lucas-photo.com

Shots from the 2007 Hurricane/Typhoon Bay are (finally) up on the site.

I may have mentioned that the only thing I like better than speed shooting is speed shooting when it really isn’t necessary.

I think it stinks that some competitors get fewer, and worse, shots because of an accident of geography that puts them in the far corner of the stage when their class (or portion thereof) is called out. *Usually* the head judge will swap them around– but not always, and there’s no way to tell until it’s too late.

Part of this is my own fault– since the Dexter Jackson show, I’ve let myself be swayed by what other people think about how shots should look, instead of shooting what I know I’m good at. At the All-South I realized that, and not only got *way* better shots than the last few, but enjoyed the process a lot more as well.

That’s for a future rambling post, though– this one’s hopefully made the point, and I’ve still got to get the Lakeland and Southeastern shots up before I can get to the All-South, then start in on the backlog.

Apropos nothing, I finally got fed up with the games my ISP has been playing, continually losing my counter files on the “virtual host”, so I created a database-driven version that seems to be working a lot better. I fed in the last-known-good value, just over 600K visits, and we’ll let it run from there- though I suspect I’m well over a million hits by now.

Shots from the 2007 Floridas are (finally) up on the site.

It’s been nuts here to say the least. Not sure if I’m going to make it to the Southeastern next weekend or not.

The Florida NPC site has posted the 2007 bodybuilding contest schedule.

I’m still incorporating the data into the searchable schedule on my site, but I did go ahead and post the list of contests I plan to attend this year.

I’ve gone from 13 last year to 10 planned this year, with three of those ten noted as tentative.

Two are tagged for distance, and the third is the Gainesville show, which wasn’t listed in the calendar. I’m following up to see if that was an oversight.

In any case, I’m quite happy with the planned itenerary thus far– I think it’s much more manageable than in years past.

Update: The Gainesville show is tentative for this year. More as I find out.

I updated the Perl and PHP engines for the site, and that broke practically everything.

At this point I’ve got a lot of it back up, including all the 2006 show shots, most of the individual shots, the Perl-based site search and several ancillary functions.

I still have the modeling shots, mini-shoots, and stock photos to do, and I haven’t been able to figure out the problem in the contest schedule yet. So I’ll be looking for hidden problems for a while.

Thanks for being patient.

Update 2006-11-19

Got most of the public site fixed, including the Atlantis memorial site and the contest search page— the global variables I had been using had been disabled for security by the update. Still have work to do on some of the maintenance pages, but I think we’re back in business.

Update 2006-11-20

Just noticed that the mail page function hasn’t been working for some time. Seems to be up again. Sorry about that.

Sheesh, that took a while. Variations in lighting across a stage are absolute murder on shot consistency. Another big show, great work by promoter Chris Eaddy, and finally finally FINALLY I can work on the other backlogs.

Did a quick shoot with Debbie Barnes, looking great for an upcoming show; ran into Ellen Woodley, prepping for the same upcoming show– we may be able to sneak in a quick shoot right before or right after. Saw Belle Turell in the audience, too, looking good after her performance at the North Americans, but her attention was elsewhere.

Anyway, the shots from October 7th’s Southeastern Classic show in Orlando are up on the site. Enjoy.

Shots from the 2006 Gateway Classic in Lake City are up on the site.

Unfortunately, the decision to omit prejudging routines, the rushed pace of the prejudging, and the low lighting levels combined to create some really tough lighting conditions. Some people, alone in their classes, did not even do their compulsories in the prejudging; they got fewer photos in the set.

I apologize for that, but there was nothing I could do. Speed-shooting in bad light is a chancy proposition at best. As it was, I had to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort manually tweaking the sharpness, contrast, and histograms of all the shots, just to make them look half-way decent.

On the positive side, local girl Toni took master’s figure overall; I have approximately ten grillion shots of her and will be posting her page “when I can find time to go through them all”. Ian and I also did a shoot with Wendy, one of the competitors, by the hotel pool and those shots came out very nicely, though they will likely go as a minishoot for now as she only had the one outfit.

One other tidbit: I just noticed from the Florida NPC page that the Space Coast show is back on, June 24. That’s been an enjoyable show in the past and I’m looking forward to it. There are a couple of other interesting things in the works as always, too: stay tuned.

The Florida NPC has posted the official 2006 contest schedule. I’ve updated my site with the new info and adjusted my travel plans– the St Augustine show got moved a bit, and the North Florida show is off. More details as I get them.