Selling my beloved Kona 29er ... $350.

SOLD - SOLD - SOLD

I'm selling my beloved Kona Unit 2-9, single speed 29er mountain bike. I bought it about two years ago (new), and put it through normal paces in the DC Metro area (e.g., Wakefield, C&O, Elizabeth Furnace) and in mountains out west. Unit is dinged per normal usage, but no issues. Great fun, simple, light and reliable. (I've moved on to a Specialized Evo 1x10.)

Size is 19" (I'm 6'1"), with stock components (Avid disk brakes), plus Time Atac pedals and both road and mountain tires. Here's a spec for the 2011 version: http://www.konaworld.com/bike.cfm?content=unit ... Pictures of my bike below.

If interested, please email jamesrwilson@gmail.com or call (6-9:30 PM) 571.239.6772.

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The bike's palmares, such as they are, include rides up to Broken Top, Tumalo Falls and various loops in Bend, round about Sisters, Oregon, Seattle bike parks, Olympic Peninsula, a couple times up and down the length of the C&O Canal, lots of single and double track around Boulder, Colorado, and various ventures about DC and Skyline Drive -- and a Spokes Etc. best 'photograph-your-bike' award ...





Thank you.

Seattle/Olympic Peninsula

Great week attending database conference in Seattle. Well-focused sessions and, a good benchmark for any conference, developed more than ten ideas for things to consider back at work. My agency is merging with a larger agency (good news), so it's a good time to reflect.



Professional matters aside, I very much like Seattle, a town of interesting architecture, culture, waterfronts, and restaurants. I brought my mountain bike in a travel bag, so I could take in pre- and post-conference rides. Logged about 75 miles, sometimes rising before dawn to hit the mountain bike park or ride around Lake Washington. After the conference, I took the ferry to the Olympic Peninsula where I grabbed more rides and walkabouts. The trip also afforded the opportunity to break in my new pocket camera, a Leica D-Lux 5. While the camera is more fragile than my Canon G10 (which I sold), the Leica image quality is very, very good.







Had a little difficulty on Miller Peninsula, off Sequim Bay / Puget Sound (bottom picture). Got lost and spent a couple hours re-tracing my path, without much success. Finally bushwhacked over towards the bay as dark approached, and made my way back to car. A bit of adventure, lucky no harm ...

Additional pictures here.

SV 13-14 Closing Up and Logistical Notes

Site Visit Day 13-14 (Saturday-Sunday) -- Magical Saturday finish to January 16-31 EHN/LeAlem site visit. Several morning patients, including aged pastoral woman requiring two levels of translation -- from Oromifa to Amharic, from Amharic to English. A beneficiary mother and child, both receiving treatment. Met Alemayehu's 84 year-old father, Dinku, who lives 185 Km north of Addis (he still herds a few cows). A grateful patient whose daughter I know in Washington sent several gifts -- goat skin sandals, an ethnic shirt, and a copy of the Quoran. Most amazing and generous, social worker Almaz threw a party at her compound in north Addis. We had extraordinary foods, a traditional coffee ceremony (bean roasting on eucalyptus fire, then grinding and brewing), followed by an exhilarating dance party with about ten children -- LeAlem family members and friends -- going wild. Also, many fine gifts from Alemayehu and colleagues. I reciprocated with a lot of gifts I'd brought from DC. I was overwhelmed, nonetheless.















The town is partly shut-down due to the African Union summit. The zone between the Hilton, Sheraton and Africa Center (ECA) is chock-a-block with machine gun wielding security personnel. Cars are not allowed to pass and much traffic is at a standstill.

Sunday, I got up early and packed. Great breakfast at "Parisienne Cafe." Later, Alemayehu and I drove to the top of Entoto mountain, at 10,000', site of King Menelik II's palace before his wife Queen Taitu led him to establish the present capital 2,000' lower, Addis Ababa (new flower). After our hike and tour of the old palace and 700 year-old church and sepulchre nearby, we lunched and returned to Allemayehu's house to spend a comfortable afternoon with his wife Wolansa and son Joshua. Of course, I was sated by more great food, coffee, bread and honey. At the aiport at 7:30 PM for 10:15 PM departure. Scheduled arrival Monday morning.

