“Hey man, whatcha been up to?” I can hear some of you asking (and by “hear” and “you”, I’m referring to the metaphorical voices in my head). Why, thank you for asking–it has been a busy holiday season, work has been completely demonic with the completion of a multi-million dollar project, and I can’t seem to shake this idea that there is a perfect Dorito out there somewhere.

Up top, a previously unpublished self-portrait from December, wherein I’m playing with new hot-shoe softboxes (Thanks Honey!) and the concept that monochrome doesn’t have to mean black and white.

A few days later, I pulled out those very same softboxes for a client/friend commission. She saw the very first shot, and said something to the effect of “too much shadow. Can you get more light on the other side of his face?” When it came down to my toy versus her vision: definitely her vision won. The project was the spawn of ShinyYouth, an endeavor to empower youth to be strong media advocates. It started when the young man pictured below walked around a tech conference asking folks “What technology would you be?” They wanted a portrait of him to help promote the project, and I immediately thought of the image below.

We shot the image on the Kindle Fire first, then tried a bunch of times to get him to hold the Kindle (with image) in the right place. OK, it wasn’t really a bunch, it was like 5 tries. In and out in 45ish minutes, including time for my daughter to chat with him to help get the natural smile.

Speaking of my daughter, she had a birthday recently, and was, for some reason, feeling particularly shy while we sang. And shy while I was holding a camera. I just don’t understand what happened…she used to be so forceful.

At a recent family gathering, I again played with the idea of “almost black and white”. Its an extension of some ideas I picked up from The Photographer’s Mind, that some photographs can allow details or subjects to be revealed slowly upon inspection. (This iPhone photo was another example–the subject, cars, are not immediately obvious. You have to follow the leading lines to see them.) I really like this picture because of the very subtle yellow tint (that you might not have noticed until I mentioned it) and the fact that the candles are all embers of about the same size. We were celebrating three birthdays, and I just love the symmetry of their faces, and the candles just barely emitting light.

Baby pictures are almost of their cutest moments. This is not a cute moment. She was tired and frustrated, and had a messy face. I was totally attempting to document the moment, showing that this sweet little angle really did have her moments.

And speaking of having his moments, this is my friend Skippy. He has, how shall I put this, camera issues. We did a grand family shoot–three hours all over their house and front yard for a great set of concept pictures (all their idea) that they are planning on putting into a book. I can’t wait to see the finished product. I had just finished taking pictures of his step-daughter on white seamless, and we were at a break in the rhythm  of shooting. So I told Skippy to step onto the seamless. And I waited. In normal photog-subject interactions, this is considered a no-no. You should be guiding, instructing, leading the subject. No need with Skippy. He went through poses faster than my flashes could recycle, some of which are best described as “outhouse gothic”.

The other project I’ve been working on is developing the materials for a photography class for a local camera shop powerhouse. They are well respected around the world, and I just happen to live close enough that when they asked “Who wants to teach a class in exchange for a bunch of store credit?” I just about wet my socks. I seriously didn’t think my experience or work would be good enough, but I decided to let them make that decision. An application, a bunch of e-mails, and an interview later, and I’m “in”. I’ve given them a “bio”, a self portrait, and examples of my work that don’t require a model release. My first class, Intermediate DSLR Usage, will be at the end of March, and I’m really stoked. My presentation materials are about 98% complete, and after they announce the class, I’ll post more about it here.

I’m also continuing to push shots up to Instagram. If you don’t have Instagram, you can view my stream here. My over-the-top enthusiasm has simmered down a bit. I’m still not sure why, either that I post there, or that my enthusiasm has waned a bit. Instagram has its own community, and its own look, memes, and cliques. There are people who post only images from their iPhone and hate all non-iphone images. There are people who use it exclusively for self-promotion, though I’m still unclear what benefit they get from it. Some people even advocate using Instagram as an extension of their portfolio. I don’t take myself that seriously, but I do love the little endorphin hit when a photo gets Liked. My wife described me as a bit of a “Like Whore” and though it stung just a little, it’s sadly not far from the mark. Instagramers are more giving with their Likes than my friends on Facebook. I blame that mostly on Facebook and the fact that people only see people they interact with. On Instagram, I see (or could see) everything that everyone everyone I follow posts, whether I’ve interacted with them in the past or not.

So, thanks for calling, or stopping by, or checking in, or creepin on my blog. I’m glad you asked.

What have you been up to?

In case you missed the pictures and comments on Facebook, I’ve posted them to Flickr as well. My wife and I hung out with Mother Grove at Byrnes Pub for dinner and pre-show drinks. I brought a camera, not really intent on shooting their performance, just grabbing whatever struck my fancy. But with a band on stage, and a camera in hand, I just couldn’t help myself.

