Weekend at the Beach

It's going tobe sweet. I have not had a weekend off in forever so this weekend, no e-mail, no cell phone, no computer, no cameras (well a point and shoot) and off we go to the beach. Lexi loves the beach and Jordyn has never been so it should be fun. We even found a cool hotel called the Looking Glass Inn that is "dog friendly"...even going so far as to give your dog a basket with treats, dog dishes, poop bags and even doggie sheets to make Lexi's stay more enjoyable. No I am not kidding. Lexi is going to the beach in style this wekeend!

Poker

Today my Pops flew home from Vegas and he, Dave (Jenn's brother) and I went up to laCenter to play in a tournament at Chips Casino. There were 40 players and I played some of the best poker I have played in a while. I made one mistake at the end, slow playing 2 pair and letting my opponnent draw out on me, and ended up placing 8th. 8th out of 40 is not too shappy.....Dave was the first guy out, on the first hand and Pops lasted about top 30 or so.

Track

I was shooting a prep track meet toay and one of the runners I needed to shoot was going to win her race by about a million miles, she has had the states best time in the 400m for 3 straight years, so there was not going to be a typical finsih line sprint photo finish...and quite frankly, I'm tired of shooting those anyway. So I went up high in the bleachers with a 400 lens and tried to use the curves in the track to frame her and make the photo look a bit better. Didn't turn out as nice as I would have liked, but it will work.

Bee Photos

The Sacramento Bee ran 4 of my Ice Skating photos....click here if you want to see more.

Ice Skating

Spent the evening shooting Ice Skating for the Sacramento Bee. Here is a photo of Michelle Kwan....I don't really get Ice Skating and it's a bit hard to shoot because I have no idea of what is cool and what is not, or what jump is good and what jump is bad, I do not know what a triple axel or a double toe loop is or looks like, I just know that it looks hard and falling on the ice must hurt like hell.

Proofbook Cover

Every week I design a proofbook cover for the proofbooks I give to clients. They are fun to do, fun to pick out the photos from the wedding that I like best. I liked this weeks wedding a lot. Here is the book cover.

Wedding Photo(s) of the Week

Yesterday's wedding went pretty well. It was held at a church with great architecture which I tried to show in the second photo. The first photo is the groom dancing to "The Twist" so i used a slow shutter speed and "twisted" the camera while he was dancing, tricky huh? I like the photo though....

Mariner's Game

Thursday I went up to Seattle and shot the Mariner's/A's games for US Presswire. While I shoot a lot of baseball, this was the first time I had shot at a Major League venue...it was fun, but I wasn't that happy with my take. I certainly learned a lot though and gained some valubale experience regarding captioning and what is good to shoot and what papers will run and what to file, what shooting positions are good and which are not so good etc, etc, etc....next time I shoot up there (in a few weeks probably) I will be much more prepared and I think I will do much better. One good thing is that the San Fransico Chronicle ran a shot of the A's pitcher Rich Harden in the paper the next day....The shot above is Randy Winn of the Mariners making a diving catch.

Nice Sky

So the other day after coming home from a shoot, I was outside with Baylee when I saw the sky had turned a really cool looking color. I wanted to shoot a photo of Baylee with the sky in the background, but my view was blocked by my neighbors house, so I went into his backyard for a better view. I shot a couple frames of Baylee, then he asked me to shoot him for his website (he is a psychologist of some kind), so I did and it turned out cool. I've been wanting to shoot a portrait into a cool sky like this for a while, but latley when I got assignments to do so, the subject could not wait that late or the sky did not look good, or it was raining. Oh well. Sometimes the good photos come when you are just shooting for yourself.

New Lens Test

I got a new lens today, an 85mm f1.8. Pretty sweet lens. I've read lots of great reviews and wanted to add a fast longer prime to my bag. As soon as I got it I went to my favorite test subject....my dog Lexi. I really like the fast focusing and shallow depth of field on this lens.

More Baseball

Yes I shoot a LOT of baseball.....Almost everyday I am shooting either a prep game, or a Portland Beavers (AAA) game....or some kind of game....tomorrow night I am shooting the Mariners and A's game in Seattle....stay tuned for more baseball. This is a shot from monday of JJ Furmaniak fielding a bunt and making an off balance throw to first.

Wedding Photo of the Week - 2

Ok, so here is another one of my favorites from this weekend. It was at the Columbia River Gorge Hotel in Hood River, a fantastic location.

Wedding Photo of the Week

This weeks version....I could not resist the cuteness of this little girl, who is about Baylee's age, as she raised her glass to say cheers during the toast.

Out!

