a good day in the park

In the latest of my "spur of the moment" shoots, myself and Christopher decided to check out a park with one of our favorite models. Got some pretty sweet stuff. It's really great working with an assistant. Frees you up to try some fun stuff.

Mac or PC?

I'm struggling here. I love my mac. It's a Macbook Pro that I hook up to a Dell 24" monitor. The interface, the colors...all great. BUT: Hard drive space is at a premium. I use external hard drives to store my photos, but the 120 GB that are provided on the laptop itself are rapidly diminishing. Also, the Macbook Pro just isn't all that fast. Not compared to my PC.

My PC I use for gaming, so it's a hefty rig. I've been tempted to use it for editing, but it doesn't have the Mac's interface or stability. But man it's so much faster. What to do, what to do? Should I migrate back to PC? Any workarounds that anyone can think of to help out the Mac? Any input is appreciated.

VP Debate fun...

Not to get all political or anything, but I thought this was pretty amusing: Palin Debate Flowchart

a kick in the ass

So I'm now getting a bit of motivation from a photographer friend as far as my blogging (or lack thereof) goes, so I'm making an earnest effort (again) to regularly post to this.

I'm part of the Austin Strobist group on flickr. As part of the group we do photo of the month exercises, more for bragging rights than anything else. It's a good way to think outside the box a bit as far as what we shoot. So anyway, last month we were partnered up for the shoot. My partner was Christopher Ferguson of Definitive Images, and the theme was opposites. We decided we would go all out and have a city based shoot and a country based shoot, complete with motorcycle and horse, respectively.
Needless to say, everything started falling apart.
Our model for the country shoot backed out at the last minute, forcing us to scramble to find a model that would fit the wardrobe we selected and would fit the look in...oh....about 3 hours. And when it came time to do the city part, the motorcycle was nowhere to be found.
And so it was that I found myself waiting on a curb with a model at 10pm on Congress, twiddling my thumbs with Lauren, or model, waiting for Christopher to try to find a motorcycle. Well it just so happens that about 5 feet from us, a rather pimped out motorcycle was parked. As I was talking to Lauren, I started to notice the various colors of light and the environment around us and thought, "Hey, why don't we just shoot using available light and the motorcycle right here?" So we did. And boy am I glad I did. It forced me to use the environment in a way that I hadn't previously, and I think we got some really great shots out of it.
So it just goes to show you....even when everything is falling apart, just stop for a second and take a look around you. There's usually something amazing right around the corner.

football time!

Did a bunch of stuff for the paper this past few weeks. Mostly for the upcoming college and high school football season. They are finally published this week, so after that I'll post some of the shots. Yep, still alive over here!

H

Website Update!

Changed a few things around to show some of the newer work I've done and concentrate more on my portraiture. Here is a shot i did recently that I particularly like. It's Stewart Glenister, sole male swimmer for American Samoa. He just happens to be from Central Texas!

Oh My God an update!

So obviously I'm pretty awesome at blogging. After almost a year of silence I've decided to have a go at it again. Ninth time's a charm, right? So I'll start with an update on where I am. I'm in Austin, TX at the moment. After a lot of thought I decided that I needed to be closer to the family, and I've always heard such great things about Austin, so why not? I just arrived 3 days ago. I currently am shooting part time for a newspaper in Temple, TX, and am enjoying that very much. I'm in the processing of overhauling my portfolio with new work and I hope to be shooting a lot more for fun and doing a lot more test work. We'll see how that goes. In the meantime if I start slacking, bother me and I'll try to remember. I'd like to make this a habit. Shame myself into shooting more, as it were.