How Not to Market Yourself

evan's third birthday

evan's third birthday, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Amina and I were lucky enough to be invited to not one, but two, birthday parties last weekend!

Of course, one had 15 five-year-olds running around, all sugared up, but it was a blast, and I'll have more photos of that coming up, as soon as I find time to edit the 200 shots I took on that sunny afternoon.

Evan's party, though, was a more subdued affair – family, friends and lots of presents. It was a Batman party, but I think at three years old, any superhero would do the trick ... that, and the remote control dinosaur that he'd gotten. Seriously – it had a handheld remote, and you could make it walk, roll over, roar, etc. As another dad at the party said, toymakers are just now creating the toys that our imaginations pretended they were. Back when we were kids. Not that I'm old or anything. :)

Evan had a great time, and we stopped by later in the evening to enjoy a little quiet time with Evan's parents, which as you can imagine was anything but quiet. Evan's got a wicked swing of the bat, and I spent most of the evening throwing the little beanbag softball directly as the bat, so that Evan could knock a few out of the (living room) park.

today's Photo Tip Of The Day

Engineer 1, FPD

Engineer 1, FPD, originally uploaded by pr9000.

There's a pretty cool little boy who lives a few doors down from me ... His name is Cooper, and he's battling cancer right now at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. I had the honor of photographing his family in mid-November, and Cooper was a running, jumping bundle of energy ... He and his brother, Blake, wore me out, frankly – it's amazing to me the amount of energy little boys bring to whatever they do.

A few weeks later, Cooper fell ill and after many tests and procedures, he was diagnosed with cancer. He went through surgery a few weeks ago, and while it was successful, he still has a long road ahead. His family decided that St. Jude's was the perfect place for him to continue his treatments, and our neighborhood hosted a little party for him on Monday.

the crowd at Cooper's celebration, originally uploaded by pr9000.

I say "little" but that's an understatement – Cooper's dad, Scott, said that he stopped counting at 150 people. Cooper's a lucky boy, because the outpouring of love for him was overwhelming. Not to mention the fact that he got a police escort into the neighborhood, and a good chunk of the Franklin Fire Department was there to greet him! He got to ride in the back of a huge fire truck as the rest of the crowd followed in a parade. And I got to go up in the bucket of the truck to take a picture, which I must admit was a lifelong dream come true ...

the bucket!, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Cooper has a pretty awesome support structure, which includes his brother, Blake, and his stepbrother and stepsister, Michael and Danielle (he's hugging her in the photo below). Plus his friends, their friends, and a huge group of people who are following his story on his CaringBridge site.

hugging Danielle, originally uploaded by pr9000.

To see the full gallery, go to my website, click on "Clients" in the lower right corner, and enter "cooper" (no quotes) as the password. Make sure your speakers are on, and enjoy the highlights of what turned out to be an amazing, life-affirming afternoon celebration for Cooper and his family. And if you're so inclined, why not consider donating to the cause? St. Jude's does wonderful work for its patients – most especially, for Cooper.

Our prayers are with you ...

cheekwood in the springtime ...

I've done sessions at Cheekwood in the past, but last Saturday was my first spring Cheekwood experience. It did not disappoint – spring has most definitely sprung in Middle Tennessee.

Mark and his children, Taijana and Taren, were excited to get for the session – as was I, because aligning schedules had been quite a challenge. Both children are very active in sports, and that means most weekends are spent shuttling between soccer fields and basketball courts. Honestly, I'm not sure how most parents do it. Trotter wears me out, and he's just a dog. :)

Taren was really, really excited to be in front of a lens. Without question, he is the most camera-friendly young man I've had the honor of photographing. Need a pose? No problem! In fact, don't need a pose but want to see one anyway? Taren's the man!



Taijana is a freshman this year and is a pretty accomplished basketball player. I wonder if Pat Summitt reads this blog? If she does – and I'm not saying she does, but maybe – I hope she remembers this post, and calls me when "Tay" is on her Final Four team in a few years. After all, I like press passes for sporting events. :)



We had a fun afternoon by all accounts, and I think Mark and the kids are thrilled with their photos. And we ended the session with my patented "Make Everyone Jump Off A Wall" maneuver ... it never fails to entertain!

Puppies and Bubbles

Two of my favorite subjects: puppies and children.



Westhaven held a "Bubbles on the Great Lawn" event recently, where toddlers and their parents were invited to enjoy a nice, spring morning blowing bubbles outside the Residents' Center. I think the kids had more fun running around and burning energy, while the moms were enjoying the bubble soap and generally happy to see their kids tire themselves out. :)



Good friends, great weather and license to run around – can you imagine a better morning?



The only thing that would trump it – a nine-week-old Goldendoodle puppy!



