Workflow
Food Gift Ideas for Self Promotion
2011 was a really spectacular year for me as a photographer. It was my first full year working as freelance photographer in St. Louis, and with the purchase of a downtown loft over the summer it was the first year time in my career that I have had dedicated studio space. In addition, I was [...]
Office Buildout: DIY Tables
The last couple of days I have been working my hands to the bone building out the office in my studio. After much consultation with my father, I designed and built two large worktables/desks in my office. One for me, and one for Xina when she chooses to work at home. Let me just say [...]
Equipment Lighting Test Day
Today is the start of my second full week in Saint Louis. I had this little app on my iPhone that I was using to countdown the days until the move when I was still in New York and I realized that after it hit zero, it changed over from “days until” to “days since”. [...]
Always Be Shooting
Parking garage, downtown Saint Louis It has been a busy week here in St. Louis, and it’s only Wednesday. I had to actually pull up my calendar to check that, since to be honest I wasn’t exactly sure what day of the week it is. We have been busy unpacking and car buying, and while [...]
Post Production
This photo of Avedon’s instructions to his printer has been bouncing around the interwebs recently, and although I think I’ve discussed this before, I think it’s worth mentioning again: Digital post production is no different than chemical post production in a traditional film lab. There is always the caveat of course: bad photoshop is still [...]
Mobile Fotos App for the iPhone
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been utilizing my iPhone a bit more lately for scouting, idea capture and in general, just another way to boost my creativity a bit. One of the challenges that I’ve faced with the iPhone, however, is how to get my photos off the phone and onto my computer in [...]
Keywords and Metadata
Since I don’t have much in the way of interesting visuals to show off this week (damn, I need to get away from my cube so I can shoot more!) I’m going to do a few brief posts about my workflow for those of you who are curious. I tend to shoot a lot, probably [...]
Me and My Lightmeter
To meter or not to meter. I’ve been reading photo blogs religously for the last couple of years, and the one over-arching theme amongst the digital professionals has been: when shooting digital, use the LCD as your meter rather than using an actual light meter. Nearly all of the pro-photo bloggers that I read don’t [...]
Seamless
Last year I was shooting almost exclusively on white seamless for my firm – the type of advertising we were shooting for was all actual employees for a people first campaign. This year the style has changed dramatically, and while I’m glad to be doing a wider variety of work, I still kind of miss [...]
Gear Envy
Lets face it, no matter what you say about how a good camera doesn’t make a good photographer, and how a real artist doesn’t need fancy gadgets to get the shot, photography is a technology driven field. And lets face it, if you want a large scale photo shoot to go smoothly, the easiest way [...]
Outside My Bubble
It’s been a little over four years since I first started hiring and working with professional photographers, and almost exactly a year since I took my first shots as a professional myself. Working as a photographer is maybe only 50% of my workday at the moment, and it’s definitely the fun half. I’m still doing [...]
Shooting Money
These days I am constantly looking for ways to increase my photography assignments. Whenever I see photos being used around the office I try to see if it’s something that I could do, and if possible I try to convince the designer to hire me to shoot what they’ve comped up before they purchase it [...]
Making It Easy
I did a quick shoot yesterday in the office of a employee for the firm’s website. We needed a casual, seamless shot like most of the photos I’ve been taking. She was a bit nervous and, like most people that I’ve shot, she said she was terrible at getting her picture taken. I assured her [...]
Olan Mills
I started taking headshots of our employees about a year or so ago and until recently they were more of a waste of time for me, rather than a learning experience. They are dead boring – 3/4 pose, facing the camera, blue background. For the most part, they are basically point and shoot – to [...]
Lull
I’ve reached a lull in my photography education, mainly because I’m between shoots – at least as far as studio shooting. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and a lot of research, along with a lot of existing photo analysis, but very little shooting. The problem is that even though all I want to [...]
Speedlight Trouble
One of the largest problems I’ve been facing thus far with my own personal studio photography set up has been the inability to trigger my strobes remotely. As just about anyone who has used a camera should know by now, on-camera flash usually results in overexposed, harsh photos that look like they were taken by [...]