Learning Chinese

I shot an assignment today for a publication in the UK doing a story on a school here in Portland with a unique program aimed at teaching kids Chinese. These kids (K-5) spend half the day speaking, learning, writing Chinese and the other half English. Only Chinese is spoken by teachers and even the little kindergarden class I was in, they all understood. It was impressive.

Even all the bulletin boards, etc at the school were Chinese themed.

Weddings in Houston magazine

I was interviewed a while back for this article about choosing a photographer....check it out

Hoops

Shot this at a prep hoops game tonight. I should have used lights like I normally do on basketball, but I was a bit lazy this evening and I kind of wanted to see how my Mark II N would handle ISO 3200 in a dark high school gym. Not too bad. This was shot with an 85 f1.8 @ ISO 3200 1/500th f1.8. It should look good on newsprint. I printed out an 8x10 of this image to se how it looked blown up and while you can see some grain, it looks much better than anything I ever shot on 3200 Film. I'm impressed. I'll be shooting with lights again from now on though.

Boring Wrestling

Shot a very boring wrestling meet last night for the Clackamas Review. There are 14 weight classes on each team, but these two teams only fielded 5 matches, all the rest were forfeits. Boring indeed. This is the only half way decent photo I got, and its not all that great.

Crying

Is it wrong that I find this photo of Jordyn, crying in the park after I kept trying to take her photo the other day, freaking adorable?

Due....

Sorry, this blog is long over due for an update...kinda like Brigetta in this photo...soon to be due. Shot this last night in the studio....I can't wait for the new studio to be complete, shooting in the old one while the new one is under construction right next door sucks. Should only be a few more weeks though.

Computer Crash

Well, Monday sure sucked. I woke up to find that my computer had gone to the big network in the sky and would no longer boot up. I had to go by another tower and, luckily,, was able to recover all of my data off the old harddrives (photos are backup up on DVD's and an external drive so they were safe), however I lost all my e-mails thus far from 2006. Which sucks. If you e-mailed me between 9pm Sunday and 8am Monday, I never got it, please resend. I'm back up and running as far as e-mail goes now, and today I should be back up all the way...what a pain. I'm glad I know a lot about computers or this could have been even worse.

Bouquet Toss

this is from the wedding I shot on Friday.....

They'll never get me back

This is hilarious. If you've never worked in a cube, go watch Office Space. It's exactly like that, trust me, I worked as a computer tech for 3 years right out of school while trying to land a newspaper job and doing freelance on the side. They'll never get me back!

More from last week

Here is the cover from the wedding I shot Saturday. Like I said, it was so much fun. The wedding was at Timberline, but not in the main lodge, it was in the Silcox Hut, about halfway up the mountain. The only way to get there is by snow-cat. Yes, snow-cat. Everybody was transported up and down the hill in a giant snow-cat. That in itself was fun. The weather could have been better, it was white out conditions, wind at like 70MPH and 8 inches of snow fell during the day. But they were still willing to go outside and brave the elements for a cool photo here and there. One of my favorite photos is of the bride and groom getting off of the snow cat and being dragged by the driver through the wind and snow, while I am trying to take a photo in the same wind, it was tough! But so fun! Some highlights included an indoor snowball fight, which got even better when the grooms friends went outside and got a shovel full of snow then proceeded to dump it on the newlyweds heads....another hilarious moment of the night came when all of their friends came up to me and said they wanted to take a "secret" photo. So we went outside (in the winds and blizzard) and everyone stood downwind in the snow let the full moon show....

I couldn't stop laughing. THAT is something I have definitely NEVER seen at a wedding and I'm pretty sure I never will again. All in all it was a great time with great people, it felt like I was hanging out with my friends all night instead of working and THAT is why I LOVE doing what I do.

Still For Sale

I sold one of my 1D's, but I still have one more body to get rid of. Now I'm offering up my 20D AND 1D, whichever goes first, I will keep the other. I'm kinda hoping its the 20D because I like that 1D and want to keep it. Here is the ad.

Remote

This is another photo from yesterday's wedding. I shot this with a remote camera that was placed inside a rock wall that just happened to be right in front of the unity candles. Worked out pretty well. (I'm even in the photo standing in the back of the room so it makes it that much better :)...) The light in the room was totally different when I set the camera up, so I just kind of made an educated guess at the exposure and such (800 ISO 1/13th f4) and it worked out pretty darn good. And the hole in the wall was cool because no one knew my camera was even there....more still to come.

Awesome

This is just a quick post, but I wanted to put up a the first photo ever shot on my new Mark II N. It's from the wedding I shot today at Timberline. Stay tuned for more on this wedding, it was probably the funnest wedding I've ever been to. Lots of good images and stories to come....but I wanted to show off this photo first. This is in the main lodge at Timberline.

Up and Down

Installed the coolest accessory ever on my Harley today. A garage door opener wired into my headlight hi/lo switch. The transmitter part is spliced into the headlight wires and the the receiver is wired into the garage door opener. Now instead of fumbling around in my pocket for the opener (if I remember to bring it on the ride) or pulling up to the keypad on the side of the door, I can just roll up, flash my hi beam and the door will open right up! How cool is that?

