Julia and Jamie...

Since we canceled our trip up my mom's for the holiday (swine flu fears) I setup a photo shoot with Julia and her boyfriend Jamie. It was kind of a target of opportunity but we setup about 4 hours to shoot up at the castle. The first "problem" was the weather turned. It was pretty darn cold and windy BUT it make the skies really cool. One of the main shots I wanted to do was a session with Julia's BMW on a "cross-roads" that leads to the castle. It was a pain to pull out the gear but it really worked well. As you can see in the one strobe above the car I didn't put any modifiers on the lights. With the wind it wasn't really an option.

I think the 4 hour plan turned into 5 hours and we shot our behinds off. We did quite a few shots at the cross-roads, then moved up to the main castle. From there we shot on the front steps for a while before we moved inside.

The hardest part of the day was moving the gear around. Every time we moved physical locations I had to load everything back up to pack it in the bronco (not a lot of room). Once we got into the castle things really picked up and we made some amazing shots by the fireplace and in front of some windows.

The best thing is that both Julia and Jamie were really great subjects. They were really into it and played up well the different sets and emotions we were trying to capture. I gotta say that having really wonderful subjects really makes for a great shoot!

It was a lot of hard work and I am beat from it but I think I have some amazing shots to work with. The count for the day was 719 frames. The images above are just quick selects and process from the shoot. I still have a bunch of images to go through... But that will be tomorrow!

Weekend rolling in...

Well, the weekend is rolling in and today was a pretty lazy day. I had grand plans to do something, but in the end something turned out to be basically nothing. Kind of a drag but it was nice to just veg today. I am not sure about everyone else but I ate WAY too much for Thanksgiving yesterday and that probably didn't help matters.

So today involved watching movies, eating more food, and not much more than that.

Tomorrow I have a shoot scheduled so hopefully everything will go well with that. I have about four hours of time so I hopefully will take a ton of pictures and get some amazing shots. I am really looking forward to it and I think it is going to be pretty darn cool. Hopefully nothing happens to cancel it.

Happy Thanksgivings!

Today is Thanksgivings and as a precautionary note we decided to stay home this year. It's a bit disappointing because everyone was really looking forward to heading up north. My mom is getting over having N1H1 and we figured it wasn't good risk-management to take the trip up there. She's feeling much better now so we were/are probably safe, but if we went up there it probably wouldn't be the case.

So Denise went to the store on Tuesday and bought all the stuff to make our traditional Thanksgiving dinner. It's just going to be the five of us but it will be great!

Desirae was really wanting to help Denise this year and even got up early to help. So it was really cool. So "they" made a turkey, Denise's gammie's butterhorn rolls, sweet potatoes, deviled eggs, green beans and a homemade pumpkin and pecan pie! I, think we'll probably explode!

Otherwise it has been a really nice day, even got some time to play guitar a bit (in the garage with an amp no less).

Well, I hope everyone has had a great day and has paused for a moment to think about all the good things in their lives! Again, hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Exotic Feline Breeding Compound...

Today was a pretty busy day. It started off with a trip to the Exotic Feline Breeding Compound where today was a "Kids Day" event. They had a bunch of special things going on like face painting, crafts and a scavenger hunt. As is typical we got out of the house late but we still had a lot of fun there and the kids (because of the scavenger hunt) learned a lot of about the animals there. So the girls got their faces painted and cat ears, the built presents for the animals and they ran their little legs into the ground. The scavenger hunt was designed to keep sending you from one side of the place to the other to find the right animal and then get a special detail about that particular cat. At the end you turned in the paperwork (well you showed them the paperwork) and you got a special ID that showed you were a junior zoo keeper and they got to pick out a stuff animal. It was a really cool event and the place was small enough that it was really neat. After I left they ended up taking a tram ride around the place and I am not sure what all that had the chance to see there.

After that I had a photo shoot scheduled so I left Denise, Devin, Desirae and Deanna and headed into Lancaster. A friend of Julia volunteered for a portrait shoot so we met up at Apollo Park and spent about an hour exploring the different areas there and made a bunch of pictures. We ended the day with about 300 frames so I have a lot of work left to process, edit and post the images.

Trying something out...

I picked up a new lighting modifier, primarily for my outside shoots (its large and solid but lite). After I put it together to check it out I figured it would be cool to actually run it through a test. Deanna was a willing model for the shoot and I took a bunch of photographs of her. Actually it was really a lot because I also wanted to test my lights at low power for rapid refresh. I was actually banging away shots to see how fast the lights would recycle. Bottom line, at the lowest power setting I was able to get F/8 at ISO 400 which was pretty darn good.

Deanna was having a lot of fun, at least until I asked Denise to comb her hair (then it wasn't as much fun). But even after that she got back into it and it was neat to have a quick photo shoot.

Anyway I'm really looking forward to putting some of the new equipment through it's paces!