Josh Barfield of the Portland Beavers gets knocked on his behind while trying to score. This is a photo I shot at today's Beaver's game. I shot this in the second inning. Strange game today....the first 4 innings were sunny and nice, then it hailed and forced a 1.25 hour rain delay, then it was sunny, then cloudy, then poured rain again and the game was suspended in the 7th inning. Oh well. at least I was able to make a nice photo today.

Opening Day

Last night was opening day for the Beavers. I love to shoot baseball and even though it rained the entire game, had a good time shooting last night. Here is a photo of right fielder Kerry Robinson diving for a fould ball and not making the catch. I'll be shooting baseball Sunday and Monday too.....stay tuned.

Really Good Photoblog

I can't remember how I even came across this blog, but it is really good. I like to shoot food and Michael Ray is a food photographer in Pittsburg and is really, really good at it and has some really good advice and details in his blog. Go read it.

End of a LONG, LONG day

Yesterday must have been the longest day of my life. After only getting 2 hours of sleep and driving to Tacoma, I got home with enough time to say hi to Jordyn, eat dinner and then go to PGE Park to shoot the Portland Timbers playing the LA Galaxy. About mid way through the first half it started raining...and I mean POURING. I was tired and got soaked. It sucked. But at least the rain makes soccer photos a little more intersting.

Super Fence

This morning, bright and early, like 4am bright and early, I drove up to Tacoma for a commercial shoot for a security fence company based in Minnesota. I wanted to arrive on location at sunrise so I could have good light....anyway, this company is making a new fence that somehow senses when the fence is touched and sends a signal back to the guard shack. Pretty cool stuff. The prototype fence, about 100 feet of it, is installed at the Port of Tacoma dock. My job today was to take cool photos of the fence so that they can use them in ads and brochures to sell the thing....I knew this shoot was going to be a challenge because the fence was in a spot with nothing but ugliness around it. Blackberry bushes on one side and a freeway on the other. Yuck. Here is what the scene looks like in real life. That's my assistant Amaren carrying a light back from behind the fence.

Ugly huh? I thought so too. Not to mention not much room to move around behind the thing. It was a challenge to show the details of the fence, yet not show a lot of crap and have it look cool. The sunrise was great this morning, but because of the freeway overpass and the location of the fence it was not possible to shoot into it as much as I would have liked. I wanted a "feel" to the photo and I'd been wanting to try screwing around with White Blance for a while, so I set the camera to 2800 Kelvin, as cool as it would go to give the sky a nice blue and to give the fence to cooler tone to it....I also underexposed the sky by a few stops to make it nice and dark.

I think they turned out pretty well and the client was happy. I liek the photo at the top the best because you can see a bit of the fence lenght and the photo has nice lines. I with that overpass was not there, but it works to darken the background so the fence wires pop out little more.

Timbers Portraits

This morning I went down to PGE park to shoot mug shots, etc that the team needed for the program, media guide and that kind of thing. They also needed me to shoot a team photo and a portrait of a player for a program cover....here is the cover...

As I was shooting the cover shot, the clouds broke up and made for a real nice background, so we just started grabbing players and it turned into an action portrait shoot that they will use for an ad campaign most likely.

I think they turned out pretty cool. Much better than the stuff I shot last year.

Let me know what you think.

This Week's Wedding Photo of the Week

Ok. So I'm going to do something new on this blog....every Monday I'm going to post my favorite photo from the previous weekend's wedding....Here is one from Saturday. There was a cool balcony that I got up on to shoot down on the bride and her father as they walked down the makeshift aisle.

Soccer

Shot the University of Portland women's soccer team for the Oregonian today. They are doing a feature on a few of the players so my assignment was to just shoot 4 people....This was one of them...she scored a goal on this header.

Down on the (tulip) farm

This morning I was reading the paper and my buddy Freddy Joe from the Oregonian had a really nice photo on the Metro page from the Woodburn Tulip Festival. It was nice out, so we thought it'd be fun to take Baylee and Jordyn down there to see all the flowers...Baylee has a HUGE thing for pink flowers lately....anyway, so we go down and the kids love it and we bought Baylee a dozen pink tulips.

Here was Baylee's favorite part...an entire field of pink flowers...all of which she wanted to pick...luckily her hands were al ready full with the pink tulips we bought for her.

Measure 37 Story

Here is the last portrait for the Measure 37 story....He has a 6 acre property that he wants to subdivide into 22 lots, but the city will not let him use 1 of the lots saying it is a conservation site...alothough it has nothing but weeds and blackberry bushes on it. He is fighting the city, using Measure 37, to get them to allow him to build on it, or pay him for the property.

