lucas-photo.com

Shots from the 2008 Gateway Classic in Lake City, Florida are up on the site.

The color consistency is to cry for, which at least accurately represents the lighting at various points on the stage.

Judging, like photography, is a visual art, and the impact that good, even lighting has on the equitable presentation of competitors cannot be overemphasized.

(Well, actually, it can. You could say something like, “If one guy’s in shadow and the other guy’s in good light, plague and pestilence will reign upon the land!” and you’d be completely out of the ballpark and no one would invite you to parties any more. But good and balanced lighting is still *very* important.)

Apropos nothing, if the price of gas stays the way it is, I’m going to have to cut some of the shows from the plan this year.

Finally another visible dent in the backlog: shots of lovely Florida competitor Jenny Tremblay have been added to the site.

I hear that she’s been very busy of late but with any luck we’ll see her back on the competition stage soon.

I started (insert the eternal “at last” here) working on shots of cute fitness competitor Teresa Meryman from that same show in Lakeland. They were coming out very nicely, but I paused when I realized how long it’s been since I’ve heard from her– she may not want them on the site now, and I still have a *ton* of other shots to catch up on, not to mention the shots from Saturday’s show in Lake City that are only about 2/3 finished.

Anyway, I shot an apologetic email to the last address I had for her; if anyone knows how to contact her, ask her to check her mail as soon as she can.

At long last I’ve finished the updates to Sherry B.’s page. I’ve created an entire new page for her, so let me know how you think that works.

Some of the shots were underexposed, which revealed magnificent blue gradients in the sky, but left Sherry’s image too dark to discern details. I didn’t want to lose the composition, though, so I used a variation of the Zone System to try to remedy these.

– First, I pasted a copy of the entire photo as a new layer.

– Then I tweaked the histogram of the new layer so that her skin tone appeared more natural.

– Finally, I masked the new layer, then edited the mask to allow the tweaked layer to peek through on the original background.

Tracing such a precise outline with a mouse was tedious but I think the results are wonderful.

Shots from the 2008 Wheelchair Nationals/Sunshine Classic are up on the site.

I’m quite happy with the shots, for the seat I chose. I put a lot of the things that I learned at the February RMSP seminar up in Jacksonville to good use.

The giant white CJ banner fouled the white balance in the shots if a competitor moved, or was placed, entirely in front of it. Most shots I shot slightly off-center to keep a certain portion of the banner in the frame for white balance, then cropped it out in post-processing.

I left the show early.

More specifically, I had to leave before the prejudging was complete because I had other obligations. The show started an hour late, and ran at a pace I can only call moderate to slow. No useful explanation was forthcoming for anything.

Maybe I was grumpy because it bumped lunch so far back, or maybe I’ve been spoiled by really well-run shows of late, but after a while it gets to feel just plain insulting– and I’m *used* to a bit of delay, Bob only knows what the first-time spectators thought.

Everyone got shots, though, and I got to my next stop on time.

The official 2008 NPC schedule is out, so I verified, expanded, and corrected the search page.

I’ve been working on a new view of the calendar but it’s barely our of pre-alpha stage– it doesn’t yet handle multiple shows on the same date, for example. If I can ever clear the decks of backlog I’ll add “download to Outlook” and/or “download to iCal” functions and let someone else worry about the calendaring.

Also, on the main page, I updated the summaries to pull data directly from the blog, based on whether or not the blog post is slugged with the “site update” category. That will save me updating the information in two places, as I nearly always give site update details in the blog anyway.

As an aside, it’s reassuring to see so many contests now having their own individual information sites on the Web. I think soon we’ll see that become a requirement, and following the logical progression, a centrally-hosted service.

Some change on the host has caused all of the bodybuilding contest pages to break. I’m looking into it and will get the pages back online as soon as possible. Thanks for being patient.

Update: One of the environment variables I was using to calculate image names was no longer available. I worked up a fix and luckily I was able to use _sed_ to do mass changes, so I had everything working again a few minutes later.

Please let me know if you see anything broken!

Some new (well– I’m so far behind that nothing is really “new”) shots of Katherine S. are up on her page. The original shot lighting was marginal, so I let myself get a little creative on the post-processing, and I think they turned out great– she’s such a lovely girl, and the composition was good enough to support some different looks.

In other news, a very considerate person sent me a map of Six Flags Atlantis and I have added it to the Atlantis Memorial. Thanks Chris!

Coming up next: “new” shots of Sherry Bubeck.