Basketball Shoot

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I made a couple hundred photos of a basketball tonight. Tomorrow I'll narrow it down to 20, then edit five of them to upload to istock. Hopefully one or two of them will sell 10 or 15 times a month over the next year or two. I'm sure that I have five that I really like a lot. Which is good for me. Generally from 200 I have 10 that are nice and one that I really like a lot.

My new lights, the alien bees are great. I find them a lot easier to use than my Nikon speed lights. Maybe I just like the manual-ness of them, it is what I am used to working with everyday. Turn a dial, adjust the power and go. Not to mention having a trigger mechanism that doesn't rely on some sort of hard to figure line of sight.

I would like to find more projects to do with them. I have a few ideas lined up. Some need to wait for spring to be fully sprung. Some need to wait for models to be old enough to sign releases. Some need models. At least one needs a robot costume.

I'm particularly interested in the robot.

-Gary

Kite Aerial Photography

I really want to try this.

Unicorns and Rainbows

Unicorn

I listen to a radio show called, "This American Life". In one episode a woman is telling a story about a party she was at. Everyone was discussing endangered species and she said to the group, "Are unicorns endangered or extinct?" After a awkward silence, she realized unicorns aren't real. It is so easy to believe they are though, they just live in Africa, like zebras. After all aren't dinosaurs real? How much easier is it to believe in a horse with a horn than a giant lizard?

Anyway, I've been shooting grad photos. Photos of kids graduating from high school. I chat with the kids. Did you get your prom dress? What are you doing next year? Do you play sports or have a job? Where do you work?

There is one question that I stopped asking. Can you settle a bet between me and my assistant? I think that unicorns are extinct and she thinks they are only endangered, what do you think?

Now, obviously the correct answer is: Unicorns aren't real.

Too many kids don't know that I'm joking when I ask that. They are easily fooled by the way the question is formed, the way it assumes unicorns are real. The kids say unicorns are extinct in front of their parents.

I truly hope the kids aren't actually listening, just responding to my questions. Flipping a coin in their heads, extinct on one side and endangered on the other.

I'm sure very few kids are actually paying attention to anything I say, because when one is paying attention, when there is one that gets that I'm joking we can tell. The kid is having fun and playing along with the game.

-Gary

Talia and Scott

Talia and Scott

I did a basketball photo shoot with Scott this evening. I'm pretty sure that I got a ton of really great shots of him. His girlfriend came along to watch. I had a shoot with her and two friends right around this time last year.

They were both really great to work with and I had a ton of fun.

-Gary

Alien Bees Test

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I ordered a pair of Alien Bees Flashes a week ago and they turned up on my doorstep yesterday. I'm pretty excited about having some studio lights now. I have a photo shoot set up tomorrow evening.

In other news, Heidi broke up with me on the weekend. It's too bad, but realistically we are better as friends than as a couple. I could feel a lot worse about it, but at least I'm sure that Heidi put a lot more thought and consideration into it than Tracie did.

-Gary

Go Ahead, Judge a Book By it's Cover

I always thought that you actually could judge a book by it's cover and now I have proof. This book about human resources.
This book is available on Amazon and has the greatest book cover ever created. You will notice how the photo on the cover of this wonderful book fantastically illustrates the topic of the book. You will also notice that although the book sells for a staggering $152.99 + GST + Shipping, it is temporarily sold out from Amazon. There are two used copies available for $155.23 which means that the book actually increases in value after you buy it!

Wilson and the Cockroach

This is one of my favourite photos from my entire mission. My description is in this journal entry. Keep in mind by this point I had been in Argentina for a year and eight months.

Aug. 5, 1998

Today was P day. We did our laundry. I did all of mine. I have enough socks to wear a different pair everyday and still only have to wash them once a month.

I wrote a letter to Mom and Dad and one to Jeff.

I took a picture of my companion to finish off the roll and we got them developed, he noticed that there was a huge cockroach on the wall behind him and I didn't even see it!

Well while the clothes were washing, we went to get money at Coto and we came back to dry the clothes. When my clothes were dry I got my haircut. You know, it pains my soul to pay ten dollars to wash my clothes and then ten dollars more to cut my hair. At least she cut a lot off. I really needed a haircut bad.

We went to our Auchan to buy groceries, develop film and eat. We ate McDonald's. I love McDonald's. It's so good.

Anyway, like always P day was really fast. Elder Peterson told me that we were having the district meeting in Wilde, so we went on down there and waited half an hour, but nobody showed, so we left. I imagine that Peterson had barely got back with his nuevito and that Bates and Lawrence went to the chapel in Avellaneda.