Logistical Notes

On the logistical front, many things about the trip went well. I'm a bit compulsive when taking big trips -- they're once-in-a-lifetime experiences and one missing part could be pretty disruptive, particularly on the technical front (e.g., forgetting a camera battery charger.) Also I carry a lot of technical stuff -- cameras, lenses, and computers, -- and this trip had unusual heathcare issues, such as visiting HIV/AIDS patients.

Not to be too exhaustive, but here are a few tips that made a difference for me.

• Expect communication failures In Africa, where English is usually a weak second language to native tongues, communications get jumbled and folks you are speaking to often say "Yes. Yes." when they don't understand. This trip, for example, when I checked-into my hotel I asked to extend my reservation to January 31. The clerk said "Yes" but he heard "21" and, as a result, I had a guy knocking on my door asking me to leave way too early. Luckily, I carried copies of my confirmation letter from the hotel and battled to stay longer ... then downshifted to a cheap guest house when I could extend my stay no more.
• Bring lots of documents Related to the above, I brought lots of documents, full copies of my vaccination records, business visa letter, print outs of Google maps for the Addis area, lists of phone numbers for contacts, country maps, the mix. It is very hard to get good printed information once on the ground. For Ethiopia, the best guidebooks I found I bought on Amazon in the US.
• Know the US Embassy 24x7 phone number When I got bad sick, this was invalauble. The emergency number -- embassy "Post One" -- connected me with a medic who talked me through symptoms and course of treatment. Really helpful in an unfamiliar place, when faced with a complex problem.
• Photographically, be excruciatingly clean Addis and probably most north African countries are dust bins. Two minutes out of the hotel and you have a thin layer of dust on your clothes and camera. So, try to keep everything sealed-up. Don't pull your camera from the bag until you need to take a picture, bring a couple canisters of compressed air to clean-up at night. I used a damp washcloth every night to wipe down the exterior surface of gear bags. I never changed a camera lens except in my hotel room, after I'd taken a shower or bath. (The bump in humidity keeps the dust down.) Also, I kept lots of back-ups on multiple media: on computer copies, external USB back-up, CF cards (never re-used cards while on travel), internet photo site, burned CDs/DVDs ... as noted, this type thing is a once-in-a-lifetime deal, and I don't want to chance data loss.
• Clothing I'd traveled in Ethiopia, Egypt and similar places before, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, including visiting slums and interacting with sick people. I pretty consistenly wore an L.L. Bean safari jacket, sort of like a canvas sport coat with extra pockets. It was a good barrier against the dust; I'd shake it off at the end of the day -- $59 at post-Christmas sale (I wish I had brought two!). I generally wore light, long sleeve shirts, including the "Buzz Off" anti-insect variety. Seemed to work well. For pants I'm a devotee of Columbia khaki trousers with a zipper pocket inside the right-hand pocket. Put my wallet and stuff I didn't want pick-pocketed there. $49 on sale at REI; I think I own six pairs, traveled with four. I wore trail sneakers and cushy socks most of the time. I brought a sport coat and ties for fancy meetings.
• Healthcare and personal protection For health protection I always carry blue EMT gloves (even when home) in case I need to get involved with someone else's body fluids. I took my EMT kit when visiting slums. I avoid letting children touch my face, and I brought six bottles of Purell alcohol gel cleanser to sterilize my hands quite often. I made a mistake picking-up one child with Typhus, but I scrubbed down afterwards. I put on SPF 30 sunscreen before heading out each day. Addis is above 8,000' so I drank lots of water -- and I only drank bottled water, not tap. I had an episode of food poisoning; Alemayehu speculates it was some uncooked cheese. I'm uncertain. I had many vaccinations, a few more than usual due to my healthcare work -- Typhoid, Yellow Fever, Hepatitis A/B, Rabies, Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus (DPT), H1N1, Meningococcus -- and I brought Ciprofloxacin, Malarone for malaria (didn't take it), various pediatric and adult analagesics, Lomotil, Pepto Bismal and such. One thing the embassy medic suggested was carrying packs of moist baby wipes; I didn't, but I carried TP in my bag.
• Drivers You probably don't want to drive in Addis -- it's a very complicated place without good maps and most drivers negotiate every intersection, rather than paying attention to signals. Pedestrians (and goats, cows, sheep, donkeys ...) walk randomly on the road and, by law, they have the right-of-way. Ethiopia liability laws are heavily weighted against drivers. I had drivers from LeAlem, took a few taxis or often walked to get around.
• Lodgings I did very well with lodgings, at both ends of the spectrum. At $100 US per night, the Jupiter International Hotel (Kazanches) proved ideal. A short walk from LeAlem, clean, good restaurant, free breakfast and -- key for me -- free Wifi. This compares to the Hilton, about a kilometer distant, at about $200 discount rate (no free Internet), and the closer Intercontinental, also about $200. Pictured below is the Jupiter lobby/bar, where I spent time watching soccer, lunching, listening to jazz, and working on my laptop. At the other end of the spectrum, at $25/night, was La Source Guest House, in the Meskal Flower district. It was cheap but very clean and safe, endearing native art work on display. (I had to stay there when my Jupiter reservation lapsed).

