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!
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
Last weekend I spent a couple hours with the kids of the Mossor family. The family wanted some individual and various group shots of the kids. Another glorious rainy day in Washington, of course, which limited our shooting possibilities. But, this is why I love Tacoma, especially the downtown district. There are countless little nooks and crannies with cool walls and textures that can be found under cover and out of the rain, you only need about 20 feet of covered space to rock a shoot like this. Rain or shine, I can shoot all day long in Tacoma, love it.
The Mahala belly dancers performed at the masquerade dance I attended last weekend. It was a surprise for me, thinking I was showing up to shoot people dressed in interesting costumes, and out come a group of belly dancers! The group performed twice throughout the evening, and were very entertaining. They ended up being my main photographic focus of the evening.
The QSA Club put on a masquerade dance last Saturday evening in Bellingham. It was one of the first dances I've been to where almost everyone actually danced, and they danced the whole 4 hours! Some came totally decked out some pretty amazing costumes, some in whatever they were comfortable in. Regardless the attire, their was a very positive energy in the air and everyone had a great time.
It's so important going into a project to bring some sort of a vision along for the ride. You just don't show up to a location for a gig, drop your gear bags, look around with your hands on your hips, deeply inhale, and then with a sigh-like exhale go "ok, so how we gonna get this baby done?" Don't get me wrong, in some cases that is literally the situation you are thrown in, but in all instances when you are lucky enough to get that planning/conceptualization time... USE IT! That's why I thought I'd write up a little post about "the vision" that goes into projects, where the concepts start, how I work on key visuals, etc. The following are some sketches from the concept phase that we drew up prior to the shoot day side by side with shots from the video we just finished last week. Yes, you will always get something a little off from your sketches, whether that be restrictions of your location, time, access, etc., but some of the sketches below show how the main idea is retained from the concept and carried through to the final product. This first guy is a perfect example of that. We originally had a cat sitting on the bed to give it a more "homey" feel. But... you can always count on the most predictable animal to act like a D-bag when you really need them to pull through for ya. Our ridiculously lazy cat model, who on any other day wouldn't move if you stepped on him, decided to emulate a curious cat on a crack high, not sitting for more than half a second. Oh well. For the rest of it, it worked out pretty much to plan.
The Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN), yes, it's a mouthful... put on a video contest focusing on hand hygiene. They teamed up with 3M and created three video categories broken down by specific content matter and time, all dealing with different manners of hand cleaning. Voting starts Jan 25th, and the three finalist will be posted on AORN's site for deciding the winner. The winner takes home $5000 for their hospital's education department. I'm obviously pulling for Tacoma General. Here is the video we put together for the 1-minute, hand washing category. There were specific information and visuals that needed to be integrated in the video, but for that most part, we had a lot of flexibility, and we really differentiated ourselves from the pack by telling a story with video instead of adding another tally to the countless instructional videos out there. Let us know what you think! Public voting will decide the winner out of the 3 finalists next week. I'll post again with a link to the contest voting so that you all can vote once it's available.
Started working with a new client the other week, Tiare Floral Design. A floral designer local here to Tacoma. Doesn't sound too exciting, eh? Yeah, well he's not exactly the kinda guy who is taking calls at flowers-r-us. When you think of a floral arrangement I can guarantee you it's not anything close to what Tomasi, the designer, is creating. I've had the pleasure of seeing his work in person, and it's not something you'll find the Safeway florist slapping together. Tomasi approached me and said he really liked my work, I said the same, and we were booking shoots that day. I'd never shot flowers specifically, but after seeing Tom's work, I was very excited to take a shot at it. We talked about present and future projects. The most interesting aspect of our future work coming down the road for me is the mixture of portraiture and the floral design. So there will be many posts coming at you in the months to come with many variations besides just flowers on a pedestal.
I had some roses in the house for a couple weeks, they aged very well, and... like many things they inspired a photoshoot. They kept their form, yet darken in color and gained a nice texture. I shot a couple with a butterfly beauty light configuration, but my main focus was a darker, more mysterious shot. Setting up two lights with 10 and 20 degree grid spots, I lit only key parts of the composition, giving it a nice look. I love having deep, dark shadows in my photos, and these have lots of that indeed. For me, the most interesting photos are always the ones where there is a part of the photo in darkness, just something about it.
I'm trying to make an effort to write more posts about some of my equipment, 'cause I know that other photographers out there in the market for new stuff would like to hear feedback about this stuff from real people they know, and not some crummy product review on adorama.com. I'm also going to try and make a spot on the site that details the current equipment I use in the field. Before I go off about how much I like this piece of glass... it's important to note that for all of you photographers in the beginning or even middle stages of your learning don't get too consumed with buying super expensive gear and thinking it'll make your photos magically turn to gold. A sharp lens and a poorly executed photo composition is still a poor photo, no matter how heavy and expensive your setup may be. Invest in some knowledge and gain solid skills in the field before you blow your savings on equipment that won't help your game too drastically in the beginning. I've taken many awesome photos in my years, and some of my top favorites of all time were taken with a $900 body/lens Canon Rebel setup.
My little helpers, Coal and Tobi, are the rascals pictured above. Lisa bought these ridiculous outfits for the cats which made for some good photo ops. I don't know what is funnier, the way they look in them, or the reaction they have, trying to squirm out of them the instant they find themselves looking like Rudolph. Coal really cracks me up, he truly looks like the Grinch here, always has that contemplative look like he's stormin' up something evil in his noggin'.
I've been working over the past few weeks getting the workshop curriculums squared away. The advanced workshop, among the set of workshops, will teach you lighting techniques like the one used to create the picture above. Upon completion the "workshops" page will almost be it's own...
