13 May My Chief Editor
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...
Personal
15 Apr Studio Flowers
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 Upfront Theatre
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 Last Day ñ Editing
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 Ice Sculptures – Part 2
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 Chena Hot Springs
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 Ice Sculptures – Part 1
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 Airport Security – Over the Line
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 Packing for Alaska
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 Got the Cover
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...
18 Mar Thee Backup Solution
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 The DK & Morgan Show
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 Busy Week in B-ham
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 Workshops Are Here!
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 Nooks and Crannies
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 The Mahala Dancers
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.
09 Feb Dancing the Night Away
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.
28 Jan The Vision
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.
21 Jan The Art of Flowers
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.
04 Jan New Life in an Old Rose
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.