All in all, a great trip, enjoyable, and, I think, good for people I care deeply about.

LeAlem 2010 Picture Library
EHN Blogs

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Post -- Home safe in Arlington Monday morning 11:00 AM. Good flight. Time for hot bath, laundry, dog walk ... back to my real job tomorrow!

Camera Choices

I received a pre-Christmas note from a friend on which camera to buy and I thought about it and wrote back. FWIW, I'm sharing my thoughts ...

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On cameras, the brand I've worked with is Canon. It's been good. I went there because I thought the digital color was strong and pro usage is pretty extensive ... though of course there are flame wars between Nikon and Canon. Both brands offer exceptional options. Here's what I've looked at and work with --

Point and Shoot -- the top rated two options are the Canon G10 (now the G11) or the Leica D-Lux 4. I bought the Canon G10 for about $500 and subsequently lusted after the Leica for about $700. (The Leica has some awesome image quality for a small camera and a certain elite appeal.) However, as I got used to the Canon, my lust faded. Leica, while nice, is too "precious" ... not as sturdy as the Canon, no auto lens cover, a little harder to set. The Canon G10 or G11 gives you a lot: Great image quality, the ability to shoot in RAW format (and, subsequently, edit/post-process native image files without loss of quality ... this is really important to me). Plus it has a pretty bomb-proof metal case and feels okay in the hands.

On the digital SLR, there are a lot of options. I started with Canon's Rebel for about $500, and moved up to the 5D (which cost new about $3,000). But, really, many Canon SLR bodies will be just fine, particularly as you get started. The key thing that makes the difference is the quality of the lens. The kit lens I got with the Rebel was pretty weak, about a $100 thing ... the images were never very sharp. My first higher end lens was the Canon 70-200 F4L, about a $600 deal (non-I/S). The damn thing delivers great results, all my shots at bike races (including candids) are from that lens, both on the Rebel and the 5D. Subsequently, I added the 24-70 F2.8L (the wedding "brick") and I'm probably going to get the 135 F2L before my next overseas trip. So, I'd recommend a reasonably inexpensive digital SLR like the Rebel or a used 20D or 30D, and spend more money on good glass -- which you'll keep using if you move the camera body up the food chain.

One advantage of the point and shoot is that it is portable and mostly self-contained -- e.g., it has its own flash, no need (or ability) to change the lens. The SLR is more complicated (and more capable, as you grow ... some pros, though, like Chase Jarvis think the iPhone is the best thing since sliced bread (mostly because it's easily ubiquitous ... if there's good light).)

There are lots of review sites out there. I think Fred Miranda is among the best -- http://www.fredmiranda.com.

