It’s been a few months since our last update here on the Dry Fly Media blog…Jake and I spend more time that we should blogging about the world of fly fishing (mostly) over on Chi Wulff…

Since my last update here, Jake has returned full time to Bozeman and is working on a number of projects there this summer.

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I are in Washington living along the southern reaches of Puget Sound and reveling in the mildest summer we’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s currently my privilege to be spending part of my week with the Gig Harbor Fly Shop team helping them with a website and online store redesign project as well as some enhanced marketing to be done as the redesign efforts are polished up.

We have a couple of very interesting film projects coming together with the aid of some heavy-hitting sponsorship support that we’ll be talking more about as things firm up. It seems the days have otherwise been filled with a flush of demand on the web side of our business which we’re plowing through as fast as we can.

May what’s left of your summer include lots of time on the river or in the backcountry.

We’ve been pondering the future of publishing in the outdoor media world lately, specifically as related to fly fishing. Without a doubt, times are a changing.

Digital magazines, despite their obvious shortcomings which have been debated and discussed in a number of different venues and forums, continue to sprout like summer weeds in our front pasture. We heartily agree with those who argue that content is (still) king, photography alone (even if stunning) doesn’t a magazine make and that the ability to monetize the project is likely directly related to its longevity.

There are a few fly fishing books that have been converted to digital formats, though none so far appear to have taken advantage of the burgeoning technological developments that have surfaced (even in the past few weeks). We too find the conversion of ‘standard books’ to an ‘ebook’ format somewhat blah even if more convenient to read on the go.

The big publishing houses have held all the cards in terms of creation of high-end, multimedia rich digital content up until just recently; the software simply hasn’t existed or has been developed in-house and therefore inaccessible to the small publishing house or independent.

That’s no longer the case.

Apple’s iBooks Author and Inkling’s Habitat programs are a couple of game changers that deserve a watchful eye. We’re working on a couple of concept books right now (one being our long-promised Chi Wulff Friday Feast cookbook) that look very, very interesting in an interactive, multimedia format. The more we look at the potential, the more impressed and excited we are.

More to come.

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.

Jake managed to get some fishing in nonetheless.

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.

See you in the north country.

Two fly fishermen.

A 1983 CJ7 with a top road speed of 45 mph, no working gas gauge and a soft top coming apart the the seams.

Almost 2100 miles of open road from Montana to Texas.

Two weeks to do it.

The 11 Commandments for The Drive:

• Thou shall fish every day.
• Thou shall strive to fish every fishable water en route.
• Thou shall treasure smaller waters.
• Thou shall treasure native fish.
• Thou shall drive no more than 15o miles per day.
• Thou shall record  only HD video.
• Thou shall drive only on back roads.
• Thou shall not push the Jeep beyond 45 miles per hour.
• Thou shall seek out local expertise, fly shops and good fellowship.
• Thou shall not discharge thy firearms unless absolutely necessary.
• Thou shall survive without a radio in the jeep.

More blathering about the project here on Chi Wulff.

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.

We’ve thrown another gallery up on our portfolio site today – River Ghosts.

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.

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.

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.

After killing it twice.

For a variety of reasons and due to popular demand, discussed in detail over on Chi Wulff, we’ve elected to once again revive the Chi Wulff blog.

In fact, Chi Wulff will as of today become the unofficial / official blog of Dry Fly Media.

Friends have nagged us.

We’ve been haunted by nightmares of abandoning Chi Wulff ingloriously this past spring.

Hello old friend.

Chi Wulff is back.

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…..