Matty Blog

28 May

Posted at 14:43h in Events
matty_4.17.10_ 186 The great people who put on the Bellingham Film Festival asked me to be the exclusive photographer for this year's event. A huge thanks to Wilson Large, the main man behind the whole event, and the guy ensured I had everything I needed to capture the event. On top of this being a weekend for local film talent to show their stuff, there were four workshops held for the public to come listen in on. Four very well established individuals in the film industry were awesome enough to make the trek up to Bellingham from the film country and talk to the audience about what they do, how they made it, etc. Each evening was capped with a party. Funny thing about parties and being the photographer... the event host is always there to make sure you get a drink in your hand. Luckily these were some very laid back after parties, so who cares if my framing is a little crooked, right?... ;) We held the workshops at the soon-to-be new Pickford Dream Space. It'll be THEE place to come watch movies in Bellingham when it's done. Right now it is under construction, which has a really cool look and very fitting place to hold this event. Lots of open space, which was perfect for my white seamless setup. Our four guest speakers: Brian Sipe - Makeup FX artist, Michael Blundell - Cinematographer, Lisa Beach - Casting director, and Sara White - Executive producer, all donated a few minutes before their workshop to do a quick photo shoot for some PR shots on the white seamless. Andrew Lahmann, of P-51 Pictures, was another great help at the festival, ensuring I had everything I needed to get the right shots, and who was also responsible for recruiting the excellent guests for the festival. We setup a little studio in the middle of the floor space, even built some gobos out of some plywood we found laying around. It was a great little impromptu set! The awesome people at Sonya's Quality Furniture let us borrow a cool chair for use as a prop, worked out perfectly. I used to live in Bellingham for a number of years and loved it, I miss that place a lot. As a whole, the people are so nice, very pro small business, and there is an amazing amount of people willing to lend a hand to help out.

24 May

Posted at 16:41h in Info/News

activeSeriesPromo

IF INTERESTED, CLICK HERE TO CONTACT MATTY

Calling ALL Athletes Matty Photography is looking for athletes of all styles, shapes, ages, and sizes. Looking for track stars, body builders, tennis players, hoopsters, skateboarders, dancers, rock climbers, baseball players, cyclists, you name it... we wanna hear from you. Matty is looking to capture a unique series of people in their "moment" doing what they love. We are looking for those who push the limit in one way or another, following their passion, excelling at what they do. Using creative lighting, Matt will capture raw moments in time, giving a new perspective of our active lives. "Active" will be a series of photos showcasing the culmination of all your hard work, the human form pushing itself. These won't be cheesy posing pictures, they will be taken while you are at the peak of your jump, the middle of your swing, the point of your limit. They will be explosive, story-telling shots. We want to hear from you, now!

21 May

Posted at 19:49h in Shoots
matty_4.28.10_ 073 A few months back, when we did the calendar project for Smokin' Hot Espresso, we also designed a punch card for each girl using the photography from the calendar shoots. Each girl then had an individual card to hand out to repeat customers, they've been a big hit. They've had a three more girls join the team since then and were in need of some photos, specifically for creating punch cards for the new employees. For those newer readers that a completely lost, flip back a few months in the posts and you'll get caught up real fast. We originally planned on shooting this set on white seamless, but... I got the craving to do something a little more creative last minute. Like, really last minute. Try an hour before the shoot! Found a solid location that had the graffiti scene going on. Now... I know what you are thinking, "geez, hasn't the graffiti thing been played out yet?". The answer to that lays in how you use it. You can compose your shots in a way where you are totally relying on the graffiti art as your focal point, or you can use it to accent your models. I chose the later, and using various lighting techniques, I added or subtracted how much of the graffiti played a role in the shots.

13 May

Posted at 13:57h in Just for Fun

Wow, it's almost been a month since my last post, I'm so sorry! My chief editor, Coal (pictured above) has been riding me like crazy to get him some new work to approve for the blog. The good news is that I have plenty of...

15 Apr

Posted at 22:20h in Shoots
IMG_2388 Another shoot with Tiare Floral Design in the books. Tomasi, the designer, always amazes me with his work. It's fun when two artists who come from two completely different fields collaborate on projects. You get double the art, an... art-in-art if you will. Tomasi's work pushes me at times with lighting, giving me a challenge, which is awesome. The designs are never the same and range wildly in size, with some breaching the 5 feet mark. These are not small floral arrangements. Lighting them equally across the entire piece can be difficult at times, especially the wide variety of materials that are used.

08 Apr

Posted at 13:03h in Shoots
matty_3.6.10_ 284 A few weeks back I shot a group of the Upfront Theatre improv comedians for some advertising material. It was a lot of fun. Set up your lights, pull out the camera, and these guys just start doing there thing. You don't have to say a thing, they just kinda know it's time to take pictures and they jump right into a skit as if there were an audience in front of them.

02 Apr

Posted at 18:24h in Info/News
matty_3.29.10_ 024 Spent a bit of the evening editing work for clients and taking it easy for my last day here in Alaska. Did a walk-around the other day and took a few photos, here are a couple of them.

01 Apr

Posted at 21:00h in Just for Fun, Shoots
matty_3.29.10_ 216 Got some time to finish up the ice sculpture photos and post up some more selects. If you are saying "what? What ice sculptures?" You should click here to read part uno - CLICK FOR PART 1 -. So... on to more pictures and a little bit more story. Almost being in Alaska for a week now, I can tell you this was the most fun I had while taking pictures here. I mean... how often to you get to go photograph the location where the world's best ice carvers come to compete?! Again, these pictures don't give these guys nearly enough credit because of all the melting that had taken place before I showed up.

31 Mar

Posted at 23:30h in Just for Fun
matty_3.31.10_ 342 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!

31 Mar

Posted at 01:00h in Just for Fun, Shoots
DSC_4918 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.

29 Mar

Posted at 22:55h in Just for Fun

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...

28 Mar

Posted at 11:01h in Info/News
IMG_0043 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.

27 Mar

Posted at 10:59h in Info/News

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...

24 Mar

Posted at 18:39h in Events
matty_3.16.10_ 036 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.

18 Mar

Posted at 20:44h in Gear
drobo 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).

16 Mar

Posted at 18:34h in Shoots
matty_3.5.10_ 013 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.

07 Mar

Posted at 17:45h in Info/News, Just for Fun
3-matty_3 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.

01 Mar

Posted at 19:56h in Info/News
mattyWorkshopsGraphic 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!

18 Feb

Posted at 17:54h in Shoots
matty_2.13.10_ 188 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.

12 Feb

Posted at 18:52h in Just for Fun
matty_2.6.10_ 111 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.