So, these are my starting thoughts. Get something you like, that feels right, and shoot a lot. Henri Cartier-Bresson, my favorite photographer, said something like "Your first 50,000 shots will be bad, so get them over with." It's a great art form, and way to remember things you like, your family, the mountains.

The other piece of the equation is what you do after you take the pictures. I discussed this here.

Anyway ... I hope you have a great holiday and that photography brings you as much satisfaction as it does me.

G10 (first outing), 6.20.09

I like to take pictures and I like to ride bikes. I need to ride to help keep my body (such as it is) from falling apart. I'm going to Bend in a few weeks (as Soigneur and father), a land of great rides and visual splendor. But my photography kit -- a Canon 5D and a passel of lenses -- isn't bike-suitable. It doesn't go in a jersey pocket. I have a little old Nikon Coolpix point and shoot. It's serviceable, but with 3 Mb pixels and all, it didn't feel up to snuff. I test rode the Coolpix last weekend out in Poolesville and up and down Sugarloaf. The shots were pretty mediocre. So I traded in a summer's worth of kitchen points today and pulled down a Canon G10, a 15 Mb pixel gizmo that also shoots RAW. Everyone raves about it. $450 at Best Buy. (I lusted after the Leica Dlux 4, but at about $700 ... I couldn't walk that plank ...)

Today I did a quick walkabout with the G10, from Rosslyn across Key Bridge into Georgetown. My initial reaction to the work is not astounding. Obviously, I still have a lot to learn to optimize the shots (I need to re-read the instruction manual, for starters) ... but I was concerned that even with 15 Mb pixels some of the shots came out sort of grainy, a moire wash. Also, as I knew, the gizmo isn't much for action shots, taking more than a second to cycle through a capture. On the other hand, the color seems spot on and it can grab pretty sharp detail. I'll keep practicing and I'm pretty confident by the time I'm rolling about the Three Sisters or Crater, in Oregon, the shots will be snazzy.

Trade Zone, 3.15.2009

Rented Canon 300 mm F4L I/S lens from Penn Camera (Tyson's), $35/day, for try-out shots at Trade Zone training races.  (Images posted here.)  I usually shoot 70-200 F4L zoom.  I like the zoom because I can do more variety -- e.g., close-up people shots, candids, mild panorama.  That said, the 300 was something else.  Amazing sharpness, gorgeous color (despite drizzle).

Grey, misty, about 45 degrees.  Shot at ISO 800, action shots 1/1250 or 1/1000, candids less (1/400 +/-).  Lens wasn't too heavy, handheld just fine.  Good reach into race action.  Nice bokeh (softness behind shallow depth of field).  Left about halfway through the 'A' (fastest) race; rain become more steady, didn't want to gum the lens.  The rental lens improves outcomes, but at $1240, I'm not ready for kitchen point deficit.

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Follow-up note:  Used 300 mm with IS mode 2 (panning).  Will try it next with IS turned off to improve focusing speed.

Creating DVDs for NCVC Awards Fete

Every year (for the past 3-4 years), I get tapped to produce DVDs that will be used to project images on the walls or in big screens at NCVC's annual awards banquet.  It's a nice movie folks can watch as they nosh and socialize.  Each year, it's the same pattern -- I forget how to produce DVDs (because I only do it once each year and technology changes).  This blog entry is a scratch pad for what I did in 2008 so I can re-use my method next year, and have a little less stress.  (My work is really intense now and comes home with me, so I don't have much soft time to do hobby and charitable work.)  The pattern described below is related to the photo processing workflow described here.

First:  Go into Aperture (photo workflow management application).  Select all 2008 images rated 3 or higher.  Establish keyword "NCVC 2008" (or such) (shift-H to bring-up keyword HUD).  Second, go through all selected photos and mark those with the keyword that you want to show at the banquet.  If there are not enough selected quality images, set rating filter to 2 and above.  In 2008, this selection process garnered 600+ images.  (Took 2-3 hours, aided by fine merlot.)

