My First Engagement Photo Shoot

Jackie and John in Foliage – Cedar Memorial, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

One of my friends at work asked me to shoot some pictures for her (that looked nice) so her mom could put an engagment announcement in their hometown paper. I got all excited and went for the big production of lights and all that, but she really just wanted a couple of nice shots. Needless to say, she is happy we decided to go big.

I pulled together my crew of Erica and Eric to go help out. Erica was there to help pose since she’s a girl and is better at that then Eric and I who totally though technical stuff most of the shoot. She also rocked with her D80 and took over 200 shots in RAW that I’ve been helping her convert and develop into awesome jpgs. I picked Eric since he’s a good shooter and has an amazing portfolio. My plan was to shoot Erica’s D80 off and on, but I didn’t feel it and rocked out the Portra 160VC that I got from the Kodak Expired Film Giveaway and I’m glad I shot film. I really like the Portra 160VC, the saturation is nice in the scans I got and I’m pretty sure my buddy David at Target turned off the auto-correction.

We headed over to Cedar Memorial which happens to be a pretty large and well known cemetary in the area; it’s also really nice and has some good locations for photo shoots assuming you can hide the flowers at the headstones. I got a couple of nice shots that weren’t acceptable because you can see rows of flowers in the background.

The only bad part about the day was the realization that I put my Vivtar 75-205mm f/3.8 lens back together incorrectly when I cleaned fungus off the back of the first element. It doesn’t focus at infinity anymore. I’m tempted to try and fix it, but it took me a good half hour to get the focus barrel on the focus threads. My Vivitar 285hv flash also broke when the wind caught my brollie and light stand causing it to fall over. In order to work better with my Cactus radio triggers (which had no issues at all yesterday) I bought a hotshoe to pc cord adapter that I mounted on the bottom of the flash; that hotshoe adapter doesn’t fit the bracket on the light stand all that well and usually falls out if it’s tilted, somehow it didn’t this time and the flash’s hotshoe tore itself apart. It seems that I can replace that part of the flash so not all is lost; but I realized that mono lights are probably a better thing since I shoot lots of film and having modelling lights would be a plus. Not to mention the camera fails with the half dark frames, they popped up, but happily on frames that weren’t that great, so I’m not too mad about that.

I think the day was a huge success despite my gear failures. From the shots I’ve seen so far between the three of us, the happy couple is going to get some good quality images.

Loss of Tradition

I cruised over to Tailhook Daily today just to catch up on the latest Naval Aviation news and saw something that sort of disturbed me. Congress wants to name the next aircraft carrier the USS Barry Goldwater. I don’t know who Barry Goldwater is, but I’m assuming he isn’t that important.

I’ve been on two CVN’s, the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and I don’t remember the other one. I always wondered why the naming system has sort of bugged me and the Tailhook guys actually put it in words.

There is a petition to restore the glory in the naming of aircraft carriers back to traditional means: victorious battles (USS Midway or long standing names (like the USS Enterprise).

It would be a lie to say I haven’t been busy…

My Feet – Ft. Walton Beach, FL

So August was an incredibly busy month with long hours at work, a business trip to Florida (shot 3 rolls of film, shots here but still waiting on how to develop the old slide film), and a week of hanging out at home wth Lilly while Erica was in the Twin Cities for the Annual Tastefully Simple Convention. Lilly and I had a good time and we even went to the park to look at flowers.

My birthday is coming up in 3 days now since it’s after midnight and is now the 5th. I got a pretty kickass shopvac from Erica’s dad and with the money my parents gave me, I got Battlefield: Bad Company and Dead Space. I still need the gear to finish out my darkroom, but Photo Pro has been out of the needed gear, maybe Hall’s Photo in Marion has it. There is no point in going to Porter’s since they stopped selling developing materials in the stores, only online I believe.

Photographically speaking, my one sorta working Pentax ME Super has electronic problems which were confirmed when I borrowed a completely fubar’d ME Super kit with an auto winder. Fixed the other ME Super I had that was giving me problems and shot that for a model shoot my friends and I had not too long ago. I took the plunge and bought a pack of Fuji FP-100C for the Bronica’s Polaroid back. That was an adventure in figuring out how to load the film, wasted 2.5 shots figuring it out and have 2 sorta decent shots hanging on the fridge in their instant glory. I know now what I’m doing so next time I get some of that film, I’ll be good to go.

I find myself more removed from my photography friends because I shoot film and because I keep having issues with my cameras. The latter is due to using old gear, but it seems as there is a little disconnect; don’t know how to describe it. Maybe it’s more apparent now that we’re doing stuff with off camera lighting and they have it easy since they can check settings and I’m relient upon them for initial settings. Maybe it’s because film is something they haven’t thought about for years. I never know what I’m going to get when I take a picture considering all the film I have is usually way expired and my camera will have more than one issue screwing up one or more frames.

Beach Skimming – Ft. Walton Beach, FL
(I’m spoiling you all with a second image today)

I am finding myself more in agreement with figitalrevolution each and every day. What Stephen blogs about just connects with me for some reason and it’s refreshing to know that there is someone out there producing material that is in league with what I want to be creating. Granted he has possibly the best film scanner for under $17,000 and a $30,000 printer (which happens to be one of 8 in the world, that’s how sweet it is). At least I’m finding inspiration for my photography goal.

If you don’t know about him, head over to Zack Arias’ blog. It is a really good read, especially recently.