My work is outstanding and that is evident by the number of photos I get published in papers and magazines on a regular basis. Actually the problem is that I'm not a very good salesman. It doesn't come natural for me. I'm very busy this year so in addition to being a lousy salesman I'll never have time to improve in that area as long as I'm so busy.
I'll just have to hope that some manna falls out of the sky by the middle of the summer.... ;-)
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
What's wrong with my work?
photo was randomly selected to illustrate my work and not meant as criticism of those pictured
What's wrong with my work this season? I'm having beyond a miserable year supplementing my gas and hot dog budget. So far a big fat $0 (compared to the other photographers I know who all report that they have done well so far). I'm not sure what the solution is or even if there is one but I'm funded for a couple more months so I hope things improve.
Isn't the sharpness clear enough?
Is there a problem with composition?
Does the color balance look off?
Your feedback is encouraged, please send to: mndirt@hotmail.com
As always my work is done primarily in support of the racing publications and tracks.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
I'm afraid we're gonna' get hammered this weekend
I'm afraid that the rain is going to be the big winner this weekend. It's so darned dry that for sure we need the rain but the timing could be better, not just for racing fans but for everyone who enjoys the outdoors.
If we go get a race in this weekend I'd say the best chance is going to be on Friday. I'm hearing terms such as isolated and scattered in regards to Friday night with showers continuing until at least 1pm Saturday and temps struggling to reach 50. You can pretty much bet that a race is not going to happen under those conditions. I see that Cedar Lake has a rain date for the Billy Anderson Memorial this year and I am thankful for that.
If we go get a race in this weekend I'd say the best chance is going to be on Friday. I'm hearing terms such as isolated and scattered in regards to Friday night with showers continuing until at least 1pm Saturday and temps struggling to reach 50. You can pretty much bet that a race is not going to happen under those conditions. I see that Cedar Lake has a rain date for the Billy Anderson Memorial this year and I am thankful for that.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
A good weekend right out of the box...
I took the camera out of the cabinet for the first time in six months this past weekend. Everything looked good right out of the box and the new lens produces some great images. I'm extremely happy with the results. Here is a small scale sample:
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Writing about my weekend so far, but wait, there's more to come...
Good Friday is one of our holidays so that makes it's a GREAT FRIDAY, but for those of you who worked it was good because Friday is always good. Finally it sounds like we're going to get a decent weekend but not before Red Cedar and Cedar Lake were forced to cancel their scheduled opening nights. Hecklers will say "they could have raced" but reasonable people will take into account the frost covering their windshields every morning this week and understand that sufficient drying did not take place and post sundown weather was not warm enough to attract a crowd. Those diehards who would have showed up in their snowmobile suits will protest with the aforementioned complaint but reasonable people with little kids in tow outnumber them and promoters know that the families go a lot further making the bottom line work than a couple dozen diehards. Complaints aside, next weekend's preliminary forecast is calling for more spring-like conditions though still not warm after sunset by any means but jittery promoters with one eye on the economy and remembering the six lost weeks of early 2008 will oblige die hards. In other words, I predict that we will race next week come hell or high water. A fitting expression in the upper Midwest because you never know which one you're going to get in the early spring, hell like temps or high water.
You probably noticed that my blog has been silent lately. That's because I have been brushing up on 25 years of public speech training. My public speaking experience includes addressing large audiences and I am a past member of the Toastmasters club. No matter how long you have been a Toastmaster you're always learning. The Toastmasters has a thing they call "table topics" that goes something like this:
The Table Topics portion of a Toastmasters meeting takes place before or after the formal “prepared speeches” segment and usually lasts 20 or 30 minutes. The Topicsmaster announces a topic or question and calls on several members, one at a time, who give impromptu one- to-two-minute responses to that topic.
When you’re called (or volunteer) to speak during Table Topics, you’ll do well if you keep your remarks brief and to the point. (This is often easier said than done, however!) Try to present sensible, worthwhile ideas that add to the knowledge of others and organize your thoughts into a mini-speech. You’re encouraged to refute or elaborate on ideas and information already presented by other participants.
The challenging thing about Toastmasters was that I was required to speak extemperaniously (on the spot with no warning). That didn't bother me, I could deal with that but sometimes they would come up with some off the wall subjects that I couldn't relate to which forced me to learn to wing it. I left the Toastmasters because I didn't have time to prepare speeches during the racing season when spare time is always at a minimum. I can barely get the grass cut, the projects done and fulfill family obligations as it is without having to write and practice speeches. Toastmaser's is a great organization but it's a big commitment of time that was starting to cut into racing. Anyways, I'm shaking the dust off my speaking skills and will soon be putting them back to work.