You may have heard that I have a doodle myself; I don't talk about him much. (Ha ha) A neighbor fell in love with Trotter, and called me last week to say that they took the plunge, and brought home little Obie. We took Trotter down to Chess Park to meet him, and it was quite the scene ... Obie's obviously learning about how to deal with other dogs, and it's got to be a tough lesson when everyone is bigger than you:



Trotter's a big boy, and I think Obie was more than a little intimidated. Amina had to put Obie on top of Trotter, and once that happened, they got along well. Obie smelled like puppy breath, which I think should be bottled and sold as a cologne or an Airwick air freshener scent.

His teeth were puppy sharp and he always rolled over on his back – he knows he's not the boss of anyone yet. He looks just like Trotter did when he was a pup, and I almost – almost – did a straight-up trade. :)

Winston!

With a smile like that, no wonder Winston was the big hit of my recent photoshoot!

My neighbors Terry and Trina asked me to photography their son, Lance, and his girlfriend, Katherine, over Spring Break ... but the real star of the shoot was Winston, their year-old basset hound. Winston's a drool machine, a deep barker and three times as long as he is tall. His ears drag on the ground and when he's done walking, he'll just up and stop, however far you are from home, and refuse to continue unless he's carried the rest of the way.

Needless to say, he's a charmer. :)



We had a great time, and our neighborhood – like the rest of middle Tennessee – is just on the edge of full-fledged spring bloom. We hit a few of our favorite Westhaven spots, and of course ended up by the fountain, where Winston was just about finished ... it's funny – kids and dogs all seem to have about a 45-minute limit to how cute they'll be on command.

I think Lance, Katherine, Terry and Trina all were happy with the results. And Winston? It was the most Beggin' Strips he'd ever eaten in one afternoon.

Booker the boxer

booker, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Amina and I were in New Orleans for a few days last week, and of course I've always got my camera with me. You never know when you're going to see the perfect shot, and without a camera it's just a memory that you'll chase forever ...

I saw the perfect shot on our first night there, as we walked down Bourbon Street, and went back the next night to get it, but it didn't present itself. I did the same thing in Hawaii a few years ago -- on my first evening there, I saw the prototypical "surfer girl" shot at sunset on Ka'anapali ... and I didn't have my camera. I still haven't managed to find that shot, and I probably won't be happy until I get it.

But ... to the handsome young man above: There's a dog park near (I think) Avenger Park, along the river, that we passed as we explored the Garden District. We pulled over because we were missing Trotter, which is as pathetic as it sounds ... and that's where I met Booker.

On first glance, I felt very sad for him -- obviously, how could you not? -- but after seeing him prance around the park and play with the other dogs, I gained a lot of respect for him. I'm sure he "knows" he only has one eye, but animals tend to overcome such minor things. I've seen three-legged dogs run faster than I can, and I saw Booker barreling through the park with that familiar "puppy spring" in his stem.

He was happy because he was loved, he had friends around and (I'm sure) at the end of the day he'll be in his home, well fed and rested and loved by his owner.

When I find myself feeling down about things around me, I try to remember Booker. He knows something that I don't; I just hope I'm smart enough to learn it.

Get Your Whites Their Whitest ...

I'm not a big fan of doing laundry -- just ask Amina. Sure, I can cook, I like to clean my house and mowing the grass can be fun. But laundry?

Sorry. Too many rules, too many things to think about: can I wash this with that? Is this a delicate or just a tattered old t-shirt? Can I mix whites and colors? Well, on that last question, I know the answer: throw a red t-shirt in a load of white towels and the whites don't look white any more.

There's a photography lesson in here, believe it or not.

What Color is "White?"
The brain is an amazing computer. It processes millions of bits of information per second and somehow manages to make logical, life-affirming decisions out of the data (unless a wine tasting is involved). One of the things the brain tells us is color, which can be pretty important -- "Should I eat that green bread?" is an important question because, well, most bread isn't green. Knowing what "green" is helps make the more important decision of whether green is good to eat. In this case it probably isn't, though when I was a bachelor I might have made a different decision ...

Think of white as the constant color -- we can argue all day about what shade of blue or green a paint chip shows, or whether the "Midnight Blue" color of your car is actually closer to a purple. White is white, and if that's a constant, then we can judge all other colors around it. (This paragraph deliberately ignores color theory, because it's a huge ball of wax and tends to start fistfights among color nerds.)

Most digital SLRs -- meaning, "a camera where the lens comes off" -- have what's called a white balance setting, and it's critical to taking a good photograph. Why?

White in natural sunlight looks different than, say, white in your living room at 9 p.m. with reading lamps, or white at 9 p.m. in your living room with lamps and the built-in flash firing ... When you set the white balance, you're telling the camera how to compensate for the light surrounding your subject.

Consider this photo; I took it with afternoon sun streaming into my dining room, so I set my white balance for "sunlight" and fired away. My camera decided "white" for that scene, and adjusted the other colors accordingly.



