Have a happy fourth!

Just try not to blow off anything you might want to use later, 'k?

(Yeah, I know, this post is real useful to my readers in Slovakia or whatever.)

Pictures and stuff

I'm slowly getting the vacation stuff online on my other site. I'll be putting a few of the shots on sale here as part of a move to getting some of my non-nude catalog up for sale, but if you're just curious about my vacation I have the first couple of sets up.

Death Valley
Hoover Dam
Grand Canyon

In other news...

The air quality is much improved where I am - hopefully it will hold next week and I'll get some shoots done.

I'm hoping to get Maria's set edited in a week or so but I need to make more progress with the vacation shots first.

I removed some ads from the blog that were slowing things down but added in a little visitor map - it's on the right hand sidebar. If you click on it you can see things bigger and with more data. Kind of interesting that of the European traffic so much is from Germany - France and the UK result in a lot more sales. It's just blog traffic - the main site gets enough traffic that you would probably see a lot of time of day effects since it only remembers so many hits back.

Fire, Fire, everywhere

By the way - if people don't know, there are fires all over California. It's not so bad right here at the moment but there's all of this high altitude stuff - the light is a little orange and for that matter if you look at the hills even a mile away you can see the air quality's really bad. In many areas they're recommending that people stay indoors as much as possible.

I was planning on doing a bunch of outdoor shoots and now I'm not sure what to do - I did the one with Maria on the coast, and that was OK (although I had to color correct out the orange cast), but I was going to do more in the east bay hills and that's not looking so great. Or at least not so great for the "sweeping vista" shots - the more close in ones should be OK.

Basically I'm just going to have to muddle along as best I can.

Nudes in stock

After handling pre-orders I have enough copies left over to open this up now, so if you order from the books page you'll get the book right away (there are options on that page to just order from the publisher as well, which I noticed folks have done - thanks!)

I have one each of the three other books on eBay that I picked up when I got the proof copy, but that's the last of them - after this point if I need to get some other books to get the cost of shipping down I'll just get more copies of Nudes. I'll try to keep Nudes listed on eBay starting later today (I need to set up a little preview for it) for those of you who like that option.

Post Shoot Notes: Maria

Maria had a nice shoot early this morning, basically in a variety of places near the Golden Gate Bridge. Not that you'll actually see the bridge in any images between the smoke from all of the wildfires and the San Francisco fog.

Portrait Price Increases

This applies to my portrait work, not print sales, but I thought I'd mention it here as well. I like to structure things with a really low sitting fee and higher per-print charges but it's time to have things a little less skewed in that direction. After July 15th it's going up.

New Pictures: Kamarose

I just uploaded the new set with Kamarose.