Back in 1987 the Traffic Department was eliminated by Northrup King in favor of decentralization and out sourcing. Consequently, I found myself out on the street for four months. I had a severance package and a room full of music and recording equipment that saved me from going nuts worrying about finding a job. Equipment included a multi track recorder, a keyboard with beat tracks, a borrowed bass guitar and my own electric six string guitar. Even though I can't sing worth a damn and am not the best guitar player I spent the summer writing and recording songs to keep my mind off being out of work. It was fun working with a multi track recorder, laying down all the tracks and pinging from one track to the next. I tried to keep the total number of tracks around eight to maintain the integrity of the sound. Back around that same time I was traveling around with a friend's band and helping with the sound. I played guitar at their practices and even stood in on the bass guitar for one of their gigs. I learned a lot about recording but that was before home computers became popular so it was all done with audio tape. Today's recording technology is way better and it has been easy for me to pick up due to my recording experience.
I installed a gig of memory and a 1tb second hard drive in my computer yesterday with no problem. Unfortunately I made a bad decision and tried to install Ubuntu on a partition on the new drive and that set my productivity back about six hours. Grub boot loader comes bundled with Ubuntu so I thought, why not setup a dual boot system because I had used Linux on my wife's computer for a year and would like to master using it on a daily basis. Problem is that when I got it installed and tried to reboot the Grub boot loader locked up and showed an error #21.
I spent an hour trying suggestions posted on the Linux forums like changing the boot order and several other things that didn't work. I narrowed it down to a drive controller conflict on some systems and I saw where people who experienced this problem had posted screen shots of the error code and the Ubuntu team would evaluate the problem and respond. When I saw that I knew I was in trouble because I can't afford to lose a week this time of year so I had to do an XP recovery. Besides insufficient printer support another one of the drawbacks of Ubuntu is time consuming hardware compatibility issues like this one. I would still like to run a dual boot system with Linux but that's going to have to wait until after the racing season. Even the off season only offers a narrow window of time between the pre holiday photo rush, the GRP contest and ramping up for the coming season. I'm putting Linux on the back burner but I intend to try it again in the future. Anyways, the system restore went well and the only thing left to do is enter an occasional password and download a few browser plugins. I'm doing a long format of the new drive partitions then I'll set one up for file sharing so I can put our growing collection of family photos on it. The other partition, about 500 gigs, will be for my racing photos. That's the reason I got the large drive, so I could copy a decade of scans and CD's to one easy access location. I'm sick of digging through shoe boxes of CD's every time I need to go into my archives.
I got rid of my Qwest DSL and phone service and went to cable internet and saved about $50 per month. I purchased a Skype account and got a USB headset with a microphone so I can make calls anywhere in the US free of charge. We got a USB adapter to connect our cordless phone to Skype so it can double as a home phone system. The USB adapter directions and Skype directions were cryptic and I couldn't figure out the call sequence to make outgoing calls with the cordless. I could call my cordless on the Skype number with a cell phone and received the incoming call but I couldn't call out. Seeing as it worked fine using the headset and I could receive calls with the cordless I knew there had to be a setting or dialing sequence that I wasn't seeing. I posted the question on the Skype forum and one of the moderators replied with the answer. You have to use the country code, (area code-phone number) and an * after the number. That solved the problem but I'm thinking to myself "here I am building and maintaining computers and I can't figure out a USB phone adapter"...what's wrong with that picture? I can do almost anything with technology as long as there are good directions and I'm wearing my reading glasses. LMFAO Seriously, that is one of my pet peeves, electronic devices with incomplete directions and poor help sections on their websites.
So that's what I have been up to lately. My goal now is to apply my speaking, recording and tech knowledge to racing.
Today is going to be a nice day so as soon as I get the last load of laundry in the washer I'm going to run to the store and buy a gas grille. So far this morning I got up, fed the cats, made the coffee, have one load in the washer and one in the dryer, took out the trash and straightened up the kitchen. The wife finally got to take the sling off her arm after six weeks and started physical therapy. Talk about a kick in the *ss, the copay is $35 per visit and she's got to a couple times a week. On top of that she's got another unrelated procedure that has to be done next Tuesday so I might have to take a day of vacation unless she feels comfortable driving herself there. She did get in the car and went shopping yesterday after six weeks of not driving. I hope that she finds a ride or feels comfortable driving there herself because I have already used too many vacation days and racing hasn't even started yet.