Second: Select all images with keyword "NCVC 2008" or such.  Export image versions (JPGs) at full resolution to a new disk drive folder.  (Took about 10 minutes on Mac Pro.)

Third: Launch Macintosh iDVD application.  Select "File/Magic iDVD" (create).  Choose a theme.  (I like "Reflective Black.")  With Mac Finder, select folder of images exported from Aperture and drag photos onto movie, into box labeled "Drop Photos Here:".  Enter DVD title, click the "Create Project" icon/link, and hit save after the project initializes.  (Do saves often during this work.)  (Took about 20 minutes on Mac Pro.)

Fourth:  Refine the DVD.  In tree view of the DVD content, drag the slide show (pictures that were imported) onto the top icon so that the DVD will autoplay the slideshow when inserted into a DVD player.  Double click on the slideshow to view discrete images, and delete or re-order images, as desired.  I did my first run DVD with projection ratio at 16:9 letter box TV format.  On review, I went to 4:3, standard TV format (for whatever reason, seemed to look better on my  big screen HDTV). Don't forget to turn on looping mode so the DVDs will run continuously.  (I forgot, and had to re-burn DVDs a third time ...)  With iDVD, you can also add music and all sorts of stuff.  (I didn't.)

Fifth:  Burn the DVD.  When everything looks good, select "File/Burn DVD" ... insert a DVD (DVD-R is the format I used).  Burning the initial DVD requires about 20 minutes on the Mac Pro (used to take about 45 minutes on my entry-level MacBook).  Subsequent DVDs can be burned in 2-4 minutes, each.  Put the DVD in a DVD player to test, to make sure it came out right.  If not, go back in the process.

You're done.  Hopefully I'll be able to find these notes in 2009 and life will be good, our economy will be robust, banks will stop failing, car makers will be lean and competitive, Santa Claus will come down the chimney ...

Bike Jam

The kids and adult racers at Saturday's Bike Jam were incredible.  I shot about 1,700 images, and posted a few hundred to the web.  Light was fine -- bright, sunny and contrasty.  I pushed ISO to 800 for the later races, which gave good depth (e.g., F8+ @ 1/1250).  The Canon 5D handles high ISO very well; it's tough to see different image quality from ISO 400 to 800.

My friend and favorite bike photographer -- il miglior fabbro -- Kevin Dillard was at the Jam, so we coughed-it-up a bit.  I did a number of shots of photographers at the race.  I think these guys and gals are sometimes the odd appendages that really inform us about what is going on.  Not unusual for a 75-degree sunny day athletic event, there were a lot of gorgeous folks about.  And some canines.  So you'll find them in the mix of spandex and sweat.  Also, some blue sky American flag images.  Memorial Day weekend 2008.

Mac Pro

Bit the bullet.  A great first-year plus in the Apple world with my Macbook (Intel 2 GHz Core 2 Duo) transitioned to more serious iron:  I grabbed a Mac Pro from Craig's list.  The Mac laptop is great, but it isn't designed to be left on most of the time and crunch gigabytes of RAW files -- or so I reasoned.  The Mac Pro is a chunky tower, runs two dual-core CPUs at 3 GHz, and came with 5 Gb RAM and a terabyte of storage (across 3 internal hard drives).  I'm cautious about high-tech gear from Craig's or Ebay.  This unit came from a respected firm that chose not to go Mac, and had two years left on its Apple Care service program.  I researched comparable refurbs at Apple ("Refurbished Mac" at store.apple.com), learned the machine's history ("hardly used since our old IT guy left"),  reviewed the machine on site, slept on the deal, and checked kitchen points with Care.

