On one hand it seems almost incomprehensible that our last post here on the Dry Fly Media blog was not quite seven months ago. Time flies when you’re having fun, and given the daily (more or less anyway) blog fodder that we post over on Chi Wulff (the official blog of Dry Fly Media and friends) we haven’t wandered over here to blather that often.
The majority of our DFM team has been down in Texas doing some decidedly real world (and not fly fishing) related work since June of 2010; we’ve enjoyed our stay in the Lone Star State and the South, though we’re more than ready to get back to home country.
Though our timeline isn’t set in stone right now we should be back home by May of this year and are already lining up our projects for the season.
Speaking of projects, literally the morning of the day Jake and I were to head north to Bozeman to start the final preparation for ‘The Drive’ I suffered a tibial plateau fracture and meniscal tear (knee). Went ahead and left, arriving back home in Bozeman some 28 hours later, though by that time I was hobbled enough to be useless and after some spirited gnashing of teeth we tabled ‘The Drive’ for another time and probably another set of fishing destinations.
The months in Texas have brought much more commercial work to the shop than we’d anticipated and we’re incredibly anxious to get back home, get back on the rivers and creeks and capture images and video related to the fly fisher’s world.
We have several very interesting projects that we’ll be talking about here and on Chi Wulff, including a long planned and anticipated (by us) small stream – native fish feature film that we’ll shoot this season in the northern Rockies.
Hope your winter season is going well and that you’re getting needed work done and flies tied.
We’ve posted this over on our blog Chi Wulff this morning…….
Though somewhat ironically born and raised in the near waterless Texas panhandle, I’ve been fascinated with water, particularly moving water in freestone creeks and rivers, for as long as I can remember.
From the perspective of beautiful freestone rivers and creeks, living in Bozeman can make one think you’re the proverbial kid in a candy store.
Here’s a couple of images from a series that we’ll throw up on our portfolio site later today we’re calling River Diamonds – all the images happen to have been taken on the Firehole and have a unique faceted look that is not a Photoshop effect.
It’s a river effect, and a damned nifty one.
This was one of those just stumbled across it and get lucky techniques and seems to be the easiest to reproduce on the Firehole. Told you that’s a magical river.
There’s a little more of the story over on Chi Wulff; these were taken in about a 10 minute interval a few weeks back while chasing bass with big flies and 8 weights on Lake Austin near Lakeway.
No fish that day, but some interesting images as the sun highlighted a few individual trees in the bend of the shallow river canyon.
We’ve thrown another new image gallery up on our portfolio site – it’s called Madison Cast.
The rapid acquisition capabilities of the newer DSLRs are nothing short of amazing.
This past September we had the pleasure of spending a couple of near perfect fall days on the upper Madison while shooting footage for the new Rivers in Motion series. Jake was working his way downriver with a double nymph rig (just below Hebgen) with the afternoon sun right behind us.
He has a smooth, fairly rapid casting stroke having cut his casting teeth on fast graphite rods; a Canon 5DM2 could still grab some nifty images as he moved through with pretty nifty detail.
Imaging complex movement as discreet still images can be visually fascinating.
We do a fair amount of high end equestrian work (dressage, eventing, rodeo, jumpers) and love the ability of these cameras to freeze fast action right in its tracks.
We’ve been playing a bit of catch up around the Dry Fly Media headquarters since returning from a run to Colorado on Saturday.
Besides trying to lay the hustle, bustle and commercial distractions of the holiday season behind us, different folks on the team have been pounding the hours at real life jobs that seem busier than ever this time of year. (Retail work can be a killer anytime; during the holidays it can seem like slow torture.)
Personally I like this time of year as it brings a sense of closure (sometimes) to the previous year and there’s a sense of new opportunity brewing as we look to next year.
One of the projects that has been pushed to the back burner the last few months has been sorting through and processing the year’s images and videos, cleaning them up, tweaking here and there, forming collections, fine tuning metadata and catalogues – the list could go on and on.
If you’re a photographer or videographer and like to keep your images / vids well organized and catalogued, you know what a time consuming undertaking enterprise this can be.
Jake’s still pounding through the video editing of the new Rivers in Motion work we shot this fall; I was in his office about ten days ago helping with some preliminary editing and the footage does look amazing.