If you have a family some years are going to be like this where other things have to come before racing. Some years it has been my medical problems, a few years we had a daughter and granddaughter living with us and this year we're dealing with my wife's health problems. I suppose I could have been like some of the racing fans and stayed single but I love the family connection and racing is just one aspect of my life. I think you can kind of see that, especially early in the season when all these rabid fans are running all over h*ll looking to attend their first race. I stay home and try to get some early outside work done, clean the garage, get organized for the season and wait for the racing to start at my local track. As far as I'm concerned I can drive a half hour to see weekly classes at two tracks so I'm not going to travel long distances and incur motel expenses or do a redeye for a weekly show. I'm a specials events snob when it comes to traveling, it's got to be something pretty big for me to travel that far. I only have a limited amount of money to spend on racing and with my wife not working and going through physical therapy I have to plan my schedule out carefully. Hopefully I'll sell a few pics early in the season but I'm not counting on it because that's so competitive early in the season that I never sell much this time of the year. There are several photographers that make a living selling pics and they go after the hero card business very aggressively early in the season. Consequently, guys like me who take photos mostly for the publications and don't canvass the pit area selling photos like they do kind of get shoved aside until a little later in the year. I have so many things going that I don't have time to do a lot of the custom artwork anyways and don't have a competitive low cost bulk printing source so I just step aside and let them knock themselves out. My bread and butter as far as photos is selling enough of the 5x7's and 8x10's to supplement travel expenses. This year is going to get off to a tough start so I hope the wife heals up quickly and I don't have to start cutting the planned travel out of my schedule.
The vacation roster has been tough this year too. Usually when one gets older and gets more seniority scheduling improves in their favor but in my case our staff is being reduced by retirements making single day vacation scheduling more difficult. Thursday and Friday vacation for some of the events I have taken for granted like the Masters and USA Nationals may be difficult to get this year. I decided to quit camping out at multi day shows because there aren't any electrical hookups so I can't charge batteries and send to the publications from my camper. The partying and lack of sleep was getting old anyways, the way I look at it now is that I can only do one or the other, not both. Often I'm up until 3am after the races photo editing and getting organized for the next day. Try doing that with a hangover in a 100 degree tent trailer with no electrical hookup or internet access sometime. I've got a couple of single day events that I'll camp out at but that's going to be the extent of it. The Firecracker/WoO weekend and Jerry Richert Memorial will be my two camping excursions this season. I don't know if I'll be able to afford the motel for the Deer Creek WoO and Jackson Nationals weekend but I can guarantee that I won't be doing those with a camper. If I can get the days off and I can't afford to stay in a motel with high speed internet I'll probably just do the WoO after work on Wednesday night then head for home. There's always plenty of work around the house and nearby weekly shows to attend. I love the Jackson shows but the way it's getting anymore for me 210 miles feels more like 2010 financially and vacation wise.
Later.
You probably noticed that my blog has been silent lately. That's because I have been brushing up on 25 years of public speech training. My public speaking experience includes addressing large audiences and I am a past member of the Toastmasters club. No matter how long you have been a Toastmaster you're always learning. The Toastmasters has a thing they call "table topics" that goes something like this:
The Table Topics portion of a Toastmasters meeting takes place before or after the formal “prepared speeches” segment and usually lasts 20 or 30 minutes. The Topicsmaster announces a topic or question and calls on several members, one at a time, who give impromptu one- to-two-minute responses to that topic.
When you’re called (or volunteer) to speak during Table Topics, you’ll do well if you keep your remarks brief and to the point. (This is often easier said than done, however!) Try to present sensible, worthwhile ideas that add to the knowledge of others and organize your thoughts into a mini-speech. You’re encouraged to refute or elaborate on ideas and information already presented by other participants.
The challenging thing about Toastmasters was that I was required to speak extemperaniously (on the spot with no warning). That didn't bother me, I could deal with that but sometimes they would come up with some off the wall subjects that I couldn't relate to which forced me to learn to wing it. I left the Toastmasters because I didn't have time to prepare speeches during the racing season when spare time is always at a minimum. I can barely get the grass cut, the projects done and fulfill family obligations as it is without having to write and practice speeches. Toastmaser's is a great organization but it's a big commitment of time that was starting to cut into racing. Anyways, I'm shaking the dust off my speaking skills and will soon be putting them back to work.