I picked it up Thursday lunchtime and set it up that night.  Ran Software Update to get the latest version of Tiger (it was running OS X 10.4) and other things.  Hooked-up the Macbook with a firewire cable, ran Apple's Migration Assistant to transfer data and applications, and after about an hour, the MP was racing on its own, running the old programs, email and the like.  I dawdled into the early morning, arranging disk volumes and back-up routines to my liking.  (A 232 Gb main drive holds boot and application files; a 750 Gb drive holds Aperture libraries and iTunes music; and a second 232 Mb holds Aperture vaults.)  I use a 500 Gb external firewire drive for backup.  Friday, I picked-up OS X 10.5 -- Leopard.  It installed without difficulty.  I configured Leopard's Time Machine to back-up the main drive (but, importantly, not the Aperture images).  I configured SilverKeeper to back-up the Aperture libs.  Everything seems to cook pretty well.  I'll take pictures at Sunday's bike race and gauge post-processing performance that night.  One item I yearn for is a reliable, affordable Blue-Ray drive, that will allow me to burn 50 Gb disks that I can store off-site ... prices will probably drop to $300 or so this summer.

The MP is playing iTunes (Schumann) and the MB is tucked in its case, ready for the next flight to Africa or out-of-town race (Ephrata, I think).  No more beach balls.

Photography techniques/workflow

After posting Jeff Cup pictures, I received this note and question: "All your images are spot on. Thanks for posting. Two questions: In general do you take a machine gun approach when shooting? Then later pick the choice ones to post and what kind of post-processing do you do if any? Obviously your lens are awesome but the richness of the photos seem a bit more. Thanks for your time."

Here's a shot at an answer: Thank you. Given all there is to know and the depth of great photographers, I'm a beginner. About 1968, I started as a 9 year-old in a small basement darkroom in DC, mixing chemicals, developing and spilling. I continued as a high-school and college journalist, writing and taking pictures. My heroes were the photojournalists at the civil rights marches and in Vietnam. (My father George Wilson was a war correspondent for the Washington Post -- and a pretty good war photographer as the situation fit. My namesake James Ricalton was an early photography pioneer.)

After my camera was stolen during a 1981 trip to Mexico, I pretty much hung-up serious photography. In 2006, when my son started photography class in high school, I got re-interested. I picked up an inexpensive digital SLR, the Canon Rebel XT. This is a great camera, but the thing that really makes a big difference is that I bought excellent Canon L-quality glass, after finding the $100 kit lens that came with the XT murky. My first L was the 70-200 F4.0L; I use this $600 lens for most cycling shots. I use the more expensive 24-70 F2.8L for party, Africa walk-about and similar shots. Under the right conditions and usage, these lenses produce great images. In fall 2007, before going to Africa, I upgraded my XT to the Canon 5D. (I gave the XT to my sons.) The 5D image quality is phenomenal, particularly in low light. These shots are the 5D working without a flash, and mixed stage lighting, at my 13-year-old's Kennedy Center Concert. ISO is set to 3200 and the shots are mostly noise free (but with some graininess when cropped).

When shooting bike races, I'm often tempted to hold down the shutter release and take a series of images (the 5D shoots 3 frames per second) 'machine-gun' style, but so far I'm almost always disappointed with the results. (Plus, post processing a bunch of sub-par images wastes time.) I'm probably doing something wrong, or the continuous drive servo-focus doesn't do as well as I'd like. My best shots seem to be the ones I wait for, frame, and press the shutter release. I have a pretty good hand/arm, and can hand hold the 200 mm down to about 1/60 or 1/125 second. (The 70-200 F4L doesn't have image stabilization.) My sense is that to be successful a photographer has to be sensitive, guileless and incautious, stepping into the fray. (I was arrested in Spain by Guardia Civil for doing this, photographing ETA protesters ... almost the same fate marching with protesters in Mexico. I watched classmates hurry past slum kids in Cairo; I stopped to photograph.)

At last Sunday's Jeff Cup, the weather and light sucked. It was sleeting, snowing and then rainy, gray and flat. I shot the indoor shots at ISO 1600; most of these came out pretty well. I shot most of my outdoor shots at ISO 400 and 1/1000 or 1/800 second. Because the ISO was only 400, my depth of field was lower than I liked -- mostly F4.0-5.6. At about 20 feet from the cyclists, my sharp depth of field was about two feet -- so you see a lot of shots where one rider is sharp and the other is hazy (sometimes to good effect). I probably should have shot higher ISO to get better DoF -- but I was sensitive to the graininess-under-enlargement or -crop from some prior work, like the indoor Kennedy Center stuff.