Now, consider this:



Same photo, but a different white balance. In this case, I told my photo editing software to automatically figure out the white balance. Looks cooler, doesn't it? And by "cooler" I mean "a less warm color" -- this version adds much more blue to the background.

Which one is right? I'd say the first one is a more accurate representation of what my eye saw. It's warmer, which gives a greater sense of time and place -- 3 p.m. afternoon sun on a gorgeous January afternoon. But the second one seems to show more of the delicacy of the tulip bulb; it hints at the inevitable demise of the cut flower as it droops closer to the ground, and shows a better range of colors with the tulip in the background.

There isn't a "right" answer -- it's art, fer cryin' out loud! -- and that's what makes photography fun. Understanding white balance does allow you to control the shot, which is critical to getting the photo you saw in your mind's eye.

ben b/w

ben b/w, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Some very close friends of ours, from our previous life in Minnesota, know that I'm an inveterate Pittsburgh Steelers fan ... I actually sat through a cold, snowy January evening to witness them defeat the San Diego Chargers on their path to Super Bowl XXIII, and the one thing I took away from the game (besides the amazing sense of community with 65,000 people) was how quickly Nashville had thinned my heretofore thick Minnesota blood. :)

So Matthew and Aaron saw this little Ben Roethlisberger action figure, made their mom buy it, and then put it in the mail for me. What they don't know is that I'm a lover of tiny things; if I were to stage it properly, I'd have Ben throwing to a Lego Stormtrooper, with a Lego Darth Vader in close pursuit, while the miniature Millenium Falcon hovered overhead, all near a little Vikings bobblehead doll on the sidelines of Tiny Starbucks Espresso Cup Stadium.

But I didn't stage it that way -- at least, not that I'll admit in public ... I had Ben out in the weeds, on the patio table, and here, in a pretty black and white shot from our dining room table. To see the rest of them, just click on the image above, which should take you to my Flickr page.

This is another piece of evidence for "found lighting," as that's just the sun, around 2 p.m., in our dining room. It's better than a studio ...

The Joys of Found Light

tulip b/w, originally uploaded by pr9000.

One thing baffles a lot of "pro-sumer" photographers -- light. Specifically, how do you get the proper light on your subject? (1) Is it a flash? (2) Is it sunlight? (3) Can I turn on the light on the ceiling fan?

Answers: (1) Yes ... (2) definitely yes, with a caveat ... (3) well, you could, but you'd better know what you're doing.

I specialize in natural light photography, which means, in a nutshell, that I don't do studio work. Not that I'm opposed to it; it's just that I don't have a studio, and everything I've learned to this point has centered around using what Mother Nature gave us -- with a little help now and then.

For example: the shot above, of a tulip. I came down from my office around 2:30 p.m. and saw gorgeous sunlight streaming in my dining room. I've learned that Tennessee in January isn't the sunniest place in the world, so I took advantage of the rays, filtered through the blinds of the window, to capture this shot.

So it's all natural light.

I cheated a bit, by positioning the tulip so that not all of the bulb was in direct sunlight ... and when I do black and white, I do it on my computer, not on my camera -- meaning, I used my editing software to make this a black and white shot.

I also knew what not to show you ... I had taken a few shots where the sun was directly on the petals, and only then did I remember that direct light can be a bit harsh at times. It biew out the details of the petals, making for a bland photo.

Light works best when it's diffused. You won't see too many good shots with, say, a bare bulb providing the light, or shots where the sun is blindingly bright. Light diffused -- through a screen, a little plastic thing on the end of your flash, or through clouds -- is light that works.

But -- the point is -- take advantage of the natural light that you see around you. You can get very dramatic effects without investing a penny in lighting equipment.

Embrace The Flare ...

sun setting @ heinz field, originally uploaded by pr9000.

I've always been a sucker for lens flare.

Not familiar with lens flare? Here's the nerdy Wikipedia definition; the photo above, taken as the sun was setting last weekend while I attended the Steelers-Chargers playoff game in Pittsburgh, is a bit easier to understand. Basically, it's the artifacts from the sun when you point your camera pretty much directly into it, or at least allow the sun to be in the field of vision of your lens:



For some people, lens flare is a problem, and I can understand the point: it adds (sometimes) unneeded distraction from a well-composed photo, and it blows out color and contrast values, so that photos with lens flare seem washed out, grainy and otherwise unable to be salvaged into something pretty.

But I say you should embrace the flare! In the right situation, flare enhances the photo. Take the shot above: Without it, I just took a picture of the ramp at a stadium. With the flare, it invokes the mood -- a snapshot of an early January afternoon quickly disappearing into a cold midwinter night ...

I'm not saying lens flare is good in every photograph; I work hard to eliminate it most of the time, either by use of a lens hood, my hand, a piece of paper, a hat, or some element of the thing being photographed ... but there are times when the well-chosen inclusion of a lens flare adds a crucial bit of "color" to your photograph.

