Mar
31
This afternoon I headed for the Chena hot springs resort. It’s a joint roughly an hour out of Fairbanks. You really start to understand how large the state of Alaska is and how spread out the residents are when you drive on a highway for a good hour and can count the number of cars you pass going the other direction on both of your hands. Beautiful land and a lot of it!
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Mar
31
Already knew when I started this post it would be a two-parter. Have way too many pictures and not enough time to go through them right now, but I wanna stay true to my word and post a couple photos a day while I’m up in Alaska. That handsome devil with his chin resting on a ice block is me! My bud Brian and I walked through the ice festival carvings here in Fairbanks with our DSLRs. It is thee location for this stuff and where the world’s best carvers come to compete. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I didn’t see it in person. Absolutely amazing ice sculptures, some almost 30 feet tall! Granted we walked through the park after the festival was over and the sculptures had been there for weeks. Another unfortunate issue with the ice is that Fairbanks has been surprisingly warm this last week, with temps rising above freezing in the later afternoon. So the ice has melted a bit and the sculptures lacked the once amazing detail from when first carved. However, one benefit we had going for us was that since the event was over we were able to walk in and around the sculptures that are normally roped off.
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Mar
29
Is it just me, or has airport security gotten a little out of control up here in Alaska? First you want me to take off my shoes, then my laptop has to come out of the bag, you give me the stink-eye while I walk my barefoot ass through the metal detector like you are waiting for me to yell the word ‘bomb’, and check my ID 47 times before I buckle my seatbelt on the plane. But this next move is truly over the top. Bears… yes, bears. Bomb-sniffing bears are now patrolling Alaskan airports. These two jokers were at the Fairbanks airport greeting people at the baggage claim.
In all seriousness, these things are huge! I know bears are big and all, but geez. It was impressive enough to see these things encased in glass boxes, I couldn’t imagine one out loose. The polar bear, the largest MEAT EATING land animal, true story, just looked it up on wiki. You survival dudes are crazy thinking I’m gonna lay my butt on the ground in the fetal position, crossing my fingers he doesn’t swallow me whole. So… what is the logic here? So I can make it easier for me to fit in his mouth? Bite-sized Matty, served on a platter. I’ll be running… fast and in the opposite direction. I don’t care if he catches me, at least I won’t be laying on the ground messing my pants. I’m hear to tell you, if I mess my pants it’ll be while I’m running at full speed, thank you very much. According to wiki, CocaCola has been lying to us all these years. Apparently polar bears do NOT drink their pop, nor have the ability to flick the cap off the bottle, how depressing.
Forgive the poor pics, they were taken with my iPhone, the glass doesn’t help either. Got in really late last night and settled into the hotel. Got out really later today and got some pictures of the local ice sculptures. Got some really awesome stuff! I’ll be posting those tomorrow evening, or night… cause I’m an hour behind all you PNW’ers right now. See ya tomorrow!
Mar
28
I’m packing my bags and flying up to Alaska today for a week-long journey. Unfortunately, I’m not heading up for a photo assignment, but I am taking a camera body and some lenses with me. I’m hoping that I’ll get some good opportunities to capture a bit of Alaska while I’m up there. My goal is to update the blog every day or two with shots from up there. This is my first trip to Alaska, some I’m pretty excited. Stay tuned for shots!
The photo above is from a shoot a few months back. This bus ended up being a backup shooting location. Our primary location didn’t work out, well… more like kicked out, but that’s ok. Found this bus, amazingly it was unlocked, so we shot away in it. Below is another BTS shot and a finish photo from the shoot.
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Mar
27
As you may have read a few days back, I ventured up to Bellingham a couple weekends ago to work with the Upfront Theatre. Great group of people there, very funny. They’ve been getting a lot of attention lately and have been integrating a lot of new shows into their weekly set. They are consistently selling out with standing room only left by the time the shows start.
The picture above is a screen shot of the cover of Cascadia Weekly. A publication that is distributed in Northern Washington and the lower British Columbia area. Totally caught me by surprise. Ya see, I shot those pictures for the Upfront for general advertisement stuff, never thinking they would see the cover of a magazine. Got an email shot to me by the marketing lead at the Upfront, opened up the link and bam, I see my work on the cover. Kinda made my day. 