Back in 1987 the Traffic Department was eliminated by Northrup King in favor of decentralization and out sourcing. Consequently, I found myself out on the street for four months. I had a severance package and a room full of music and recording equipment that saved me from going nuts worrying about finding a job. Equipment included a multi track recorder, a keyboard with beat tracks, a borrowed bass guitar and my own electric six string guitar. Even though I can't sing worth a damn and am not the best guitar player I spent the summer writing and recording songs to keep my mind off being out of work. It was fun working with a multi track recorder, laying down all the tracks and pinging from one track to the next. I tried to keep the total number of tracks around eight to maintain the integrity of the sound. Back around that same time I was traveling around with a friend's band and helping with the sound. I played guitar at their practices and even stood in on the bass guitar for one of their gigs. I learned a lot about recording but that was before home computers became popular so it was all done with audio tape. Today's recording technology is way better and it has been easy for me to pick up due to my recording experience.
I installed a gig of memory and a 1tb second hard drive in my computer yesterday with no problem. Unfortunately I made a bad decision and tried to install Ubuntu on a partition on the new drive and that set my productivity back about six hours. Grub boot loader comes bundled with Ubuntu so I thought, why not setup a dual boot system because I had used Linux on my wife's computer for a year and would like to master using it on a daily basis. Problem is that when I got it installed and tried to reboot the Grub boot loader locked up and showed an error #21.
I spent an hour trying suggestions posted on the Linux forums like changing the boot order and several other things that didn't work. I narrowed it down to a drive controller conflict on some systems and I saw where people who experienced this problem had posted screen shots of the error code and the Ubuntu team would evaluate the problem and respond. When I saw that I knew I was in trouble because I can't afford to lose a week this time of year so I had to do an XP recovery. Besides insufficient printer support another one of the drawbacks of Ubuntu is time consuming hardware compatibility issues like this one. I would still like to run a dual boot system with Linux but that's going to have to wait until after the racing season. Even the off season only offers a narrow window of time between the pre holiday photo rush, the GRP contest and ramping up for the coming season. I'm putting Linux on the back burner but I intend to try it again in the future. Anyways, the system restore went well and the only thing left to do is enter an occasional password and download a few browser plugins. I'm doing a long format of the new drive partitions then I'll set one up for file sharing so I can put our growing collection of family photos on it. The other partition, about 500 gigs, will be for my racing photos. That's the reason I got the large drive, so I could copy a decade of scans and CD's to one easy access location. I'm sick of digging through shoe boxes of CD's every time I need to go into my archives.
I got rid of my Qwest DSL and phone service and went to cable internet and saved about $50 per month. I purchased a Skype account and got a USB headset with a microphone so I can make calls anywhere in the US free of charge. We got a USB adapter to connect our cordless phone to Skype so it can double as a home phone system. The USB adapter directions and Skype directions were cryptic and I couldn't figure out the call sequence to make outgoing calls with the cordless. I could call my cordless on the Skype number with a cell phone and received the incoming call but I couldn't call out. Seeing as it worked fine using the headset and I could receive calls with the cordless I knew there had to be a setting or dialing sequence that I wasn't seeing. I posted the question on the Skype forum and one of the moderators replied with the answer. You have to use the country code, (area code-phone number) and an * after the number. That solved the problem but I'm thinking to myself "here I am building and maintaining computers and I can't figure out a USB phone adapter"...what's wrong with that picture? I can do almost anything with technology as long as there are good directions and I'm wearing my reading glasses. LMFAO Seriously, that is one of my pet peeves, electronic devices with incomplete directions and poor help sections on their websites.
So that's what I have been up to lately. My goal now is to apply my speaking, recording and tech knowledge to racing.
Today is going to be a nice day so as soon as I get the last load of laundry in the washer I'm going to run to the store and buy a gas grille. So far this morning I got up, fed the cats, made the coffee, have one load in the washer and one in the dryer, took out the trash and straightened up the kitchen. The wife finally got to take the sling off her arm after six weeks and started physical therapy. Talk about a kick in the *ss, the copay is $35 per visit and she's got to a couple times a week. On top of that she's got another unrelated procedure that has to be done next Tuesday so I might have to take a day of vacation unless she feels comfortable driving herself there. She did get in the car and went shopping yesterday after six weeks of not driving. I hope that she finds a ride or feels comfortable driving there herself because I have already used too many vacation days and racing hasn't even started yet.