Introducing "Little Thoughts" for 2009

gerb IV, originally uploaded by pr9000.

For 2009, I'm introducing a line of "Little Thoughts" posts on the RPI blog -- notes about different aspects of taking great photographs, learning more about your camera and sharpening your editing skills -- basically, things that have popped into my head about what I do all day.

Click on the label "Little Thoughts" below to see all the related posts. And if you have suggestions or comments, feel free to leave them after each post, or shoot me an email instead.

I hope you enjoy them!

pretty ribbons, pretty bow ties of blue ...

I'm sorry to paraphrase Willie Nelson like that, but it's one of my favorite Willie songs and most likely was written not too far from where I currently sit, typing this up ... and it's not too far from being the perfect way to describe McClain, Guy and Bennett -- the three stars of a family photo shoot that was one of the most enjoyable I've ever done.

Tresha and Jay were kind enough to choose Rinkes Photography to capture their family, and we chose one of those delicate Sunday afternoons that seem to give up its sunlight with a smile; when the sun was out, it was toasty warm, but when the sun went behind a cloud or a tree, you realized it really was getting close to winter. But no matter -- everyone was up for the experience.





Guy (top) and Bennett were perfect gentlemen, and looked fantastic in their matching bow ties (which Tresha told me were quite a challenge to find). The whole family looked good, actually -- moms (and it's always moms) ask me for clothing advice all the time, and I always say the same thing: Dress your kids as you normally would, in complementary colors or patterns ... Mothers have good eyes for fashion, and photographers have good eyes for photos. And I can barely dress myself sometimes, so moms -- keep on doing what you do. :)

fall comes to westhaven

Scott and Laura have a gorgeous family, and when they approached me for a photo shoot in November, I was excited. I mean, look at these kids!



How could I say no?

We picked a bright, sunny afternoon and visited several spots in Westhaven: the park and path along Pearl Street, the Residents' Club, and the park/fire pit on Wire Grass. Amina and I don't have children -- Trotter manages to keep us pretty busy all by himself -- but I walked away from this one with a renewed appreciation for the jobs that parents have to do ... managing to keep four kids (1) in cooperative moods and (2) relatively free of grass stains and other blemishes?

However Scott and Laura did it, they obviously had practiced it long before. One thing that didn't change, though -- getting all four kids to smile at the same time, and looking in the same direction. Laura was able to do impressions of the kids, right behind my shoulder, to achieve the laughter ...



I wasn't sure about that shot as I pressed the button, but looking at it later, I liked it quite a lot. But this one -- this one I knew was gold as it was happening:



We had a wonderful time with the family, and I think they were quite pleased with the results.

Guilty! Guilty!

hailey, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Oh, I should mention that this little girl gave her cold to her uncle, described in the post below.

But she did it on Christmas day, and we all know that Santa's passed out from exhaustion by noon or so that day ... so I don't think he noticed. :)

Happy 2009!

So Happy New Year! A few days late ... but I was waylaid by a nasty sinus infection that had me begging for the Grim Reaper to visit, if only because the shock of seeing him might have cleared my sinuses a bit. Being a man, I was a bit of a baby during the week I was sick, but Amina did a great job taking care of me and now I'm back, refreshed and ready to tackle 2009.

If you were to log my keystrokes as I typed the title to this post, it would have looked like this

(2 key) (0 key) (o key) (8 key) (backspace backspace) (9 key)

I actually had to write my first 2009 check a few days ago, at a fundraiser for Lindsey Little, an amazing photographer who has dedicated her life to serving God across the globe. She's off to New Zealand next, to train and serve, and her photo gallery is unrivaled ... she's a sweet person who was Trotter's first dogsitter in Franklin, and we were happy to see her off and show our support for the amazing work she does.

Anyway, I wrote the check and got the date right, but only because I was intensely focused on doing it correctly the first time. I'm taking that attitude into the new year, with as much focus and sense of purpose as I've ever had.

The weeks leading up to the holidays were intense, filled with friends, family and a little bit of work thrown in to keep me honest ... The fun started at our neighbor's "Bad Christmas Sweater" party.



That's Mark and Aegis, totally owning the OMGLOL holiday sweater thing -- check out Mark's awesome white belt, which totally held the entire ensemble together. We had a nice time at the party, which doubled as a fundraiser for the Hands and Feet Project ... go ahead, spend a little time on the site, I won't be offended ...



We also had a great time at Scott & Laura's bash ... you can read about the fun session we had with the Erbys here, but this evening was for grownups, and a splendid time was guaranteed for all. We met some neighbors, had a few cocktails and feasted on some great food. Oh, and we learned some things about the folks in our neighborhood that we might not have otherwise known ...



I gotta get to this Radnor Lake place.