Every time we go to the Ohio State Fair, some of the best entertainment is the people watching. If I let myself, I could spend all day doing street photography, with an intent to mock those with a fashion sense drastically different than my own. Though I took a lot of pictures (the best are available on Facebook and Flickr), I tried very hard to not take purely mocking pictures. This is a post about my failures in that regard.

Up top, a gentleman sporting a t-shirt for “Outdoorsmen for Christ”. I’m having a hard time understanding the link between rifles, fishing rods, cross-bows and Jesus. Perhaps I missed the Sermon in the Blind where he said “Thou must shootest the biggest buck of the land. For then you may cut off its head and have the head mounted on the wall of your living quarters. When thou does this, think of me.”

The next one is more about photography than street photography so I’ll digress for a moment. Years ago the only photography booths/tents were likely to have been “old fashioned” costume shops where you put on some cool old-west clothes then pose for an old-timey portrait. Those were good times. Actually seemed like fun, and I think I did that once with my parents long ago. Now the fair is littered with photography booths (this one from last year still hadn’t corrected their sign). The photog snob in me went OMG when I saw this tent. “Homies Forever”? Seriously? And  he’s taking pictures with a camera using the popup flash (just visible on the far right) using a projector screen as the background. Wow. At that moment I wanted to never be associated with photography ever again.

I’ve been practicing shooting from the hip recently, trying to grab shots like this one, without making the subject aware when I’m close. I thought it comical that here I was, an obvious mark, with too much money to burn, walking by and he was texting. I can’t be too harsh though… at least I couldn’t smell him. On our way back through later, he managed to convince my son (also with too much money to burn) to let go of $10 in exchange for 10 darts that my son managed to use to break 11 balloons (one dart hit 2 balloons). In exchange he got a “medium” stuffed shark. Years ago (probably my son’s age) I thought the balloon games were a steal–it was so easy (for me!) to break the balloons, I could practically take any prize I wanted every time! Now I realize that the prizes cost less than the price to play. With the shark in his hands, I asked if he was happy to have spent $10 on a $4 stuff animal. “Yeah, well…” his voice trailed off. “At least I had fun playing!”

I love this dude’s Mohawk. It definitely made a statement. Now that I’ve aged a bit, and even sported a Mohawk of my own (not quite this cool) I’ve realized that the hair-do says nothing about the person. I used to be intimidated by something like this. Now I can see that this is just another dork wanting some attention. Oh, and it’s really sweet that his girlfriend had the same blue hairspray on just a bit of her hair. “No honey, I won’t shave my head for you. Yes, I love you, but really, don’t you think painting this little bit makes the better statement?”

OK, last picture for this post coming up. This person wandered around the fair in public looking like this. After I saw her, I couldn’t un-see her. Then I decided I had to make sure others couldn’t un-see her too.

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You’re welcome.

Anyway, that isn’t really the point of this post. The point of this post is to describe what I fit into the Tenba Small Messenger bag. This was my overnight bag for my trip to Atlanta–I took nothing else.

• widescreen laptop
• laptop power supply
• dress shoes
• chinos
• 1 pair socks
• boxers
• polo shirt
• dslr with 35mm lens
• usb cell modem
• usb cable (to charge my cell phone)
• pen and pencil
• business cards
• tooth brush, tooth paste, deodorant, hair gel (yes, I’m like that)
• sunglasses
• magazine
• notepad
• flash drive
• earbuds

and I had room for a bit more. Had I been wearing the shoes on the way to Atlanta (rather than flip-flops), I easily could have added another change of clothes. Or used the bulkier Tamron 18-270mm lens.

It was a very cool experience traveling with just the messenger bag. No roller bag, no duffel bag, no backpack. Its pretty much limited to a one or two night stay in the summer, but it made tromping through the airports and hotel pretty easy.

So we took an epic three week vacation in Europe. Being the shutterbug that I am, and the avid photog-blog reader that I am, I was highly self-aware of what pictures I would attempt to take on the trip.

From the outset, I decided that the majority of my images would include my family in them. For my kids especially, I wanted them to have a great record of the stuff they saw and did that was personal. I didn’t want to take a lot of pictures of well known monuments (like Westminster Abbey) that were exactly the same (or awfully damn close) to the ones you could find all over flickr or picasa or facebook. I finally understood the Asian tourist propensity to put themselves in pictures in front of monuments.

The picture up top, is not one of those pictures. This was the taken at the end of the day, and I was wiped out. I was nursing a mild cold, and really didn’t care much about exploring the gift shop after taking a tour of the abbey (no photos of the interior allowed). So I took a load off my feet just outside the front door and watched the crowds. Then as an afterthought, I looked up, and this is what I saw–great light, blue sky, wonderful clouds. I couldn’t resist taking it even though the kids and wife were no-where to be seen and I was pretty sure it had been shot from this angle a million times before. What’s more, the clouds were moving at a good clip, so I shot some video as well, incorporating it into my slide show video.

