Jeremiah Tolbert

Happy Monday to you all. Here’s another Thanksgiving Day pho­to­graph from the rocky wilds of Veauwoo. This is another HDR cre­ation, and one that takes a dif­fer­ent approach to the idea than I usu­ally take.

Ordinarily, HDR is good about evening out the expo­sure of a shot–bringing the under­ex­posed and exposed into the mid­dle, and as a side-​​effect it tends to enhance details, most notice­able in the sky. I think that some­times, the default HDR appli­ca­tion can result in a pretty flat image.

This one was my attempt to put some dark­ness back into the image, while try­ing to con­vey the cold dawn mood. I’m pretty sat­is­fied with the results, enough that I’ll be doing some prints of this series to try and sell in Wyoming.

In other news, my sched­ule is not booked up for this month or next month, and I’m tak­ing on all design work large and small. I’m work­ing on push­ing Clockpunk Studios to the next level, with new port­fo­lio addi­tions, a rate sheet page, and a new refer­ral sys­tem intended to reward my loyal friends and clients who rec­om­mend clients my way.

If any­one has any thoughts about how I should cre­ate my refer­ral sys­tem, please, share them in the com­ments. What kind of money would make you more likely to give out my infor­ma­tion when you hear some­one is look­ing for a designer? Some of you are amaz­ing about this already, but I’m will­ing to sweeten the pot…

I spend a lot of time com­ing to cold real­iza­tions lately, as I approach my 32nd birth­day.  I used to think any­thing was pos­si­ble in my life, but I’ve got­ten old enough to admit to myself that’s just not the case in this world.   It’s kind of sad, but I guess it means I can focus on what is important.

A short list of my real­iza­tions lately:

1. I’m not going to dis­cover a way of get­ting rich for no effort.
2. I’m never going to be debt free (see pre­vi­ous rule).
3. I’m never going to be famous.
4. I’m never going to work for National Geographic.
5. I’m never going to work for a video game company.
6. I’m never going to be skinny again.
7. I’m not going to live for­ever. (see pre­vi­ous rule).

And these are the up-​​beat ones…

Anyway, now it’s time to start fig­ur­ing out more pro­duc­tive uses of my time and energy.  I have prob­a­bly got 25 years left in me if I’m lucky and man­age to out­live my father.  Might as well make some­thing of them instead of spend­ing all my time frus­trated and unsuc­cess­ful from hav­ing unob­tain­able goals.

Charles Tan, just one of the most kick­ass fans work­ing the web today, has an inter­view with me posted over at his web­site, Bibliophile Stalker.  We talk about writ­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, web design, and edit­ing Escape Pod.

There’s one point where I sound like I say that I’m reli­gious, but I should clar­ify, what I meant is, even if you’re not reli­gious like I am not reli­gious.  That will prob­a­bly be the last inter­view or public-​​appearance-​​like activ­ity I do for a really long time, but I’m happy with how it turned out mostly.