The Basic Illustrated Guide to Cross-Country Skiing

Hello everyone!

My Post Office Box today had a nice surprise: an advance copy of the book “Basic Illustrated Cross-Country Skiing” published by Falcon Guides. This is good news because I have spent nearly a year doing the photography and editing for this book. More than a thousand images were taken and I had to select just over 100 of them to make it into the book. The editing of those images took a considerable amount of time, particularly for the montage. The weight of the project was partially alleviated by new hardware. Let me take you for a minute behind the scene to tell you what I used:

– A new custom built Windows 7 64bit desktop computer with a Pentium i7 3.6Ghz overclocked by 20%, 16GB, GEForce GTX 560 Graphic Card with 2GB or RAM. 120GB SSD to contain the operating system and 4 different Hard Drives in removable trays for software and data, Liquid Cooling.

– Wacom Intuos 5 Large tablet (saved me hours of editing)

– Two 24” HD monitors

– Lightroom 4 64bit (first the beta which was already rock solid, then the final), Photoshop CS4 64bit, OnOne Perfect Layers 6

Some days were spent miserably outside in the cold with winds that would chill us to the bone, other days were warm and sunny and fun. Sometimes we would get the correct shot right away, other times we would have to try over and over before we got what we wanted. For an entire month the weather was so bad I could not do any shooting.
Scott (the author) and I have worked on many projects for ski magazines and the past experience made it easier as we could visualize the scene and know what the end results needed to be without so many words. Having worked for quite some time in Hollywood in movie production I must admit that this was not very different from shooting a movie.

My thanks go to Scott McGee for bringing his positive attitude (and food) to our photo locations, and to our editor at Globe Pequot Katie Benoit, for the constant positive reinforcement and flexibility with our deadlines.

The cover features Scott’s lovely family enjoying a morning of cross country skiing by the town of Kelly, WY

Available on Amazon

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