I had the pleasure of seeing the final dress rehearsal of the Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival’s production of Bare : A Pop Opera, a wonderful musical which looks at the life of a group of high school seniors; the story focuses on two homosexual high school students and their struggles at their private, Catholic boarding school.

I would be lying if I said I was not moved by this show.  I fell in love with the music a year or so ago, when I first heard a song called “Are you There” on an online radio station.  It was a real treat to be able to see the show, on stage; live theatre always brings a whole new dimension to the songs you hear on the soundtrack.

The show is well acted, by a fantastic group of actors.  As of this writing, the show is still running; I highly, highly recommend seeing it.  You can get more information at http://www.pgltf.org .  I hope to see it again next week.

At home this past Thanksgiving, I had just gone upstairs and noticed a missed call on my phone. It was my friend Sean – I figured he was just calling to wish me a good day, and decided to call him back later. As I went to go down the stairs and rejoin my family between dinner and pie, I heard my phone ring again – Sean, again.

I answered my phone, concerned; something must have happened, for him to have called me twice on this day, in a short amount of time. “Hi Sean! What’s up? Everything OK?”

“Yeah! Happy Thanksgiving! I have some good news – Shannon and I just got engaged!”

And that’s how I learned about the engagement of two of my best friends from college, not long after it happened.

And then, seven months later, I was lucky enough to spend a weekend with them in the Boston area, taking their engagement photos.

Sean and Shannon are an awesome couple – he is involved in television production, and she is involved with design. They’re funny, and fun, and so very much in love.

I went in with some ideas, and Sean and Shannon filled in the gaps – and brought me to some amazing areas, places where they had grown up, places they loved.

We spent two days doing photos, spending time with their families, and generally having fun. Thanks, Sean and Shannon, for an awesome weekend, and for being my very first Engagement session!

One great thing about the Lightroom Library is the amount of information that you can see just by glancing at your image files. From flag status, stack placement, virtual-copy…-ness, it’s all right there on top of the little file preview. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, fire up Lightroom. Make sure you’re in [...]

I spent some time in early May with my friend Lauren, who is an up-and-coming actress here in the Philadelphia area.  Lauren needed some updated headshots, so we decided to meet at Rose Tree Park on a sunny day back in mid-March to see what we could do!

Lauren surprised me by showing up right after a haircut – I had just spent time with her, so I noticed right away – and LOVED the new look.

The session went well; we wandered a bit around the park, finding different locations to shoot in, and having a lot of fun.  It ended up being a great day, and I can’t wait to hear about the next show she books with her new headshots!

My friend texted me today to tell me that my ad had just come up on Google. Crazy. I’ve been using Google Analytics for quite a long time, and Google Adwords for just over a full month (I started in March). Google Adwords is where the ads are coming from. It’s a simple way to [...]

There’s a twitter challenge out there, @weeklyblogpost . I actually had the best of intentions to start off from the beginning, with Transit – I even took a photo that would have accompanied my entry, but I never got around to writing it. I find blogging to be difficult – are my posts interesting? Am [...]

This episode of @lightroomtips - the blog version features a graphical tutorial about how to customize the interface of Lightroom. This is more of a fun tip than a useful one - but there's nothing that says Lightroom needs to be all business! I'm using Lightroom 2 below - the process may be different (or limited) in Lightroom 1. One of the nice things about Lightroom is that Adobe has built into the program the ability to customize the look of the workspace, right down to the logo that appears at the top.

This episode of @lightroomtips - the blog version features a video tutorial about how to use the Quick Collection feature in Lightroom.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first full-blog edition of Lightroom Tip of the Day. I hope to do a full blog edition once every week, typically on Thursday. For my old readers, welcome back. Lightroom is a photo organization and editing software produced by Adobe systems (you know, the guys who do Photoshop?). Over the past two years, it has taken the photography world by storm. I've used Lightroom since it was first released, and find that as the program gets more sophisticated, I am going to photoshop less and less for photo editing. Lightroom is a fantastic RAW editor - the nondestructive editing properties mean that I can revisit and re-edit a photo even after making significant changes - I can even export the photo, decide I want a brand new look, and reset the image to the import settings and start again, all with a few clicks of the mouse. Lightroom Tip of the Day is a Twitter account I have created to give photographers one Lightroom tip every (week)day. The twitter account is @lightroomtips. Today's tip is : Rename presets can help you save time when renaming images. Interested? Read more below.

Today on the blogoshphere I discovered a blog by a fellow Philadelphia area-ian, Dorie Morgan.  Her post “Activities Don’t Equal Relationships” caught my attention – very well written, and with great insight. I love discovering other 20-something bloggers.  I know there are just shy of 70billion of us out there, but I really enjoy when [...]