Yes, I know I’m way behind on posts – it’s been a busy few months with work and some other things, so my hobby has had to take a back seat.
One really neat experience was that Kelli (my photography mentor) had me come along as a secondary photographer for the engagement shoot of my friends Gordon & Katrina. It was great to be hands on in that experience, to see how Kelli handles her subjects and works with them… It was also really interesting to see how Kelli finds her shoot locations and the process she goes through there. I’ll link directly to Kelli’s blog post on that shoot once it goes live (I’ll not post here since it was her gig – I don’t own any of those images). Needless to say, it was very fun and a great learning experience!
Here are some hold-overs from Adam & Crystal’s wedding (from October… I know, I’m slow!). I’ll move onto some other stuff after this; I have some personal stuff I can probably start posting soon, I just need to get these wedding shots out of the way. (OH, and check the bottom of the post for a surprise…)
And for all those who want a quick Houston, TX update: it snowed AGAIN yesterday! That’s two years in a row, which is a bit of a miracle. I took the following two images after the heavy stuff had already fallen (I was at work at that point), so it may not look impressive – but it was SNOW IN HOUSTON!
I just got back from a trip to Utah for a friend’s wedding and it was an adventure! At the temple ceremony I was asked by the bride’s mother if I could shoot the reception since the bride and groom had neglected to hire a photographer for the evening… Of course I said yes, though I certainly did not have the equipment that I would have liked to have had. So, without speedlite, wide-angle and telephoto lenses, and a second camera…. I shot the reception! The images will need some massaging since they are all shot at 800-1600 ISO, but I think my composition is OK. I’ll share those once I’m done doing some post-production work.
It was also a blast to see how many of my old friends that I haven’t seen in a while reacted to my work. I would say that most everyone I ran into at one point or another raved about what they had seen on the PhotoBlog, Facebook, and Flickr. I can’t lie, I love the attention but was pretty embarrased by it as well. Hopefully this means I’m doing things pretty well, right?
And the last bit of the story – right before I left I posted the following image onto the Digital Photography School forums to share a simple story and my shot.
This shot was a total accident – I was checking my white balance settings and forgot that my lens was in manual focus from some work I had done the day before. I didn’t delete the picture (since I always wait until post-production before deleting as doing it on the camera kills the battery), and when I took a look on my 24″ computer monitor I smiled. I love the shot, and with very very little post-production work I think it looks great! (Thanks again to my model, Jenny!)
Anyway, what’s so cool is the following:
3,679 views!!! I really think that is super neat… I really didn’t see all that many in the first 10 pages or so of the forum with anything CLOSE to that many views, and I was pretty proud. I also had a lot of people adding the image as a favorite on Flickr.
I’m pretty happy I’m producing some work that other people find pretty neat…
I ordered a 50mm prime lens about 2 months ago and it went on backorder… I finally had it show up at my place, magically, on my birthday! I absolutely LOVE the thing… I can bring the f number down to 1.4 and get some really stunning results with portraits. None of the following were taken in exotic locations or anything, I just took them around the house when Crystal was her for my birthday and Jenny came over a couple days later.
I’m also going to add in a couple different version of the pictures I took of Jenny just to show how proficient I am getting in Lightroom (which is amazing, FYI)! Thanks again to Kelli Nicole for sending me in that direction for photo editing.
A friend of mine asked if she could do a photoshoot with me, and 
since I’ve never done it before I thought it would be a good experience. I learned a lot about what it takes to do a decent shoot… I worry so much about being creative, but really it’s all about noticing different backgrounds that naturally catch your eye and then helping your subject feel comfortable. I’d say my first trip out was certainly a success in that I learned a lot, but in general I think there are a million things I could have done better. That’s why we experience new things, right? It’s always a learning experience!
In other awesome new, I have a mentor now! Kelli is a friend of mine with some serious talent, though she is certainly humble about it, so I asked if she would be my mentor and I got a smile as a response. I’m pretty excited to have that relationship setup so I can pick her brain and maybe get involved as an apprentice on occasion (if she’s got a shoot and could use some help). If nothing else, it’s someone else to talk to about my new excitement, which will help keep me motivated! I pretty much talk with Jason about things, and since he and I are both big time novices, it’s good to add someone with serious talent into my circle. She’s already given me one piece of solid advice: try using Adobe Lightroom!
As for my photos to add, here are some shots I took with Cristy a couple weeks ago that I’ve been working on developing a bit. By no means am I done, but these four shots look pretty good…. 
Feel free to share thoughts!
I had some friends over the other day and decided to play a bit with shutter speeds. I bought a tripod over the weekend, so this is the first time this type of shot was even possible without some major camera shake. Once I played with the tripod a bit I really wanted to take a shot like this – and for some reason I even had the main subject in mind. Thanks for playing along Derek!
Anyway, I think I may do a little post-production on this shot because I like it so much and may eventually play with it a bit more. I really should have taken some of these shots in RAW so that I’d be able to modify and tinker in Photoshop w/o consequences…
The shutter was open for about 15 seconds, and I had to do some serious adjusting for the light. I like that it’s a bit brighter (it fits the context of the shot in some ways), but that is one of the areas I hope to adjust once I get a handle on using Photoshop.
I’m a bit slow at getting new stuff up – but I’m trying to do a lot of reading and such to understand what I’m doing better. I also want a telephoto lens and more creativity… 
Again, please share comments.
I feel like I need to get a post up right now, just to validate the existance of the new blog. I’ll be posting some pictures within the next few days, so hopefully there is something there worth looking at. I haven’t yet invested in Photoshop or another serious photo editor, so what you see at this point is going to be directly from the camera with no modification as of yet. I’ll eventually get there on the photo editing front, but one step at a time, right?
I recently returned from a trip to Utah, and I have a couple pictures from the trip. I honestly did not take as many photos as I would have liked before leaving, but the trip was more about relaxing than it was getting up into the mountains for a photographic adventure… Again, I’ll post some stuff soon.