I’ve most recently been working on sorting through this quarter’s several thousand images I need to process, and am starting to pull together a few collections that reflect what we like here at Dry Fly Media. Here’s a new one up today we’re calling River Ice….
We’ve posted it over on Chi Wulff today as well, and written a bit about our never-ending fascination with water – particularly moving water – but water in all its forms.
These images were shot in and around the Greater Yellowstone area over the past year; all were captured on Canon 5DM2s and processed in Lightroom more often than Photoshop.
Winter on the river is often inhospitable but certainly no less beautiful than the bright summer days.
Those of us with current or historic ties to the Gulf of Mexico have experienced a wide range of emotions over the past several months.
The emotional roller coaster ridden by my friends and colleagues has ranged from rage, deep sorrow, shocking disbelief, horror, cynicism, and just plain pissed off to name a few that come to mind as I sit here at my computer this afternoon.
While there’s good news coming from the wellsite here of late, there are mountains of questions yet to be answered about the impacts of the disaster. Most of the folks that we talk to on a more or less daily basis about the Gulf think that both BP and the feds are full of crap and not to be trusted on their best day.
Yet this weekend we again saw proof that there is reason to have hope for the Gulf even today.
Growing up in Texas with family property near Matagorda beach memories of the Ixtoc well disaster in 1979 weren’t all that deeply buried in memory, and yes, parts of the Texas coast were a friggin’ mess back then.
Texas beaches and bayous have been for the most part spared (so far) in the current disaster; yep – we’re lucky and we know it, and we’re thankful.
Fishing near Rockport over the weekend we saw a vibrant bay ecosystem with a lot of hungry residents – including the fair sized redfish that Jake lucked into and Jess at Fire Girl Photography recorded with her Canon.
Don’t count the Gulf of Mexico out of the game just yet…..
Jess over at Fire Girl Photography has been a part of the Dry Fly Media team for a few years now.
Like most photogs who truly are afflicted by the consuming disease that is photography she packs her camera body and lenses just about everywhere.
A few months ago she snapped some images while shooting (firearms as well as her Canon 5DM2) at the humble Logan Gun Range outside of Logan, Montana (west / northwest of Bozeman). Heavily utilized by the neighbors, the Logan range is more than adequate, but those shooting enthusiasts from more civilized locales might deem it a bit humble.
Jess is a member of an international group of photojournalists called Lightstalkers; through connections there her Logan images were picked up by a group out of Germany doing a project called “Images Against Walls”.
The show is a static gallery at Galerie Lichtclick in Koln, Germany and has been shown in other locations around Germany including a recent run at another show – “Horizonte Zingst” in Ostsee, Germany in an old tank hanger of all places.
Jess told me this morning the show will be displayed in the West Bank (Israel) during the month of December.
Life hasn’t been all work and no play these past few weeks, but there sure hasn’t been time on and in the water.
Moving isn’t fun, and moving during the high season in Montana is even less fun.
That said, the team is now more or less settled in Austin and San Antonio, and busy integrating into daily routines of working our various day jobs and exploring the neighborhood.
Jake met up yesterday with Jess from Fire Girl Photography and managed to spend a bit of time on the Blanco River just below its confluence with the San Marcos River. While it’s true that many of the ‘rivers’ in Texas are more like muddy creeks that don’t cover the tops of your wading shoes, there are a few gems down here that deserve some attention. Jess snapped a few nice pics of the outing.
The Firehole they’re not, but on those days when the run to the coast is just a bit too far to manage, sometimes going out and playing tag with the bluegills is simply a great way to spend the day.
We’ve been back and forth to Montana twice in the past two months; given that the summer doldrums have more or less captured the north country, we’re working on several projects down south. Tarpon are back along the south Texas coast (in good numbers as far north as the Port Aransas jetties) and we’re trying to get our arms around a fly fisherman’s perspective of the GOM oil disaster.
We’ll be back shooting a fly fishing feature in Montana in September that should be ready for the winter film tour circuit.
Back to the coast this coming weekend for another try at the Tarpon and whatever else the coast might offer…..
Tempus fugit.
