The time finally came to switch from my old host, iPower, to a new one. I went with Eleven2 at the recommendation of a friend… what a difference! The site is so much faster! It was worth the hassle, and I apologize for any days that the site was down, but it was for the better.
update 4:35pm 2/28/12:
Of course as soon as I post the above message it appears that I’m having some nameserver issues. D’oh! And it also seems I’m having some image issues with the posts. ~sigh~ bear with me while I get this stuff straightened out. Sorry!
update 6:50pm 2/28/12:
I blame the network at my job. Everything is good to go!
Hello everyone! I have been receiving a very large number of visits to this site, mostly because of the Sigma Lens Review, and I’m hoping to build upon that in the coming year.
2011 was a very difficult year and really prevented me from posting more, but I will be doing a lot more work this year and definitely posting a lot more. I should be able to do some more basic gear reviews and I have an exciting announcement that I’ll post about in the coming weeks!
I intend to make this blog a lot more interactive. I hope to bring a lot of education here though myself and possibly some guest posts on a variety of topics from lighting to editing. If you are interested in contributing please let me know! I’ll also be moving this site to a new hosting company, the blog will be significantly faster once the switch is made.
The site design has changed, a bit cleaner and easier on the eyes now. The option to have posts emailed to you has also been added, I hope you will sign up and be a part of the conversation with all the new posts that will be coming out this year.
If there is anything you would like to see here, please let me know about that as well, I’m always looking for input and new ideas. Also, I’m not on Twitter anymore, but I hope you will join me over on Google+!
Thanks!
Please take a few moments to read this post. I know it’s long, but it chronicles how I have developed as a photographer and how Jeff was a huge part of it. It is also very educational and explains the difficulty I encountered when starting out. Thank you.
It breaks my heart to announce that a friend, both business and personal, has passed away. His name was Jeff Ouimette, the partner of a friend of mine whom I worked with at my day job up until recently when they relocated to the South. I haven’t known Jeff as long as some of his long time friends have, it’s only been about two years, but we had a major impact on each other over that short time. I firmly believe he had a greater impact on me than I on him, but we both mutually benefited from what we each brought to the table. He was striking out on his own to pursue his passion of candy and chocolate making, and at the same time I was working on pursuing my passion for photography as more than a hobby. So, my coworker Bob approached me one day and asked if I would take some photos of the products (chocolates, etc) for the website they were going to launch and I quickly agreed. Over the next year and a half I did eleven shoots for them, free of charge, and it was one of the best photography decisions I have ever made.
This is my tribute to Jeff and how he helped me grow as a photographer. read more…
In this class we were tasked with creating an image for an ad, PSA, tell a story, anything where you would combine multiple images really. I chose to do an ad, a beer ad, for Landshark Lager. Since it’s the summer that was the theme I wanted to focus on and, since I’ve never seen a Landshark ad up here in the Boston area, I thought it would be a great project. My inspiration was the really laid back style of all the Corona ads we are always bombarded with, the ones where people are relaxing on the beach, you know the ones.
I had a lot of ideas for this project, first I was going to shoot a couple on the beach around sunset with a cooler or tub with the beer in it but decided against that. Then I was thinking about making the tub really prominent in the image and show just the legs of the couple entering from the side of the image, but decided against that too. So the next class I simply shot the bottles in a tub with a ton of ice in the studio. I got some really great images that I was very happy with, a few shots cropped in close and some of the entire tub with all the beer bottles visible. Below is the shot I used in the final image. read more…
I’ll admit, I was very nervous to start these modules (Working with Models 1 + 2). I had never really worked with models before and I was feeling a little intimidated at the start of this class, but as it turns out, I felt very comfortable working with them when it came down to it! My school has a very good relationship with the modeling agency Maggie’s in Boston, we were lucky to have a mix of experienced and new models to work with for our shoots. We did a total of three shoots over the course of two weeks in the Working with Models 1 module, two were during evening classes and one entire day on a Saturday. Working with Models 2 was all about learning beauty retouching and printing the images to send over to Maggie’s for the models to use for their comp cards. We were also very fortunate to have makeup artists come in and get the models ready in addition to tailoring their makeup to our individual requests to go along with our theme/inspiration for our shoots.
I am absolutely thrilled with the work I was able to create! We had assignments for each shooting class to give us a structure to go along with. The first shooting night we needed to just do a head shot, a nice and tight crop to the image. The second night was to create a full length shot, in addition to head shots if we wanted to. The third shooting day was about incorporating motion into the image. We didn’t necessarily have to submit our final images as those, just our very best whatever they happened to be for each model. I was fortunate with timing and was able to shoot a total of five models over the three shooting days. read more…
