Kids!

The Calendar is full! Well not really, but we have several jobs lined up. The majority of these jobs are for child photography. We had one shoot this weekend and the weather barely cooperated, but we got some pretty good shots. I really have to watch my metering and fill flash. some of the pics were pretty under exposed and the eyes were pretty dark. Lesson learned...

Laurie was a big help with carrying gear and holding the light. I really wish I had popped out the umbrella but I was trying to travel light and keep things dry. The omni bounce did a servicable job. We have another shoot on Wednesday, and we're traveling to East Tennessee on Saturday to take pictures for one of our friends.

I'll post some pics when we get back.

Here is something scary I've learned since shooting with the 40D. When converting the CR2 RAW files to TIFF, in DPP, each file is 50+ MBs. So the 214 shots we took on Sunday used up 11 Gigs of hard drive space. It also took forever to convert.

It'll be nice when I get Lightroom :)

That's all for now.

A Quick Hello

So Laurie got me this book last week about word of mouth marketing. I would give it a 2.5 out 5 stars, but it did get me moving into action on getting the word out. The big thing this week was to let everyone know what I'm doing and basically offered to take pictures of anyone and everyone for free just to build a portfolio. I sent an email out to everybody in my address book which was a handful of people. As expected, got lots of offers for baby pictures and couples. What I didn't expect, was how many people replied. A lot of which were people I didn't email. I received several response from people that had been forwarded my introductory email. I'll have tons of practice over the coming months.


My little self assignment tonight is to fill two of my 2 Gig cards with the boys from Savannah Jack. They are playing tonight at the Blue Bird Cafe. It doesn't start until 9:00 pm so tomorrow morning will be rough. I'll post some picks after the show.

Pretty Similar Setup ;)

Here is a video from Chase Jarvis's website. I would love to have those Pelican and Lowe Pro cases. Too bad the rest of his stuff is Nikon.

It's Here!

I had to chase the UPS man around town but I was finally able to catch him. Yes, I tracked the UPS driver with my super survival skills and captured the most elusive prey...The 40D. Ok maybe a little to much Planet Earth.

Laurie aloud me to take this picture and then she packed it up and hid it until Valentines day. I'll see you soon my friend.

More Of the Same

Again, nothing new going on for the time being. I finished my goals for '08 and have my business plan mapped out, but that's an ongoing process. I'm still reading some stuff and I'm going to try and put my project plan together. After that's done, My only focus will be putting together a portfolio and marketing strategy.

The marketing piece is proving to be a lot more difficult that I thought it was going to be. Just coming up with a name is driving me nuts. If I use my full name then that will put me at the end of any listing that is sorted alphabetically, and my last name is a little unusual. So I'm debating on just giving it an arbitrary name. Once that's out of the way I can start thinking about colors, logos, site design, SEO strategy, etc.

Alright, I'm going back to my Planet Earth DVD. A wolf is about to eat this Tibetan gerbil thing... Yep, got'em!

New Gear!!!!!!!!

Well, nothing interesting has really happened this week. I've just been reading and practicing some shots in low light. Here's the good news. I've put in an order to upgrade some of my equipment. My wife ordered my new camera today, and I'll be receiving it on Valentines day. Did I mention that I love her! This is going to be a huge upgrade over the Canon 350D I've been using. I'll be moving on to a 40D!!!!! I.... um er, she also ordered me the grip, an additional battery, 3 two Gig CF cards, a shoot through umbrella, and a nice new Manfrotto light stand. I'm so excited, I can hardly stand it!

I've started to set up some jobs to help build my portfolio. So far we have one wedding scheduled, one bridal shoot, and my beautiful sister is expecting soon so we'll probably be doing a lifestyle shoot pretty soon. If anyone wants to donate a wedding dress let me know. I'm really wanting to do a "trash-the-dress" session.

Also, one of my goals is to build a pretty decent portfolio by June of 08. I'm going to try to land a bunch of gigs between now and then using some online resources. If it works out, I'll let you know what I've done. If it back fires...well, I'll probably let you know also.

In the mean time, I'll be reading up on "The Business of Studio Photography: How to Start and Run a Successful Photography Studio", "Guerrilla Marketing", and some other photography business book I picked up at the library.

P.S. Yolanda, thanks for checking out the blog. I've only been blogging here for a couple of weeks so keep checking back. I'll try to keep you up to date with what I'm doing. If I were you, I'd really check out Dan Miller's book.