So, with a little more excitement, I start to think more about my craft.

What’s next? Well, DLWS is next in just about 45 days. After that? Well, Moose has a mentor program that has a ton of appeal. Three months of training, assignments and critiques done by internet, one-on-one lessons and critiques from Moose, a DLWS appearance, and a weekend one-on-one shoot. Very, very cool.

Now that’s the next level of my photography!

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Unexpectedly, my little photography venture today first turned a buck.

A few weeks ago, Cousin Mark approached me for some shots of the Arch, and other sights around it. He had a customer who was looking for some images from downtown to apply as large decals for some soda machines on the Arch grounds. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but was happy to help Mark out.

A week or two later, he told me that his customer loved the shots, and was going to use them. So Mark asked how much I wanted as payment for my images. Now, I’ve been dreaming about turning this little endeavor into a moneymaker since someone first shone a smile upon a piece of my work, but this floored me and I wasn’t ready for the question. I started looking at what “real” photographers were charging for their work used in a similar fashion, and gave that to Mark.

Frankly, I’d kinda forgotten about it, and then in the mail today came a check from Hope Press. A check with my name on it, and for work I produced. That’s cool!

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Today the geek news is replete with much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the display on the new Apple iPod Nano. From what I read, the substance used to cover the screen is prone to scratching. The first thing that comes to mind is…. duh!

My iPod 60Gb had scratches on the screen within the first two eyeblinks, and scratches on the metal back came almost as quick. It’s just the nature of the beast. These are not hardened targets, capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. They’re just little plastic doodads that manage and play our music and photos. Just that simple.

Do I wish my hadn’t scratched here and there? Sure — everyone likes things that look shiny and new. But, I’ll tell ya, there’s something cool to me about the occasional blemish and scuff. It screams mileage. Mileage is a good thing. It says you’ve been somewhere. And it says you got back safely. Both are cool concepts.

So, take the scratches, enjoy the music — after all, that’s why you bought the widget in the first place — and take what life dishes out. You’ll live a lot longer for not worrying about it!

Beck and I took a jaunt down to Purina Farms for a dog show today. Our rally trainer was showing her Berner, named “Too”, and some of us from the class decided to show up and support her.

It’s always fun to me to see so many breeds, all primped and proper, showing their best at these events. I still see other breeds that I’d love to get to know, although I think Berners are the closest to my heart and temperament.

Too did ok, taking reserve to a big ol’ pup named “Chunk”. He’s 10 months old, and looks like a full adult. Quite a monster! The folks that brought him are breeders and friends of our trainer, and were enjoyable to meet.

We split up after the Berner’s part of the dog show, but got back together for a nice dinner at Massa’s. There was loads of conversation about the breed, dog shows, and life in general. All in all, a nice, relaxing evening after a hectic week at work.

Last night, I tried to bring my photo archive into iPhoto. Why? Well, there’s a very cool piece of software called Galerie that appears it will do what JAlbum does for me.

JAlbum’s been very, very good to me, so why do I need a replacement?

When Apple last upgraded the Java code on the box, it broke JAlbum. When run from the console, JAlbum now thinks, no matter what Java I point it to, that the Java is too old, and refuses to run. Having it run scripted through cron was part of my master strategy for the workflow that puts the photos on the site. Ugh. This event is probably a great argument against automatic updates, but I’d rather that than having an insecure box.

So I started looking around for ways to handle creating web pages for large photo galleries, and I wanted that something to be Mac-centric. Enter Galerie.

This code seems to do an awful lot of what I want, and integrates with iPhoto, which seemed like a good place to organize my photo library. I made a copy of my photo library (100Gb+!!!!) just in case either iPhoto or Galerie did something unexpected to the originals, and set about importing some folders of images into iPhoto.

iPhoto has some hooks for creating slideshows, PDFs of image albums, books, etc. — a lot of very cool things. One downside of iPhoto, though, is that it makes an independent copy of every photo you bring in. For me, that’s a bunch of disk space!

The importing went well, but I was having some trouble with date sorting the new folders inside iPhoto. I did a little search on their help file, and while looking, I found an entry talking about how many photos iPhoto could handle in a single library. And that number was 25,000 — way too low for my needs. As I started researching on the web, it sounds like it really grinds up even a big machine with that many photos in an album. I suspect my little iMac is probably not up to handling that.

Now, you could make a pretty good argument that I don’t need all those photos, and that I really don’t need all of them in the same library. But since I want to keep ‘em all, and keep ‘em in the same library somehow, that trumps any other argument.

The final straw was discovering that Spotlight doesn’t seem to see the folders (rolls) in iPhoto. Script integration with Spotlight is my master plan for being able to search through my library from the web without having to write a lot of extra code. I’ve already seen that Spotlight can see the metadata for the images, so that’s definitely the way to handle the image searches…. but it has to be able to see the images!

So I’ve given up on using iPhoto for cataloging/archiving of my library, although I expect I’ll still use it for select tasks (slideshows, PDFs). That probably nukes me out of using Galerie too, although I’ll have to dig a bit deeper to see if it can handle things outside of iPhoto’s odd storage arrangement.

Today’s search: A piece of Mac code that will handle very large photo libraries!

Tonight, one of my tennis crew had an artist’s reception at a local Starbucks. Lenny shoots very well, and makes some incredibly detailed images. Primarily, he shoots flowers and plants, teasing every detail of them he can.

