Phew!  Just got back last night from a commercial shoot in France & Switzerland (as well as spending a couple weeks of personal time in Norway, Paris, Andermatt, & Como), which was just the first of three stages on as many continents.  I fly out again Monday morning for stage 2 in Oregon, then stage 3 in Australia after that, which makes this really more of a 4-day layover…

Anyway, a lot needs to get done today and things in the office are a bit crazy, but I have a few minutes while the hard-drives are humming away; so I thought I’d start a short journal of my day and see where it goes.  Menial stuff for sure but hopefully I can make some of it worth your while:

• 10:45p arrived in SLC
• 11p completely crash after traveling for nearly 24 hours

• 4am wide awake from jet-lag (GMT+2 -> GMT -6)
• 4:30 sync MacBookPro documents back to MacPro
• 5 check facebook, or ‘FNN’ (Friend News Network) as I like to think of it / read up a little on the APE blog & some news / get caught up on emails
• 6 start backing-up 2TB G-Raid2 road drive.  Only 451GB to go…
• 6:10 shower
• 6:30 research materials for constructing a location/computer case for my 17″ MBP.  Inspiration is a mix of the portable monitor kits I saw the film-crews wheel around while on location for The Home Depot jobs, and a video posted by Chase Jarvis a few years back.  I have a traveling iMac kit, but it’s too big & heavy for remote and/or mountain locations, and requires external power.  This one will be a lot sleeker & mobile
• 7:15 notice there’s some very nice cirrus clouds outside, which I like to have for my library of background cloud plates. Load up the car with the H3Dii kit and race down the road to Brighton High where I can get a clean horizon
• 7:25 shoot a few dozen plates of clouds at three focal lengths
• 7:45 back in the office / download images / catalogue in Lightroom 3
• 8 backup progress: 300GB to go.  I use a program called Intego-X5 to synchronize my primary A drives with backups B & C.  Simple, cheap, and easy to use
• 8:30 unpack / eat breakfast
• 9 stop by the post office to pick up the month’s mail.  Received 2 Awards of Excellence from Communication Arts for image series appearing in the 2010 Photo Annual!  A super lightweight mountaineering harness (the ‘Couloir’) from Black Diamond also arrived.  Just the thing for quick trips up to Lone Peak or the Tetons, or ski-rappels next winter
• 9:15 work on finishing up the expense reports for Europe trip. After spending nearly a month traveling by planes, trains, rental cars, and aerial trams & shooting in 5 countries, I’ve got hundreds of receipts / transactions to account for.  Expenses are tallied in Numbers, and then summarized in BlinkBid which handles my billing and basic business financials
• 10 phone call with producer to go over production details for the Oregon shoot.  Location permits secured
• 11 booked travel for Australia shoot.  35 days ought to be enough.  Booked it a bit wide since the shoot dates are still being pinned down, and to have some personal shooting/skiing time afterwards in New Zealand.  I do almost all my bookings on Kayak.com which has great dynamic filters and a relatively simple interface

• 12p 2TB backup done.  Run to the bank to swap out hard-drives.  All of my images are backed-up in triplicate, with the 2nd & 3rd copies rotating shifts in my safe-deposit box every two weeks or after jobs, just in case my office gets robbed, struck by lightning, or worse.  Everything is also backed up in triplicate while on location for jobs, only on smaller 250GB FireLite drives.  As at the office, the third drive always stays in a separate room, or with me, in case my hotel room gets sacked while I’m out
• 12:15 phone discussion with ad agency about changes to next week’s shooting schedule & go over the Australia dates
• 12:20 call with my producer regarding changes
• 12:25 call to assistant in Oregon regarding changes
• 12:30p drive downtown
• 1 lunch at the Taqueria Lolita on 9th & 3rd with my friend Paul
• 2 picked up a few things at Pictureline: a Pelican 1550 case for the location kit & a Canon 24mm f/1.4 lens.  Although I shoot on a lot of different formats, both film & digital, the Canon L-series primes are hard to beat for speed, sharpness, and reliability in extreme conditions.  Both me and my 1DsMk3 were completely and repeatedly drenched by ocean waves during a portion of the shoot in France, but the weatherproofed lenses & body thankfully kept the saltwater out (which is why the H3Dii played the role of backup and hid in the watertight pelican case with the 4×5)
• 2:50 call to my parents, let them know I’m still alive
• 3 picked up a few things at REI: new TSA locks for 4×5 case to replace ones damaged in Europe and a better travel pillow (I hope)
• 3:45 another call with my producer
• 3:50 post office again to pick up today’s mail, return home
• 4-7 working in the office on the new location/computer case.  Contents will include a 17″ MacBook Pro, 3x FireWire 250GB hard drives, a 6×8″ Wacom Tablet, cords & adaptors, extra battery, and ambient light shields for easy viewing outside.  Will post some photos when it’s done
• 7:15 respond to stock image request
• 7:30 emails with ad agency & Marianne about licensing additional images from the shoot
• 7:45 keyword & upload a few new images from Switzerland to my stock site
• 8:30 off to see Inception for the second time with some friends.  Hopefully I can stay awake with a mix of serious jet-lag and Hans Zimmer’s musical ambiance (which I love, love love!)
• 11p crash again, and hopefully don’t wake up till 6 or so…

Some will no doubt feel similarly about watching these retouching clips from a few recent personal images, although luckily they’ve been sped up x10 (an advantage I rarely enjoyed with dad).  Mostly just color-tuning for now, but I’ll try to post a few more with significant compositing when I come to it.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

Example 4:

And, for those who can’t see the films inline, here are the links:

http://www.matthewturley.com/galleries/movies/100213/100213_retouch_b.mov

http://www.matthewturley.com/galleries/movies/100213/100213_retouch.mov

http://www.matthewturley.com/galleries/movies/100212/100212_retouch.mov

http://www.matthewturley.com/galleries/movies/100212/100212_retouch_b.mov

I often get asked which Adobe Photoshop actions I use to get ‘that look’.  While I’m not really sure what constitutes ‘that look’, the short answer is: none.  My opinion is that images should be dealt with on their own terms.  Automation, at least when it comes to photography, is bound to eventually reduce quality.  (That’s not to say that I don’t use Adobe Lightroom’s ‘Sync RAW Settings’ feature extensively, as I consider optimizing a RAW image and even applying a Lightroom ‘preset’ to be very different than full-on retouching).

 However, I do have a few actions that I use everyday.  Three, in fact.  What are they for?  Organization.  My actions simply populate the layer stack with all the elements I need to retouch an image, whether it’s a simple global color adjustment, or a 12-image composite.  It’s color-coded, hierarchal, expandable, and best of all, consistent.

Organization goes hand-in-hand with non-destructive editing and is especially important when retouching with tons of layers (often more than 30!), or when working in multiple sessions as often happens when clients enter the scene.  I’ve often had to return to an image after several months and been very glad that layers were well-named and were right where I’d expect them to be, saving me time and my clients money.

Of course, this system wasn’t developed overnight, which means I’ve also had the experience of returning to images I worked on years ago and wading through a swamp of unnamed layers, complete with nested masks, and funky blending modes.  Sometimes I feel I’m better off starting from scratch.  Either way, it can be pretty frustrating when all you were trying to do was round up a few images for a stock request!