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Shots from the 2013 Lakeland show are up on the site.

“Wait,” you cry, “what about the Floridas? And the Ancient City Classic?”

I’ve always heard “it’s a poor workman who blames his tools”, so this is on me, but since having such nice success with the well-lit shots at the Galaxy, I’ve had hard luck trying to get the new camera to behave in the trickier lights. I went back to full manual for the Lakeland, and though the consistency looks bad, it’s actually a pretty good representation– I love that little theater, but the lights were really uneven. I think some of the automatic settings on the old EOS would have compensated for that a bit… Anyway.

The Floridas I pretty much wrote off as an experimentation exercise– it was going by SO flamin’ fast I couldn’t keep up anyway. If I’d have known, I would have just done full-class shots and been quite happy. But I didn’t, and there were at least a couple of other photographers there in any case, so I’m not going to worry about it. If I promised you photos from that show, drop me a note; I’m pretty sure I can post-process some decent shots out of what I did get.

The Ancient City shots just came out a bit over-exposed; I’ll need to set aside some time for post-processing that out and I just don’t have it right now because…

I’ve also had an external drive, less than four months old, crap out on me; and while I have all the originals, it’s going to take considerable time to re-aggregate them (unless against all hope I can repair the drive and pull the data back off). I’ve been trying to avoid investing in a RAID enclosure but the prices keep dropping and it certainly would have avoided this debacle.

So that’s where I’m at right now– still paddling upstream and wishing I’d checked the paddle for termites. Enjoy the shots and stand by for updates.

Shots from the 2013 Mid-Florida Muscle Classic, held June 15 in Orlando, are up on the site.

This was another big show and though it had a couple of minor hiccups with the lighting early on it ran very smoothly overall.

The early start unfortunately for me meant an even earlier day, and I was having some issues cutting through the fog.

I had to do a lot more straightening and tweaking on the early shots than I normally do, which is one reason it took so long to put them up.

The competitors also seemed to have some issue hearing the judges’ instructions.

The more often this happened the more I began thinking about all the myriad of little things that can slow a prejudging down.

Sure, they are things that only cost two seconds here, four seconds there. There are also times where a delay is absolutely required, for example to give crossover or fitness competitors time to change their suits.

But in general, “dead spots”, times when no judging can occur, really could be minimized– add them all up and they can add significant time to the morning show.

Obviously a big one is the competitors’ ability to hear instructions. Four quarter-turns, seven mandatory poses, swapping competitor order, split-ups, call-outs all add up to a lot of instructions.

Losing 2-5 or more seconds per instruction because the competitors can’t hear them can easily add 5-10 minutes per class.

Easy fix: bring a bullhorn. Not kidding. If the venue PA doesn’t work well enough, use what does.

(In that same vein, could we lose the music during the prejudging?)

Having an experienced stage facilitator is critical. (This is not a knock on any individual.)

He should be in constant standby for judges’ instructions and not afraid to appear on stage to help herd competitors.

A great deal of time is lost in mandatories when competitors insist on performing un-judgeable contortions in preparation to taking the shot.

Well before the show the facilitator should work with the judges to find and mark the best-lit part of the stage and the center of that area.

For shows with large classes, the facilitator should also pre-define the overflow areas so the competitors do not interfere with the judges’ line of sight.

Correcting these issues during the show costs more valuable time.

For classes where individual competitors appear on the stage (e.g. figure), ideally each competitor should be almost on stage when the previous one begins to exit.

This can be accomplished with an assistant, in radio contact with the facilitator, in the audience with a visual signal such as a flashlight to cue the competitor to exit.

A great deal of time is lost in mandatories when competitors insist on performing un-judgeable contortions in preparation to taking the shot.

To resolve this, judges would need to communicate clearly the expectation that when a shot is called, the shot– and not the preliminaries to the shot– should be taken at once.

The absence of that communication over the years has allowed rumors to flourish, including the bizarre concept that “you should always be the last one in your class to take each pose”.

Again, with seven or more poses called in repeated sets per class, losing three, four, five or more seconds per pose can add up quickly.

In summary, I should not be given too much time to think about things like this before I’m fully awake. Enjoy the shots.

Well I found and fixed a bug in the page counter system, where for reasons unclear the count would go as high as 9 then restart from 1. I was starting to worry that no one was looking at the shots since the upgrade!

A little-known “feature” in PHP’s mysql_result() function was the culprit… I reverted to a more “traditional” way of doing it and it’s working. That also allowed (or forced) me to refactor my infrastructure again, so when I next have to make such sitewide changes it can be done much more efficiently.

I also hacked the front page slideshow to force the random photo load.

Even better news is just around the corner, I’m just waiting on final approval, but there’s a very nice update on the way, hopefully by tomorrow… stay tuned.

‘Nuff said.

Sorry for the delay; I spent some time refactoring the maintenance interface to the database.

I cleaned up some of the SQL, scrapped some hard code for jQuery (hey, it’s an OLD interface now!), added some indeces– usual stuff. But it was worth it, I probably saved almost as much time in the entry process as it took to make the changes.

Just as a reminder, these entries are based on notes and are not to be considered ANYTHING like final yet. The only official source of Florida NPC contest information comes from their Web site.

As the NPC and show promoter’s sites get updated I’ll update the schedule, but remember that stuff haapens: venues have date conflicts, sanctions can be denied, and so forth and so on. Always confirm your participation plans with the show promoter.

So anyway, here is the unofficial 2013 NPC schedule. Enjoy.

I recently uploaded some new photos of Peggy H. on the site.

Peggy needed some shots for a magazine and graciously allowed me to use a handful on my own site.

To say I’m happy with them is an understatement.

Peggy is wonderful to work with; she enjoys being photographed and she’s patient with the process.

The new shots are towards the end. I hope you like them too.

Shots from the 2012 Orlando Metro, held April 7th in Orlando, FL,are up on the site.

Sorry for the delay, it’s been insanely hectic of late and I’ve also been fighting with my Web host over some RAM restrictions that have been interfering with the normal operation of the site.

The Gateway shots should be up in short order, and I also did a shoot with Peggy Hilbert recently that will provide a nice update to her page.