Happy Bday Kev

Happy 23rd Birthday little brother! I hope you are enjoying a nice bottle a jager with some Latina's! Be good!

Today's Assignment

Nadine Fechtner holds a photo of her daughter Buffie Rae Brawley and her granddaughter, Ebony, in her Portland, Oregon home on January 6, 2006. Fechtner's daughter, was found murdered in 2004 after being caught up in a Toledo sex trade ring. Brawley is 25 and Ebony is 4 in the photo Fechtner is holding.

I was assigned today by the Toledo Blade newspaper in Toledo, OH to shoot photos to go with a story they are doing about a women who was murdered a little over a year ago and was part of a big time prostitution ring in the city. The story talks with her mother (pictured) about what a sweet innocent little girl she was until she got caught up with the wrong crowd and ended up dead. Very Sad. This is the kind of assignment when you never know what is going to happen and you have to be real careful because the subject matter is very sensitive. The family was very nice and very open to talking about the situation, so it made the assignment much easier.

These are some of the photos the mom had lying around from her younger days.

On a lighter note, this also marks the last assignment I will ever shoot with my Canon 1D series cameras. As soon as I arrived back home, my new Mark II N's were arriving at my door! They will get a full workout tomorrow when I shoot a wedding at Timberline Lodge in a blizzard (its suppose to snow 8-12 inches tomorrow).

Expansion

I'm very excited about more growth within my business. Currently, I have a 300 sq ft studio that I use for both client meetings and shooting, it works, but is becoming too small. Also currently, my office is at home. Working from home is nice, but the house is getting too small with all the animals and children running around here now. So, the solution is expansion. Construction will begin soon on a remodel of my studio that will add an additional 450 sq foot shooting area, and a new 300 sq foot office/client meeting room. My current area will go away. This will be in the same building I am currently in, so the transition will be seamless. I am very excited about this new expansion and it should be real real nice. Should be done by the end of February and at that time I will move my entire operation down there. I am hoping to shoot more kids, seniors, corporate head shots, etc in the new studio. If you built it, they will come right? :).

New Camera's

Today I bought a pair of new Canon EOS 1D Mark II N's. So, now I am selling my trusty EOS 1D's. If you want to buy them or know someone who does, here are the classified ads for them:

http://www.sportsshooter.com/classitem.html?id=11044
http://www.sportsshooter.com/classitem.html?id=11042

POY

I put up some of my favorite shots from 2005 on my SportsShooter page. I also added some commentary about what I was thinking or the situation, etc when I shot each one. Let me know what you think. I may do another gallery of my favorite wedding images from 2005 later on, these are mostly editorial images. Also, by all means, if you think I shot something cool that should be in, let me know, I'm the worst editor for this stuff.

Chocolate

Our friend Danielle gave me a 5lb Hersey's Chocolate bar for Christmas. I figured I couldn't eat it all by myself, so I let Jordyn have a shot at it. She couldn't finish it either. If you need some chocolate, give me a call I can hook you up!

Goodbye '05

Happy New Year!
Looking back on 2005, I am very happy with how the year went. Business is growing and my family couldn't be any better....Looking forward to a great 2006.

For the first time in 2005, I kept careful track of the kinds of things I shoot so that I would be able to tell what is good, bad, etc....The breakdown is very interesting to me:

Of my 2005 Income:

48.4% is from Weddings
11.8% is from Newspaper's and Magazines (Non Sports)
9.5% is from Sports
11.4% is from the Studio
11.8% is from Advertising/Corporate/PR
1.5% is from Stock images and
5.6% is from other misc things that don't fit into these categories.

The thing that I find interesting is

1) Sports. I shoot a LOT of sports, but that does not translate into a lot of money....that is a problem. I have known for a long time that shooting sports alone does not pay the bills, but seeing it on paper is alarming. This is an area that I will have to look closely at next year.

2) Weddings. The biggest single chunk. I knew this would be the case, heck I shot 52 weddings last year! I do not consider myself a "wedding photographer" and I am happy that this portion is less than half of my business... :) Don't get me wrong, I love to shoot weddings, but my style of shooting them is "photo journalistic" I feel I need to still be a PJ AND shoot weddings to keep my images different from the rest. I think the diversity in my shooting separates me from other wedding photographers who shoot ONLY weddings.

3) Editorial. Again, something I shoot a lot of, but that does not translate very well. Newspapers continue to pay less and less so a goal of mine for 2006 is to shoot more for Magazines, Books, etc that pay much higher, while mixing in the newspaper work from bigger newspapers working less for low paying papers that take time away from my family for little pay.

4) Stock. I shoot a lot, I have a lot of stock, thus far I have done a poor job of marketing it. I would like to sell a lot more stock next year.

Well, that's about it. 2005 again was a great year for me. Mitchelldyer Photography continues to grow and I continue LOVE my job. There is nothing I would rather do. Here's to 2006!