My Aunt Alice

1 July 2002

My aunt Alice passed away on Sunday.

This picture is from the first of July 2002.

Heidi

Heidi

I like hanging out with Heidi a lot. Living in different cities is brutal. Having days off that don't match up is even more brutal. It is hard getting to know someone when you only get to be together for a day or two per week.

It has been really fun so far.

We went to see the Broadway show Stomp last week, and had a great time both at the show and visiting in the car during our road trip.

-Gary

Christmas and New Years

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For Christmas I bought myself a GPS and I am enjoying using it. I haven't really had a good chance to explore places where I don't know where I'm going except for on my New Years trip to Calgary.

I picked Heidi up in Lethbridge and we went to Calgary for a New Years Eve party. I had a really good time. We went to dinner and then to her sister's house. We baby sat their kids for an hour or so while they went to their own party and then at 10:30 we went to the Dance.

Things in the studio have been pretty slow the last two days. I guess that is to be expected. The school photos are all done, everyone is broke from Christmas and the next major shooting we are doing is in four more weeks.

I'm really looking forward to starting the graduation cap and gown photos. It would be nice if they had already started because I really like to be busy.

This photo is a test of a style I want to try for the college sports teams. I think that it is a way of shooting that would really stand out from the way that most of the athlete portraits in the league are done. It seems like the type of photo that they could take a chance instead of going with the same old boring head shots.

In the Mood for Blogging

I've really been in the mood for blogging lately. I think it is because I've been feeling fantastic since I finally cut the last string holding me to Tracie when we went down to the provincial registry to take her name off my car registration. Maybe it's just Christmas.

I had a really great boxing day yesterday. We went to London Drugs and got there right before they opened the doors and were able to get two 4gig compact flash cards and then we went to the Future Shop. I got a 8gig thumb drive and gps unit. I think I got a pretty good deal on both and the crowds weren't nearly as bad as I thought they would be. Then at about 10:30 or so I went to Lethbridge to see Heidi and her family. Heidi's whole family came down to her parent's house for a visit and Christmas dinner.

-Gary

I'm A Model

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My good friend and assistant Christine did a practise series of photos of me today. They all turned out very well. I'm very pleased with them. We were able to go over the things that she did well and the things that needed a little improvement. There were only a few that would have needed to be deleted if they were for a real sitting, and almost all of them looked fantastic once they were cropped.

I may even print a few for my wall at home. I guess I'm sort of weird among photographers in that I generally really like having my picture taken. I think that these ones turned out particularly well. Now if I could just lose some weight.

-Gary

Students Loans

2007-03-31 Canadian Money

I finished paying off one of my student loans today. That leaves only one. It is very nice to be getting them paid.

I really wish it hadn't taken so long but I guess you do what you can. The other one is going to take a while to get through.

Things are going really well. I'm feeling fantastic and enjoying myself a lot. Heidi came to visit me for the weekend and we had a chance to exchange our gifts. We spent a lot of time visiting my family and we had a nice time. I'm glad that Heidi got a chance to meet Jackie and her boys.

-Gary

Heidi

Heidi came to visit again and I had a fantastic time. We went to see Twilight, which I liked quite a bit, it followed the book pretty well. I always like the book a little bit better. I think it is because it is easier to interpret books in a way that is meaningful than it is to interpret meaning into movies.

It starting snowing really hard at supper time and so Heidi decided it would be better to leave a little sooner rather than take a chance later in the evening.

I have to replace my tires tomorrow. The treads are really worn. I can't decide if I should buy winter tires or if I should just get all season and not worry about it until the time comes to get new, new tires.

-Gary

Why do Foreigners Love Michael Jackson So Much?

From the video info:

Here is a remake of the "Thriller" song that I've entirely recorded with my own voice, using 64 A'cappella tracks. There is therefore no instrument, synthetizer, beatbox, or even to sampler, but only the sound of my voice livened up with Reverb and slight Chorus on certain tracks. Regarding looping parts, I've simply used the "looping" technique. Moreover, in the whole piece (which contains several thousand notes), I transposed 8 notes, which were impossible for me to sing in high-pitched. Because of my tessiture, I also must have resigned myself to sing certain parts in head voice, more particularly on the track corresponding to Michael Jackson's solo vocal.

I've accomplished this non-commercial project at home, only with a mobile PC, microphone, headphones and webcam - in nearly 350 hours. It's just an artistic challenge, accomplished during my hours of free time, whose purpose is to make smile my close circle and net surfers. Nonetheless, I'll be happy to record in professional studio, original songs with this technique, if a label was interested to work with me on a SP or LP entirely based on this innovative concept of "Massively Multitracks A'cappella".

