade. I write this because my last post (about the death of various types of cameras) generated unwanted comments from various Camerati. I thought it only fair to outline my situation in order to add some weight to my opinions (and they are almost always only opinions).

In the same vein, my trip to West Virginia this coming week will be centered around photographing environmental portraits of various key personnel for a national company that specializes in huge infrastructure projects. It's a simple equation: I travel to the location and make the photographs in a style we've collaboratively concocted. I try to read my client's mind and get results that please us both as much as it's possible, given the vagaries of the location and the on site "talent." My client is depending on me to produce usable work, at a minimum, and really good work if all goes according to plan. In exchange for being able to use the images (licensing) they will cover all of the travel expenses and write me a check for thousands of dollars (actually, they will probably send the money as an electronic fund transfer. That's more normal these days).

Later, when and if I write about how I did the shoot, you, the reader, can be certain that I wasn't just jacking around shooting snaps  of my coffee and croissants and writing pie-in-the-sky bullshit about some camera or lens; I'll actually be writing about something I own, bought with my company's cash, and used frequently, and I'll be talking about how the equipment performed for real clients rather than some imaginary client that fits the camera shopping public's (misconceptions) idea of what a client might want from a photography assignment. And before you think of what I write as just anecdotal stuff, please remember that I've been doing well over one hundred assignments per year for at least the last 30 years and have a spouse who works as an art director/production designer at an ad agency that handles the advertising for one of the world's top three computer makers.... Oh, and my son is working in high tech public relations. I think I have some useful understanding about how this business works from the inside out. And no, I don't own a selfie stick....or a drone.

That I put in 17 days of commercial photography in the last month and 14 days of that was traveling out of town on assignment for three major clients should have accrued me some decent credibility when it comes to understanding what gear works and what doesn't. And that's why I continue to slag the various big review sites; their writers have shallow or non-existent experience working directly for the very same clients who, the writers insist in articles, are demanding 100 megabyte raw files, nothing but full frame, and all the other bullshit the content producers crank out in the service of the American marketing arms of camera makers from around the world.

So, I just spent a total of 22 days of photography using nothing but Panasonic G9 cameras and in all respects they filled the bill for me, and more importantly, my clients. Just thought I'd mention this. It's the real, real world...

Now, I thought I'd add a very embarrassing story of a major failure I committed yesterday. No clients were hurt by my mistake but my own pride took a bit of a beating.....

I've been accompanying a tour group of photographers across Iceland and we've all been working in high winds, low temperatures and unpredictable rain storms. We brought Ziploc bags to prevent condensation when coming in from the cold, waterproof material to hold over the cameras in hand during an unpredictable downpour at times when we were out in the middle of nowhere with no convenient shelter, and most of us shot between 2,000 and 4,000 shots during the long week. No cameras were rendered unusable. No cameras or lenses were lost to weather. In fact, the one failure of the week was mine and took place ten minutes from my hotel. 

It happened like this: Yesterday was the windiest day of our adventure. In Reykjavik the winds whipped up in gusts up to 50 mph, the temperatures hovered near the freezing point and the wind chill was even worse. I looked out from the rooftop terrace of our hotel to see big whitecaps in the harbor and the wind driving sprays against the rocks and seawalls and then dozens of feet up in the air and over the sidewalks. It was like a Hollywood disaster movie. But in the distance was a beautiful sunset with rich warm colors against an azure blue, and the light kissing the tops of the mountains visible across the bay. 

I bundled up in my (perfect) $39 Costco jacket, my Sherpa hat and my warmest gloves, grabbed a G9 and paired it with the (weather sealed) Olympus 12-100mm Pro lens. I stepped out into the wind and the deep freeze and headed toward the harbor to capture the drama. I dodged intermittent sprays of salt water and realized that by the time the spray got to my location it was already transformed from seawater into bullets of frozen sleet.  I got to a vantage point close to the seawall here I could document the angry waves tossing fire hydrant style bursts of water up and over the walls toward the city. The waves were wild but the sunset was almost pastoral. A wonderful contrast. I lifted the camera to my eye and pushed the shutter button. Nothing. I turned the power on and off. Nothing. Had I bricked a new camera by exposing it to the invasive, intense spray? Damn. What a sorry way to end a great trip....

Then I put my back to the wind and started troubleshooting. My face could not be more red (because of the windburn) but I was embarrassed and ashamed. I'd taken the battery out to put it on the charger about a half hour before coming out and had forgotten to put it back in. To make matters worse, the back up battery I almost always had in my pants pocket was sitting back in the room in another charger. Here I was with a perfect scene (and a great set of equipment in my hands) and it was all lost because of the simplest of errors (and omissions ).  I trudged back through the high winds and got back to the hotel. I rode the elevator up and grabbed a couple fresh batteries but when I came back out of the hotel the sun was gone, the clouds had won and everything that I wanted to captured had changed. 

Here's my "professional" tip for the day: Remember to put a battery in your camera before venturing out.

I'm currently sitting in JFK airport killing time and waiting for my connecting flight back to Austin. It's going to be a long afternoon.........