This shot is as much for my wife as anyone else–she likes to scrap book, and she reminded me that she likes to have documentary, not too artsy, images to help anchor a page.

We had an afternoon, a whole day, and a morning in London. We hit several highlights like the Tower of London and the British Museum. We left London tired and wanting more.

Check each photo for descriptions of the time we had.

A few years ago coworkers and I went to Bob’s Bar, Cultural Hub of the Midwest, for drinks on a Saturday night. Hiren (pronouneced he-rain) bought drinks for Kevin, Bob (hence the choice of Bob’s Bar) and me all night. Why? Because his “girlfriend” in India had just gotten her master’s degree, so he felt like celebrating. I put “girlfriend” in quotes because he never mentioned her name, they’d been physically apart for years, and we never saw pictures. But hey, who’s gonna turn down free beer? At the time, I’d worked with Hiren for a few months, Bob was pretty new, and Kevin was about to move to Texas to work remotely.

Today was the last day at my employer for all three of them. With Kevin’s departure especially, it felt like the end of an era, the closing of a chapter in my work-life.

I’ve worked with Kevin for five or six years and over that time we became good friends, even gardening together for a summer. We had very similar senses of humor and could talk on a wide range of topics:  religion to filesystems to ghosts to hops. He introduce me to Fight Club, and for a few years, we actively worked Fight Club references into a conversation almost every day. Unfortunately, Kevin started working remotely from Austin two years ago, when I really started my photography kick, so I don’t have any pictures of him.

I’ve worked with Bob for about two years. He was the manager of the group I worked with, while I was the technical lead, or, he was the people person, I was the technology person. We were like yin and yang. While Kevin and I shared a lot of common language and understanding about technology, I had to actively translate my knowledge into words Bob would understand. Don’t get me wrong–he wasn’t a pointy-haired-boss, but he didn’t have the depth of understanding that Kevin and I did. Bob was a great leader for the team. They thrived on his leadership, and I thrived as his peer. That’s Bob at the top of this post. We traveled a few times together, and I think I’ve taken a picture of him drinking a beer on every trip. During our fair-well dinner last night, I had to create one last image, “Bob and Stella”.

I’ve worked with Hiren just a little longer than Bob, and he was the last person I helped hire into the team. He’s a young single guy and is fond of a good night out. Actually, discussing Hiren’s social life was the bulk of our relationship. He seemed to have a pretty wide network of friends and was frequently traveling to New York or Chicago, or friends were crashing at his place for a long weekend of debauchery. One night, evidently, neighbors in his apartment complex called the cops on him twice because of noise.

Bob and Kevin left the company as part of a recent “streamlining” effort. Downsizing, if you will. 40 people out of 2000 in IT were let go, and two were on my team. Yes, I’m still bitter. Hiren left to go live and work in New York City. He was always a big-city kind of guy.

I’m not good at maintaining friendships outside of work and having these three friends all depart on the same day has been pretty tough. They’re leaving my employer, not me, but I know I suck at maintaining those connections outside of the office construct. We’re all friends on facebook so maybe that will help. Maybe.

Time to turn the page and see what the next chapter holds.

This was what my weekend was like.

First up, a visit with my wife’s side of the family for a baby shower and easter egg hunt. Kids and candy. ‘Twas a target rich environment, indeed. No kids vomited while we were there, and there were no tears or water breaking during the baby shower, so it was definitely a good gathering. Kidding aside, we all had a very nice time, and the kids were happy with their Easter treats.

After taking care of a few things at home, I left my family behind, went to a bar on campus where I heard (and shot) three bands: Swarm, Racecar (whom I’ve shot before), and American Mayhem (a Misfits tribute band). These guys were all punk/hardcore, with no limit to the amount of anger that needed to be excised from their souls. Skippy and I totally loved it.

After I recovered sufficiently, we went to another family gathering at an aunt’s house. While there, another aunt, Wendy, asked if I was available later that day to take pictures during her mother’s 90th birthday gathering. Wendy is the wife of my mother’s brother (hence my aunt), and I’m acquainted with her parents, but generally our paths only cross at Wendy’s house. Anyhow, Wendy explained that she wanted to have some nice pictures from the 90th party, but they never have nice pictures like the ones I take (flattery will get you everywhere), so could I please come to the party to take pictures? We had no conflicts, so sure, no problem. And that was before she offered to pay me (which I declined).

So the final happy picture is of Wendy’s parents admiring their second great-grand-child, Wesley.