Hello and Happy Thanksgiving. Here's my list.
My family - You are everything. And I hope I show you how important you are to me every day.
Ashley - You are everything and then some. This is our 15th Thanksgiving together. You are amazing and you make my life something new and wonderful every day. I love you.
My friends - There aren't many of you. And chances are better than even that I don't show you how important you are to me as you do to me. (cough coughWilliamscough...) But I do Thank God for you and hope your family and friends are safe and warm and fed this Thanksgiving.
Books, Newspapers and Magazines - When Fiona and Isaac were born, one of my personal, semi-selfish wishes for them is that they would love and crave reading as much as I do. They do. I am thankful and feel unbelievably blessed to get to listen to the beautiful sound of a house full of people reading.
My job - Yeah, yeah, I know. Work shouldn't define me. Well guess what? I does, at least a little bit. I hired in with Griffin Technology (Connect to play.™) three years ago this week. And in that three years, it feels like I've done more cool, life-changing (my life, that is) stuff than in the 17 years previous. I'm a writer ... a person who writes for a living. I feel like I can say that now without adding an asterisk. Griffin got me there. Thanks Karen, Derrick, Robert, Alex and Jennifer for believing in me.
Photography - 2009 will go down in my book as the year I learned how to take pictures. Sitting in a hayfield focusing on a rollebale, or shooting pictures of food at Go Cart Thai, I'm learning to see the world differently.
Living another year - Dad died three years ago. As we all grew up and moved out, I think his favorite times of the year were the holidays, Thanksgiving especially. While I used to look at Thanksgiving as a speedbump between Halloween and Christmas, I'm growing to see why he must have loved the last Thursday in November so much. Dad, I miss you and love you.
While there's much more for which I'm thankful, this covers the highlights.
Happy Thanksgiving, folks.
Professional wedding photographers can breathe easier.
Pete and Holly, originally uploaded by Webslog.
Just finished going through 300+ images I shot at my cousin's wedding party this weekend. I rented a Nikkor 80-200 f/2.8 AF-S with the intent of getting lots of mid- to low-light candids at the party. And for all of the experience I had with both the lens (none) and shooting people well (less still), some of the shots came out well. Problems persist, however, that are 100% operator based.
First and foremost, good subject matter, great light and a fast lens can make up for a multitude of sins.
Things to work on:
1) If you can't wait for the frame to clear to get the shot, move to get a better shot. Any number of reasons why, not the least of which is that a step to the left or right, in closer or backing out would have saved me two hours of Fauxtochopping. I was behind what I think was the actual wedding photographer and this shot, as it originally appeared, had her flash unit overlapping the sleeve of his shirt. I was able to do a hamfisted job of retouching it out (on which, more, later), but the better move would have been to lean a little left or right.
2) Fauxtochop saved the shot, but dented the integrity of the image along the way. I was blessed by the photo gods with absurdly nice light and a looooong golden hour ... more like a golden 2 hours 25 minutes. It meant that I was able to get some tasty skin tones and that the expressions on people's faces was relaxed, natural and un-squinty. Score one for not having to futz with skin tones in my post-shot workflow. However, I did have to Photochop extensively to clean up the included flash that intruded into "my" image. It's not something I'd done before very much and I learned that doing clean up is waaaay more time-consuming than I thought it would be. Too, this was the first time I've used PS to change what was actually in the photo/fix a mistake I made in shooting the photo (poor composition choices). While I don't see myself on any sort of moral high ground, I do like to know, personally, that what shows up in my pictures is what was actually in the frame, rather than what I wished was in the frame. Won't lose an enormous amount of sleep over that. But I will pay closer attention to what's in the frame before I pull the trigger next time.
In particular, had I opened the lens another half or 3/4 stop, (3.2 to 2.8, the lens's max), I think I would have made my hyperfocus area a little shallower such that the people in the background would wash out a little more than they did. Too that would have meant less need to applying the Vignetting tool to close the image in around the bride and groom and move peeps deeper into the background.
3) I manage to do a pretty decent job of walking right past pretty good shots looking for great shots. Similar to my challenge with the train tracks I talked about previously, I spent an entire evening moving to fast. The result was a lot of forced composition and trigger pulling before I should have. Next time, a few minutes spent in meditating my way into the assignment/project before I start shooting anything that moves would be time well spent.
That's all I've got on this one.
Cheers.