If you have a family some years are going to be like this where other things have to come before racing. Some years it has been my medical problems, a few years we had a daughter and granddaughter living with us and this year we're dealing with my wife's health problems. I suppose I could have been like some of the racing fans and stayed single but I love the family connection and racing is just one aspect of my life. I think you can kind of see that, especially early in the season when all these rabid fans are running all over h*ll looking to attend their first race. I stay home and try to get some early outside work done, clean the garage, get organized for the season and wait for the racing to start at my local track. As far as I'm concerned I can drive a half hour to see weekly classes at two tracks so I'm not going to travel long distances and incur motel expenses or do a redeye for a weekly show. I'm a specials events snob when it comes to traveling, it's got to be something pretty big for me to travel that far. I only have a limited amount of money to spend on racing and with my wife not working and going through physical therapy I have to plan my schedule out carefully. Hopefully I'll sell a few pics early in the season but I'm not counting on it because that's so competitive early in the season that I never sell much this time of the year. There are several photographers that make a living selling pics and they go after the hero card business very aggressively early in the season. Consequently, guys like me who take photos mostly for the publications and don't canvass the pit area selling photos like they do kind of get shoved aside until a little later in the year. I have so many things going that I don't have time to do a lot of the custom artwork anyways and don't have a competitive low cost bulk printing source so I just step aside and let them knock themselves out. My bread and butter as far as photos is selling enough of the 5x7's and 8x10's to supplement travel expenses. This year is going to get off to a tough start so I hope the wife heals up quickly and I don't have to start cutting the planned travel out of my schedule.
The vacation roster has been tough this year too. Usually when one gets older and gets more seniority scheduling improves in their favor but in my case our staff is being reduced by retirements making single day vacation scheduling more difficult. Thursday and Friday vacation for some of the events I have taken for granted like the Masters and USA Nationals may be difficult to get this year. I decided to quit camping out at multi day shows because there aren't any electrical hookups so I can't charge batteries and send to the publications from my camper. The partying and lack of sleep was getting old anyways, the way I look at it now is that I can only do one or the other, not both. Often I'm up until 3am after the races photo editing and getting organized for the next day. Try doing that with a hangover in a 100 degree tent trailer with no electrical hookup or internet access sometime. I've got a couple of single day events that I'll camp out at but that's going to be the extent of it. The Firecracker/WoO weekend and Jerry Richert Memorial will be my two camping excursions this season. I don't know if I'll be able to afford the motel for the Deer Creek WoO and Jackson Nationals weekend but I can guarantee that I won't be doing those with a camper. If I can get the days off and I can't afford to stay in a motel with high speed internet I'll probably just do the WoO after work on Wednesday night then head for home. There's always plenty of work around the house and nearby weekly shows to attend. I love the Jackson shows but the way it's getting anymore for me 210 miles feels more like 2010 financially and vacation wise.
Later.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Thursday, and I have a few things to cover...
The latest issue of the Midwest Racing Connection is now posted on theracingconnection.com Check out my "Inside Dirt column and interview with Ron Bernhagen of the Upper Midwest Sprintcar Series.
I switched from DSL to a cable internet connection so if you have my old email address, gotomn@mninter.net, in your address book you'll want to delete it and use mndirt@hotmail.com instead. I'm still using stanm@gotomn.com but am in the process of migrating all of my email messages into the hotmail account because it's easier to manage and I can access that one from work during the day.
Southern Minnesota is supposed to get hit by a snowstorm this weekend so I think it's a safe bet that the Deer Creek opener will not take place as scheduled. Red Cedar has already canceled their scheduled opener that was supposed to take place on April 10. I'm already looking ahead to the weekend of the 17th and 18th as the probable opener.
We'll, I've got a bunch more to say but am too busy to type right now. I'll pick it up tomorrow.
Oh, one more thing. When I signed up for Facebook I had no idea that it would keep me so busy....
I switched from DSL to a cable internet connection so if you have my old email address, gotomn@mninter.net, in your address book you'll want to delete it and use mndirt@hotmail.com instead. I'm still using stanm@gotomn.com but am in the process of migrating all of my email messages into the hotmail account because it's easier to manage and I can access that one from work during the day.
Southern Minnesota is supposed to get hit by a snowstorm this weekend so I think it's a safe bet that the Deer Creek opener will not take place as scheduled. Red Cedar has already canceled their scheduled opener that was supposed to take place on April 10. I'm already looking ahead to the weekend of the 17th and 18th as the probable opener.
We'll, I've got a bunch more to say but am too busy to type right now. I'll pick it up tomorrow.
Oh, one more thing. When I signed up for Facebook I had no idea that it would keep me so busy....
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