Mountains, Rainbows, and Selling Photos of them to Local Businesses
Work has started to pick up for me in the Cortez area, and just like the weather of the current changing of the season, when it rains, it pours.
See my previous post for the GH4 review, and be sure to note the part in my article on Fstoppers where I mentioned that I planned to try and use that video to get work from local businesses such as guiding services, tourism board, and the city.
As it turns out, within a few weeks of releasing that video, I had several meetings lined up, and then soon after I was contracted to produce several new videos. My first client was Mesa Verde Country - a tourism company for Montezuma County (includes the cities of Cortez, Mancos, and Dolores) that is run by the city of Cortez.
Here's some images of me working on a few shoots, which included a Pow-wow, the Reach Out music festival, a tour of Mesa Verde National Park, a beer festival, a local wine dinner, shooting at the city pool, and getting an interview and other footage at the Cortez farmer's market. (The images are very bag-focused because I was doing a review of the new Lowepro Trekker 650 for fstoppers.)
On a rare free day, Jen and I were planning to go hike in the La Platas. Storms had been moving through on a daily basis, but we saw a window of opportunity and went for it, hoping to get dry weather on our several mile hike. We woke up early and began our drive out of town when this view presented itself to the west.
I worked on it a bit in Lightroom and Photoshop and ended up with the image below as the result. I don't like to over process photos to the point where it's a fake looking image, or I'm making stuff up, but some color enhancement, local exposure adjustments, and cleaning up things like road signs that are distracting are fair in my book.
I posted it to facebook and it got a tons of likes and shares, so I decided to contact every person and business I had either gotten a card from or been in email contact with, and try to sell it. I also used it as an excuse to follow up, but also to see if anyone wanted to license it or buy a print. I got several offers, and even got it posted on the front page of the local paper. Not bad.