First Work for Bulletin Done

Finished my first work for the Bulletin yesterday. It was tons of fun! I just walked around the waterfront shooting candids during the Bathtub festivities. The waiters race was the best, though I was disappointed none of them dropped a tray in a spectacular fashion for me to selfishly photograph. People were very nice and the only photograph refusal I had was from a military guy that said they weren't allowed to have their photo taken, so I just shot their gear. The other nice thing was that this type of shooting requires little or no photo editing, so turnaround time is much faster at the end of your day. I'm still finishing post processing work on families we shot last weekend (one more to go).

Today Adam is shooting the start line for the Bathtub race and I'm shooting the finish line.

12 Families in 11 Hours

Well, we wanted to see if we could endure an all day shoot in a hectic environment (like a wedding) so we brought together 12 families for an 11 hour marathon at Neck Point Park. Each family took between 20 and 45 minutes. Both Adam and I realized we are so much more comfortable in a studio where we have absolute control over lighting but then again, you can't bring the beach to the studio. We did posed shots and candids, and while the candids were hard in some ways, they were also pretty rewarding if you nailed it.

In the end I think we could pull off an all day event like a wedding and it would likely be easier than today. I don't think we will do all day portraits again. The last three groups had us at our lowest energy so we weren't at our best, not that we didn't get anything, we did but I think we shoot better when we are all excited and fresh.

Tomorrow we go to take photos at the Coombs Rodeo then I'm on vacation and we don't have anything until the golf tournament in August other than our ongoing work for the News Bulletin. Time for me to stop writing and start editing todays photos.

Freelance

Well we have been hired as freelancers for the Nanaimo News Bulletin which is pretty exciting. We'll be their weekend and evening shooters for sports and community events. This is great for me as I love this type of photojournalist photography and between the two of us we should be able to knock off most of the projects fairly quickly and gain valuable experience.

We are fully booked this Saturday shooting 11 families and 1 couple at Neck Point Park in an 11 and a half hour marathon shoot. Good training for weddings really with a long shoot like that.

Family Portraits

Last Saturday we spent the day shooting portraits for 6 families and 1 dog owner. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of work. I spent about 3 hours post processing the photos I shot and I'm sure Adam spent even more time. Honestly I'm pretty happy with the work we did, being as it was our first time shooting with strangers in our studio. We learned some things about shooting people with dark hair on dark backgrounds and fair skin on white backgrounds. Things we just wouldn't have known had we not done it ourselves. In the end the result was far better than I think anyone expected and I'm absolutely excited about doing it again. In fact we are doing it again, but on a beach this coming Saturday. This time we will rely less on posed shots and more on candid ones. Should be fun, but since we are booked for about 12 hours of shooting we will likely be pretty tired. Can't think of a better job to have though.

This Sunday we are shooting at a rodeo for the photography club as well. That ought to be fun as I haven't been to a rodeo since I lived in Alberta 15 years ago. Then I'll be off on a quick four day vacation and when I return Adam and I are thinking of taking Vivid to prime time and actually opening it up for some paid work. It's pretty exciting really.

In other news we have opened an account with Smugmug to host our portfolio and password protected galleries for clients. You can visit it at http://vividphotography.smugmug.com/

That is about it! We still have a couple of spots left this Saturday for families, so if you are reading this and want in on some free portraits while we are still doing them, give us an email. I've included a photo Adam took of me working. Funny, I don't get many photos of me I actually like. He must be pretty good!

Printers, Lenses and all that Stuff

Well, received the reprints of the SWAN photos today from Kodak labs. They did a better job and the cropping was the way I wanted it. I like their colour too. Our photography effort left something to be desired in my opinion but it was valuable experience for us if we plan on doing indoor receptions. We did order a calender for SWAN which turned out really nicely. As well Adam did a huge photo collage for them and I had it printed 20x30 which was neat, but the end result was just OK to my eye as the print quality suffered a little.

Speaking of indoor shooting, both Adam and I have some really fast lenses to use now as we each bought a fixed f1.4 lens for our cameras. That would have been very handy a month ago, and they are sweet portrait lenses, a real joy to use. I also bought a lensbabie, well ordered one and look forward to using that for portraits as well for it nature of selective focus. Still saving for that expensive zoom lens, but am on the way as I've sold my FZ50. It was a great camera, but I hadn't been using it much. Of course this leaves me without a backup camera.

We have some portrait work coming up. On July 12th we are doing a bunch of studio portraits at my house for friends and family and on July 19th we are doing the same but with outdoor settings like Pipers Lagoon. Should be a great way to get more practice and build those portfolios. Both Adam and I have signed up for the Natural Light Portrait Photography course at Vancouver Photo Workshop in August. That should be fun and a nice build on what I learned last month at Royal Roads.