The summer before I got the Canon XT, in 2006, I started raging against the PCs in my house. With a couple teenage kids and lots of web/email/game interaction, the PCs always seemed to get spyware infected and lose performance and stability. A former CTO, I spent too many nights -- or all nighters -- delousing Windows and reinstalling and stabilizing software. When Apple introduced the Mac Mini, I threw out my sons' PCs and substituted in the Mini (toss the Windows CPU, and plug in the same old monitor, KB and mouse). The Minis worked great; things stopped breaking. I later followed, pitching my PC for a basic Macbook. It's been great; does all the email, finance and web development work I want. When I got the Canon, I bought Apple's Aperture for photography post processing and upped RAM to 2 Gb. While I'm not a student of Adobe's Photoshop or Lightroom, Aperture does everything I want. I haven't begun to use most of the capabilities of Aperture 2.0 (or 2.1). It's fast and keeps me well organized. Also, for a good look, at home, I have a 23" Cinema Display at 1920x1200 connected to the Mac. Once a month, I use Datacolor's inexpensive Spyder tool to calibrate the display.

Here's my basic post-processing workflow: I shoot everything RAW. Usually, I fill 2-3 4 Mb CF cards during a day-long bike race. (I carry a ThinkTank wallet with about 10 4-Gb CF cards in my pocket; I got real compulsive when traveling in Africa, with multiple backups and DVD burning every night.) When I get home, I put the CF cards in a card reader which imports the RAW images into a new Aperture project. At Jeff Cup, I captured about 600 images (including a number of ill-advised machine gun spews). I review and rate each image on a scale of 0-5. From the Jeff Cup collection, I marked about 125 images as a '2' and about 5 as '3' ... Since going digital, I've only marked a handful of images 4 or 5; the picture has to be really sharp, well composed and meaningful to get a high rating. Most of the Jeff Cup pictures were plausibly well-focused but uninteresting. I left these unrated (0). About 10 of 600 pictures were blurry messes or unintended shoe shots and got deleted. Photos with a two or higher rating get posted on the images.jamesrwilson.com website.

Almost every Jeff Cup image with a 2 or higher rating is cropped using non-destructive Aperture editing tools. (Non-destructive means the original RAW (or JPEG) file is unchanged, but a mask or filter is applied so that when the image version is displayed on-screen or exported (e.g., as JPEG) for web posting or printing, Aperture renders the modified version.) After cropping, I check image characteristics such as exposure, color saturation and contrast. For a richer look, in some images, I'll pop-up the exposure and contrast, or I'll slightly increase saturation. Other images I'll drop saturation for an old-school black-and-white effect, like this one. All this is pretty easy to do with Aperture. I spend about 1-2 minutes for each image with a 2 or higher rating, and a cursory 5-10 seconds 'passing by' each less rated image. (This also means that, in the interest of time, I often skip pretty good images ... my sons insist on reviewing all the images themselves and they negotiate in some images I didn't rate well.) So my total pre-web post processing time for an event like Jeff Cup is 4-6 hours. A multi-day event like Fitchburg usually runs about 6-8 hours -- I set-up my laptop in the race hotel lobby and process away. When I get home, I review edits on the Cinema Display (because the laptop screen isn't very precise).

After I've selected and adjusted the images for an event like Jeff Cup, I post them to an image hosting service. Until recently, I used phanfare.com, but that is becoming a registration-based social networking site, so I dropped the service. Now I'm using zenfolio.com, which is a professional photography site. I started with zenfolio in March 2008; so far, I'm pretty pleased. It costs $100/year and lets me resell images (as prints processed by Miller Photography). And just recently (e.g., this is my first post), I set up a blog on Google's blogspot.

For refreshers and learning I keep an eye on these sites: fred miranda, pixelatedimage, bagelturf and others.

My apologies. That's a long answer. I'm learning. Cartier-Bresson said your first 10,000 pictures are your worst. I'm catching up to that mark.