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!

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!

Updated my website today, putting some new photos in the albums, especially in the Headshots albums.

I find that one of the hardest things to do is figuring out which photos will go best in the online portfolio.  I know that I need to do some more sessions, particularly with guys – almost all my headshots are of girls.  And I’m looking forward to my friends engagment shoot in the spring, to put more information there.

This week I plan to send out a facebook message to all my friends who are actors / into theatre to see if they would like to get their headshots updated and let them know about what I’m currently offering.

Also, aside from photography, I was approached to do a freelance web design gig for someone I know, based off my work on my theatre group’s website (http://www.stbernadetteplayers.org).  I don’t typically do web design, but I’m always up for a challenge, and now that I’ve learned so much more about WordPress I feel confident in using it for some simple designs – which is (hopefully) what this client is looking for.  I should be having a meeting with him in the next week or so.

What do you do to market yourself and your skills?

Ok, so, it’s only December, so it’s a bit early for New Year’s Resolutions, but I wanted to get a head start on mine, kind of clear up everything I’ve been putting off and start fresh in January.

The biggest resolution is that I would like to publish (aka make and post in some fashion) 625 photos in 2009.  I know it seems like a kind of arbitrary number, but I felt that 1000 was a bit too high, and 500 seemed kind of lame.  So, I took how old I will be and squared it.

I was thinking of breaking all of that down into stuff like “100 can be old photos that I just never got around to processing, 20 can be from my cell phone, blah blah” but I just want to get it done.  That includes posting more to this blog (the photos I take), posting more to flickr, doing a better job keeping my photos backed up, actually going through old photos and processing them, whatever.

My birthday is delightfully close to New Year’s Eve, so I will begin then.  It will be more like a “625 photos in my 25th year”.

Are you looking into doing any New Year’s resolutions of your own?  Photo challenges?  Personal goals?  I usually don’t do New Year’s resolutions because I’m lazy, but I’m interested to see what other people think.

Ok, so one thing I always enjoy seeing is how people bring their photos from SOOC (straight out of camera) to the final product. Typically, the most awesome end photos are awesome already SOOC, but I’ve seen amazing artists do amazing thing with ill-lit or otherwise flawed material.

I haven’t reached the point where I can save a badly lit photo, but I thought I would share with you my current process for editing a photo.

The first photo is “SOOC” – I shoot in RAW so technically this is straight from RAW… but close enough. RAW allows for more flexibility in editing, so I try to always shoot in RAW; however, there is some altering of the photo in the processing to JPG that is inherent in RAW. At least, I think there is.

Top left photo is the SOOC+crop – this step comes first, typically, and then tweaked before export. For headshots, I grab every photo in lightroom and adjust the aspect ratio to 8×10 before I do anything else. Then, I’ll go through and individually edit each photo’s crop and straightning.

Top right photo is SOOC+crop+lightroom adjustments. This varys wildly depending on the photo. I either use my own tweaking or I’ll use a preset and go from there. For this photo I used a preset and tweaked from there.

The bottom two photos are after final photoshop tweaking. Sharpening the eyes, dodge the eye whites, brush out stray hairs, tweak the levels, and then convert to b/w for a b/w version (I use a setting for this, because I am lazy and the person who made the setting is amazingly talented and really, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel).

So, that’s kind of how I go through processing a photo. Not every photo makes it to the photoshop step; not every photo even makes it to the cropping step. But for all my final photos, this is pretty much the process.

Ok, so I got some flickr mail today.   Apparently the guys at http://www.wefeelfine.org/ are creating a book, and want to use a photo of mine in the book.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/onblack.php?id=2056810170&size=large

In return, I will get a copy of the book, signed by the authors, and an invitation to the book release (which, I think they’re in California, so unless my picture is like… the cover shot, unlikely I will go).

I shot back with the following questions:
First, how will my photo be used?  Will it be in the book itself?  Color?  Black and white?  Will it be edited / where in the book are you thinking of using it / how do you plan to use it?

Will I be given credit in the book?

This is the second time I have been asked to publish a photo.  The first time is already underway, and it was for a photo I actually like less than this one, and I got paid (albeit only a little bit).  I don’t know how I feel about not getting paid – but at the same time, being published in a book is still pretty novel.

Will update when I have more information.

What would you do?

So, I missed posting yesterday, but that’s alright.

I wanted to take a quick moment to share with my (two) readers something really cool -

If you use photoshop, you’ll appreciate this real-life mock-up of the program.  I found this through design fckr (http://dfckr.com/), a neat design blog I have in my google reader, and had to share it.  I use photoshop quite a lot myself, and am responsible for hooking at least one of my friends on its awesomeness.  So, this was really neat to see.

Enjoy.

Happy weekend!

Today after work I had the privilege of re-shooting headshots for a friend of mine. I took an original set on Friday, but the late afternoon light was not working in my favor – I think it was me working against the light rather than working with it.

Here is an edited version of one of the photos from today. I’m really happy with how the shoot went – this was taken at around 5:30, with some lovely light, under trees. I never considered shooting in the shade before I read about how the light is easier to work with – now I really have to say, it’s the way to go.

One of the hardest things to learn, for me, is how to get people to pose, and relax in front of the camera. I’ve been shooting people I know up to this point, which allows for some fun banter back and forth. When the subject is comfortable in the pose, the expressions are much more natural – a lesson I learned today.

In other news, the Phillies are in the World Series for the first time since I was 9. I was born in December of 1983 – the last time a Philadelphia team won a championship I was not yet born. So, let’s go Phils!