Portrait from yesterday

Here is a portrait I shot yesterday of Sandy Duffy, an attorney for Multnomah County. I shot this to go with a couple of other portraits I am shooting today for a story in Governing Magazine about Measure 37. She is the county's attorney for land use problems arising from the measure.

Another First

I'm pretty stoked today....I got a sales report from my stock agency and a photo I shot of Steven Jackson was used on a trading card by Fleer. I've never had a photo of mine used on a football card before, that is pretty cool. Also on the report, sales to Lindy's sports annuals and Street and Smith's college football Preview...all different photos, all from the same game....glad I shot that game now!

Media Day

Yesterday was "Media Day" for the Portland Beavers. I'm really excited for the season to start up. I love baseball and love being at the ballpark all the time and I love being around the game. It's also cool to see the guys i talk to everyday get called up and make the Big League team.....anyway, so last year the team used mug shots of the players taken down in spring training. The were not the best and talking to the players about the photos it sounds like what happend was the player was given a Beavers hat, told to put it on real fast and was shot with direct flash under blue sky...not the most appealing mug shot....so this year I wanted to make them look good. Afterall these mug shots get used all over the place in newspapers and on mlb.com and in baseball magazines, etc.....since it was media day I would be able to have every player and coach line up and shoot away. I setup a simple black backdrop with a red gelled light on it and 1 light with a softbox. I think they turned out pretty good. The whole thing took less than 10 minutes to shoot and the players like it when I can get them out of there real quick. This is my favorite player on the team, pitcher Chris Oxpring. He's a cool Australian guy that always makes a point to say hey to me. He pitched 2 games in helping Australia win a silver medal at the Olympics last year and I am rooting for him to get called up to the Padres this year.

I can't remember this guys name, but he is new to the team this year and I can tell he is a cool guy. While beavers media day was going on, so was a youth soccer clinic on the PGE Park field. A bunch of little kids were kicking goals and he stepped in to try and block them and was having a good time with the kids. It is EXACTLY the kind of thing that makes kids want to be baseball fans.

Portrait

A while back I was in a bit of a portrait slump. Nothing I was shooting was looking good to me. I think the best way to get out of a slump is to assist someone else and see how they do things to get you thinking outside your normal thinking (does that make sense)....anyway, Eric Cable called me at the perfect time, needing an assistant for a big portrait shoot. It was just what I needed. While assisting Eric I realized sometimes I make things more complex then they need to be. I don't always need to use 3 and 4 lights on a portrait. Eric used nothing but windows and reflectors on our shoot and it really made me realize I just need to make it simpler. So here is a portrait I shot for the Chronicle of Higher Education Monday.....the story is that she is a lobbyist trying to raise 440 million dollars for community colleges. I wanted to shoot her on a community college campus so I met her at Chemekata CC down in Salem and shot this portrait of her in the "quad" of the campus...using just one light and a reflector. Simple, clean, nice. Sometimes less is more.

More from Saturday....

So I'm editing through the photos from Saturday's wedding and I came across a couple that were pretty funny, to me anyway, i wanted to share. The first is the couple as they are leaving....they think they are leaving to nice blowing bubbles, etc...but the best man, the grooms teenage son, had a better idea. Give everyone silly string and nail them when they came out. Worked perfectly! The grooms son also cracked me up earlier in the day with his speech.....when I got married married, my brother, drunk off his behind, started out his slurred "speech" by saying in the drunkest voice you can imagine, "I've known my brother my whole life.....we used to live together" Although it is much funnier to watch it on the video than see it in type....anyway, so the best man/son starts his speech with, "I feel like I've know him my whole life....he's like a father figure to me" which made me think of Kev and really cracked me up.

Mmmmmmm, Cake

For some reason, every time I shoot a wedding, I really spend time to make sure I get a good shot of the cake. I like to shoot food photos. I really miss shooting food features for the newspaper, so maybe that is why I love the cakes so much....either that or maybe its because I'm a fat kid who loves to eat cake :), although I never, ever eat any at weddings. Either way here is the cake from yesterday's wedding.

First bath

Tonight I decided that Jordyn was ready for her first real bath. Up until now, she was using one of those little baby tubs you put in the tub so she can sit up and get scrubbed. But I figured it was time to see how she liked just sitting up on her own and splashing around.....she loved it!

Life Magazine

Life Magazine e-mailed me the other day looking for an interesting wedding photo/couple to run in the magainze this week. I sent them a few photos/couples I thought they might like and they picked 2 of my photos to use in LIFE. Pretty cool. They are also going to interview the couple and do a story on them. They were pretty excited too. Here is one of the photos. They were walking around and all the cute little kids wanted to hold her train for her.