Jon asks...

"What sort of photo editing occurs for school photos? I never imagined that was part of the process."

I guess it sort of varies depending on what's wrong with the kid's face. We do a lot more editing than the big school photo companies.

We crop and straighten all the photos. We pop a few zits and fix stray hairs. People can pay for heavier zit popping. The biggest difference between us and the big guys is that we get rid of the glare from the flashes on glasses. Glare on glasses takes the most time of anything we do, and is fairly difficult. I'm getting pretty good at it and having a tablet/pen input device makes it a lot easier. The big companies specifically say on their order forms that they do not retouch glare on glasses. Another thing we do is colour balancing. We colour balance the photos from each photographer's setup for each day so that pictures of siblings will match even if they go to different schools or are photographed by different photographers.

The colour and light levels change dramatically based on where you are shooting. For example if you are in a school gym that is home of the "Red Devils" and there is a huge red logo behind you on the wall, some of the light from the flashes will bounce off of the logo onto the kid making them more red than usual. If the photographer beside you doesn't have the logo behind them, the pictures will have a different colour cast. Then if the younger sibling is goes to school at the home of the "Blue Devils" they will have a different colour cast as well. Shooting in a drama room looks different than shooting in the gym, art room, or cafeteria. Even though the pictures are mostly the same.

We try to control all the variables. It seems to be working for us.

-Gary

School Photo Printing Done

We finished printing the school photos today. Some of the ladies at work were discussing the last time we were done before December and it has been over 5 years at least.

The new printer coming late put us four weeks behind on the printing before we even started, so it was great that we were able to get it done. Next year, we are going to be sitting around waiting for the cheques to clear.

Apart from the speed of the printer itself, several other factors sped up printing and packaging.

For example

Photo editors don't have to split their time between editing and printing the photos. Now the editors only edit the photos, which lowers the switchover time between editing and printing.

The person operating the printer works independently of the editors. This means that anything that needs to be reprinted can just be reprinted. This reduces interruptions to the photo editors, and there is less waiting around for reprints.

The new printer is can have a much longer print queue. The machine can print unsupervised once the jobs are entered, allowing the operator to do other things while waiting for the queue to finish.

We don't laminate the photos anymore and cutting the prints to separate them has been mostly eliminated by the new printer. We will likely be able to eliminate all the cutting once we have more time to make templates and tweak the printer a little more.

There are a few more things that we could do to improve, but for the most part, many of the bottle necks have been removed.

KFC Police

I met a guy about 12 years ago that that raises fighting cocks. At the time, he had about 40!

He kept the big ones all together, it is safe to do that because although they naturally fight each other, if the pecking order is already established they don't fight. He said that if he separated one out and the put it back after a week or so the rest would have forgotten their friend and kill it fast.

He took out 2 little ones to show us a fight. They started fighting right away.
Trying to peck and scratch each other with their spurs. Luckily they were too little to harm each other. It was very interesting.

He let them all out and they all went looking for food. After little while later, one of the younger cocks started fighting with one of the hens. The owner whistled for his #1 fighter (mainly to draw attention that there was a fight going on) and it came over and broke the fight up and it let the hen know that it wasn’t allowed to fight by pecking her.

The hen got one last peck in after the fight was over. The guy laughed and said, "Just like a woman, she just had to get that last peck in."

That guy was very interesting. He knew the pecking order of his birds. He knew which rooster was the toughest. He told us that the #1 bird in the pecking order was actually the 3rd toughest rooster, #2 and #3 were both tougher, but because they were younger they could still remember when the #1 was stronger. I guess the top cock maintained his position through roughing up the younger birds and then continually intimidating them as they got bigger and older.

So it seems that chickens just don't like fighting if the pecking order is set in their minds.

-Gary

Heidi

Heidi

So instead of sleeping right now I am going through the photos on my computer. I have this one saved in the folder called, "BEST WEEKEND EVER".

Time Change

Medicine Hat, Alberta

With the removal of Daylight savings time, it gets dark a lot sooner than usual. About an hour actually. I really like having a little daylight left after work. I much prefer that to having a little more light in the morning.

Things are going well. I've finished going out to the schools and now we are focused on printing all the pictures as well as studio work.

I have about half the airmiles I need to get an xbox 360, but the good news is that Safeway has introduced a new card that gives you 50 bonus airmiles when you spend $40. Which is actually pretty easy. I spent $70 today. I guess I should pay attention to how much everything costs and spread my purchases out to maximize airmile potential.