I’m looking forward to our next shoot together!
Mar
24
It was a busy last week for events. Shot everything from a floral presentation for Thomasi here in Tacoma to a memorial reception up in Bellingham. Looking at my portfolio, you wouldn’t think I worked many events or even at all. It is a whole different animal, event photography. I’m always looking at the world not just as a giant set of photo opportunities, but being a huge flash lighting guy, I’m always thinking of ways to put some extra spice and flavor into a photo by using creative lighting. In a sense, taking photography to the next level and creating my own environment with my light, the way I like it, regardless of the existing lighting environment. That is not how the event photography world works. And no… throwing a hot shoe flash onto my camera and blasting people is NOT proper event photography, I will argue that until the day I die. On-camera flash completely flattens an image, takes away the ambiance of the event and how people experienced it. Event photography is all about adapting to the environment, working with the existing lighting no matter how bad it may be. Yes, there will be times when an on-camera flash will be needed, but geez… it’s that last ditch effort when your environment is giving you next to nothing to work in. I see it too often, the “pro” working an event and blasting people with a flash when it is completely unnecessary. Doesn’t take but an amateur to know how those photos are going to turn out. I shake my head, resist the itch to ask them a completely rhetorical question, and keep walking.
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Mar
18
25 MBs a pop, yes, that’s right… every time I click the shutter on my 5D mkII, the 21.1 megapixel DSLR consumes 25 megs on the memory card. The real concern is not how fast today’s cameras fill up 8 or even 16 GB memory cards, it’s at the end of the day when I have a total of 10-20 gigs of file data to upload, edit, and store. Shoot 3, 5, however many sessions a week… you start eating up disc space like crazy. I store and backup every picture I’ve ever shot in the last 5 years. I used to store all of my data on a 1 TB drive, then have another 1TB drive to backup the first drive in case of a drive failure. It was annoying, cumbersome and I got real tired of all the manual backups. Enter the drobo unit.
The drobo is the best thing to happen to anyone who needs a simple, no thinking required, redundant storage solution. It’s a RAID’d external hard drive setup (RAID is a fancy acronym meaning if you lose one or two drives, you still retain all of your data). I won’t go into the details, you can surf the drobo site for that. The drobo unit can hold up to 4 hard drives of any size, you can even vary the size and make of the drives. The drobo unit then takes all of the drives and combines them into one large virtual drive. For example, my drobo has four 1.5 TB drives, and all RAID’d together as one drive, providing space for redundancy across all drives, I get a little over 4 TB of storage. Like I said before, I can have up to 2 drives fail at one time, and all of my data is still secure. This all provides me with a massive storage device with the peace of mind that all my data is safe. It can connect up to your PC or Mac, with high-speed USB and firewire interfaces (it also can be configured and hooked directly into your network and accessed from any machine on that network).
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Mar
16
DK and Morgan, two improv comedians from the Bellingham area, were a blast to shoot. They asked me to shoot some funny situations that they could use for marketing their show. As a photographer, it’s usually my job to entertain and make my subjects feel comfortable, in-turn getting a relaxed, fun image with a genuine smile. The guys made my job easy, in fact, I was the one who was entertained. Instead of worrying about getting a expression on my clients’ face I had to worry about missing good ones ’cause theses guys stayed in character and kept the jokes rolling. I don’t think I’ve laughed my way through a shoot quite like this before. I turned on the lights, pulled the camera out of the bag and these guys started a little mini improv show without me even asking. We setup a couple different scenarios that we thought would be comically strange and a good improv environment for advertising these goofs. Kinda like the… “caption this picture” situation.
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Mar
07
Wow… had an awesome time up in B-ham. Made the journey North for 4 days to work with the folks at the Upfront Theatre. I made the most of my stay and squeezed in a bunch of shoots. Just wanted to post up since it’s been a while. Expect much more stuff coming to the blog now that I’ve gotten all of the workshops and workshops’ site launched. It has taken up so much of my time.
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Mar
01
Yes, they are finally here! I have built a website just for the workshops, as I think this is the best way to keep my photography and the workshop information separated to prevent confusion. Many of you have been asking “when, when, when!” I’ve spent many long, late nights putting these bad boys together for you, and I’m proud to say they are ready for ya. I’ll see you all at the workshops!
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