Sep
29
What a fun shoot. Despite the fact that we had to get up at 5:30am to do this one, everything else was awesome. The Lakeway Best Western in Bellingham, WA, was very nice in letting us do this in their indoor pool. The only catch is we had to be out by 9am. As in hair/makeup prep, light setup, troubleshooting, shooting, and teardown by 9…. aka early morning.
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Sep
22
Purchase a Matty Photography gift card for a friend or family member and give the gift that not only lasts a lifetime, but generations. Gift cards can be bought in any dollar amount, and then applied to your special person’s photo shoot.
They are the perfect holiday gift, a fun surprise for you and your partner for a memorable couples shoot, or just to make someone feel special by letting them get captured in their best light.
Sep
21
Remember the days when you saw a really awesome photograph that was visually engaging say… 10 years ago? The comment that inevitably seeped from your mouth was something along the lines of “this is so good, it looks fake,” yet full well knowing it was most likely the real deal, cause at that point in time digital photography and photoshop artists were just really starting to go mainstream and it was uncommon for a photograph to undergo complete and utter manipulation by the knife of a photochopper. Today it’s the exact opposite, if the photo looks awesome it’s gotta be fake. Something has been tweaked, thinned, trimmed, cut and pasted, filtered, and/or drawn. Which brings me into the meat of the discussion…
What has photography become? How unrealistic have we become, how have our expectations lost every little scrap of perspective on the real world? As I browse thousands of model and photographer portfolios I’m overwhelmed by the amount of doctored photographs, neither providing true representation of themselves or work. A model with so much post work done to her she looks like a barbie doll (no exaggeration), and photographers claiming work as “photography” after a picture has spent a good few hours getting “tweaked” in photochop (yes, chop). Hell, the only ones being honest are the photochoppers showing their work, cause that is their true work.
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Sep
17
I’m happy to announce that the Matty Photography website and all other internet services are powered 100% by wind energy. The page you are reading right now is being powered by good ol’ mother nature, just a blowin’ away. And to think, of all those shoots I’ve been on and cursed the wind for messing with my lights, ha!
Considering computers and the internet pretty much run the world nowadays, this green transition is a huge step in the right direction. I just read an article today that they are building a windmill farm just outside Yakima, WA, with the intent to power the entire Gig Harbor area. I got my degree at CWU in Ellensburg (not far from Yakima), and believe me, they’ve got more than enough wind over there to go around. I remember times when walking to class I had to lean a 45 degree angle into the wind just to walk forward, my jeans whipping like flags. Always a constant, and over the years, an extremely annoying howl that always made wonder why the bare hillsides that surrounded the valley didn’t already have a forest of windmills.
Now, I wonder if we can get AlienBee to design a strobe with a solar panel/spin wheel combo on the back, that way I wouldn’t have to lug 30 lb battery packs around on location shoots to power my lights!
Sep
14
Meet Spencer, a senior in high school this year. He’d been on the books for about a month and our date was all set for the first weekend in September for an outdoor shoot (the type you can typically plan far in advance for in the summer). The day before an outdoor shoot I’ll use good ol’ weather.com for hourly reports for the coming 24 hours, the thing is pretty darn accurate. It wasn’t looking good, the chances of rain happened to peak the same hour we scheduled to shoot, awesome… A backup location was selected and we would reroute to it last minute if needed, and boy did we. Though we are not officially in the Fall season yet it certainly felt that way. Rain coming down in sheets, hardest I’d seen since the Spring. Wind blowing in gusts, so even if we got lucky and had a dry window, a good puff from the Gods would use my softboxes like sails and toss my lights to the ground, most likely shattering the bulbs. While shooting in an old garage the wind still found one of my lights and tried it’s darndest to trash it before I could get a sandbag on the base, but Spencer was heads-up enough to catch the thing to lessen the blow on the way to the ground (thanks, bud 
).
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Sep
02
Summer is coming to an end, days are getting shorter, and I have still only gotten out to ride my motorcycle a handful of times during our 4 good months of riding weather here in Washington. While looking at this set of photos it occurred to me, I think I’ve photographed my bike more times this year than I have ridden it. But at the same time, I like looking at the machine almost as much as I like riding it, it’s a piece of art all by itself.
I wanted to shoot something extremely simple yet visually engaging, and this shoot provided just that. I’ve recently been playing with a lot of color gels, creating vivid backgrounds on the seamless. I posed the bike in front of the seamless, threw a single strobe behind the bike with a color gel, and popped the picture. I wanted a nice gradient light falloff, which the single light did perfectly, while also keeping to our “simple” theme for the shoot. Lisa stood in as my shadow rider (I wouldn’t recommend following her riding technique out on the streets ).
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