The event was well-attended, with a cross section of folks from work, as well as other folks Lenny interacts with. And, of course, his work was prominently displayed on all the walls of the seating area, along with stacks of prints for sale.

It was really a lot of fun, and makes me think even more about getting more serious about my work. I think I’ve just been dallying about with my photography site and business. It’s time to get serious! (Betcha’ve heard that one before, eh?!)

Lenny is always encouraging me to get out there and start publishing my work. He likes it, and says I have an good eye and technique. He’s right about one thing — I’ve gotta get out there and start getting my work on the streets. The first step to get there is printing some of my favorites, getting them matted, and being ready for an opportunity when it arrives. A little investment could go a long way!

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Rita slammed the Gulf Coast way early this morning. That can’t be a good thing, but what I’ve seen this morning on CNN and FoxNews leads me to believe that it’s much, much less devastation than what I was fearing.

Houston was spared. Galveston was largely spared. The sparse population probably means a much lower casuality cost. I’m sure there will be some damage to the oil industry, but it seems to be minor in comparison to what Katrina did a couple of weeks ago. In listening to an AM radio station out of Dallas Thursday night, it sounds like all the oil that passes through that part of the world has been turned off until Rita passes, which probably means shortages and higher prices until they are restarted sometime in the coming week.

It could’ve been a whole lot worse, and the fact that it wasn’t is something I’m so thankful for.

God be with you all in Texas and Louisiana.

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This morning, it appears that the gulf coast is bracing for the impact of Rita. Texans are fleeing the coast. Rita has strengthened, and then slightly weakened. The markets are getting pummelled. Precious metals are at close to 20-year highs. Oil barrels are approaching record territory again. And, the pundits are predicting $5/gallon gas out of this storm. What the heck is going on?

The good news is, I guess, that it looks like the hurricane is moving more north than originally thought, which should spare the refineries near Galveston and Houston. It also looks like the powers-that-be have finally realized that for many, the lives of their pets are as important as their own lives, and they are being allowed to evacuate with their masters, rather than being left behind to drown or starve. It appears the various government agencies have learned how utterly deplorable their response was to Katrina, and have set up ahead of time for a better response to Rita.

At the end of day though, there’s nothing I can do about any of it, and nothing I can do to help, aside from send money to the the American Red Cross, which I will do again for this event. I really think it’s the best way to get aid directly in the hands of those that need it.

I also heard about a cool site from the folks in San Francisco called 72hours.org. It’s basically a site designed to help you plan out survival for the first 72 hours of a disaster, realizing that you may very well be left to manage your own survival for that long until help arrives. Cool sounding site that I will be digging deeper into.

I think there’s good lessons to be learned from these disasters, and I intend to pay attention in class.

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Well, the inevitable has happened. The gas companies are starting to raise prices, presumably in preparation for fuel shortages from Hurricane

Rita’s impending strike on the Gulf Coast. Truthfully, I expected it to happen yesterday as the dire predictions for Rita spread quickly.

Oil prices went up in a big way on Monday, but they’d eased some yesterday, so I don’t quite get this pre-emptive escalation of the gas price at the pump. I’m sure it’s “just in case.” Just in case of what is still a question with me!

Precious metals are also reacting, with gold up about 8% over the last week, and silver up about 5%. It’s crazy folks, just plain crazy.

And then the fed raises interest rates yesterday. That one I also don’t get. I’m not an economist, nor do I play one on TV, but it seems like if you know a bunch of price hikes are happening in the economy (primarily driven by oil/gas prices), and that you have a huge amount of deficit spending already underway (Iraq, Katrina) with more on the way (Iraq, Katrina), you probably don’t start trying to tweak the financial model until you understand the effect of the unprecedented things already in motion and the ripples from them.

No matter, this week will be an interesting one to watch as Rita starts her spin toward the coast.

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Katrina’s wounds are still fresh, and word tonight is that the Gulf Coast must prepare for another large hurricane, this time named Rita. It appears that it will strike Key West tomorrow as a category 2 or 3 storm, and will aim for the gulf, destined to make landfall as a category 4 or 5 hurricane around the end of the week. Where will it make landfall? Well, Houston seems likely, but there’s also a chance it could turn north to New Orleans.

My understanding from the news is that New Orleans really couldn’t withstand another strike like Rita is appearing it could deliver. I saw on the news that the Army Corps of Engineers believes that they could stand 3″ of rain across six hours, and a storm surge of five feet or so. If Rita even makes a glancing blow, I suspect New Orleans will see conditions far beyond what they can withstand. The good news is that New Orleans is mostly vacant, and it looks like mandatory evacuations there are coming soon. However, the additional damage that Rita could do to the city and the oil business could be staggering, and surely would impact the economy of the US.

If it hits Houston though, the oil business there could be impacted, and that would also impact the country’s economy. Just the thought of what Rita could do has already had an impact. Oil went up 7% today, gold has surged from about $435 to close at almost $470 today, and silver has gone up nearly 5% in the last week or so. It’s crazy. There’s so much speculation on everything anymore that someone sneezing the wrong way causes the financial world to be rattled. I can’t imagine what gas at the pump will do this week. It got as high as $3.29 just after Katrina hit, and I have to think that it will push at least that high.

This is crazy folks, absolutely crazy. Hold on to your hats, the ride’s gonna get bumpy.