Cheering Section

I wasn't sure if I was going to cover the marathon again. Last year I ran around the city to cover as much as I could. Last year there were no 8GB cards on sale (so all I had were some 512MB cards). Last year I didn't really know what I was doing. This year, though, I knew I didn't end up doing much with the pictures I took. In fact, I did so little, I didn't even post them on this blog. I was thinking this year it might be fun for the three of us to go down to the marathon and sit and be spectators and cheer.

The weather was pretty nice. We found a sunny spot at the 4-mile area, saw the wheelchair, women's, men's, and the rest run past. On the left is the winner, on the right is Scrappy doing a dance to keep warm. We left in time to get home to see the lead women and men finish on TV.

Chuck E.

We wore our costumes again for a costume birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. I shouldn't say "we" because adding a tiara to your street clothes isn't much of a costume. For a second day in a row, LV was Indiana Jones and Scrappy was Padme from The Clone Wars. LV suggested I wear a sweater vest and be him. Then we decided that was weird. Instead, I tried to dress like one of the archeology students in Raiders of the Lost Ark--a cute dress, Mary Janes, and "Love You" written on my eyelids. No one knew I was in a costume. Maybe I should have gone with the tiara.

Halloween

Trick-or-treating was more fun this year because we'd lived in the neighborhood for more than a week. We didn't have to worry if we were going to get lost.

Halloween in general was also more fun because I could torture the cat--dressing him as a pumpkin for Scrappy's school parade. He was a good sport.

Illustrating Again

I thought I would have been starting on illustrations for a paid assignment on Monday, but instead I shot Monday, cleaned most of Tuesday, and have been avoiding the illustrations all morning. I received the details last night, so it's not like I've been avoiding them all week, but... here I am blogging instead. Maybe the inspiration will come after this episode of My Super Sweet 16 ends...

Playing with Light

I was thinking about watching that episode of Chuck I had on DVR when I realized that I should probably continue to get my money's worth out of the rentals. I had wanted to see what the difference was between the reflectors and the diffusers included with the umbrellas, but decided instead to use my softbox and ring light. Why catalog lighting I don't own? The white board (and positioning of the slippers) is my catalog for future reference...

Another Reason to Move

While I was celebrating the newly instituted Tiara Tuesdays, my landlord was getting the garage cleared out. All that good stuff that I had models posing with is now gone. How boring.

Seriously?

Thanks, SI, for proving once again what a jinx your cover choice can be... The party was quickly over after that cover. I found these today while cleaning. It was nice (?) to see that no one from these covers is in the World Series.

Tasty

The shoot ended rather early (I consider anything before 6 p.m. to be early), so there was plenty of time to let the cats out and watch them entertain themselves. Streaky found a big fat fly to eat. I have no idea where the fly came from. Or, for that matter, the bumble bee the cats were chasing before the fly.

Getting My Money's Worth

Shoots never come together quickly. This was an exception. A makeup artist and a model contacted me about shooting. I said I would shoot avant-garde beauty with them. They were both excited. I really know nothing about avant-garde, but I wanted something different and I wanted to use my rentals at least one more time.

I totally expected one to say she couldn't shoot--not on such short notice. Both were available Monday, both had no problem with the location, both were responsive to emails. This was bizarre. Shoots don't come together in fewer than three days.

Thirty minutes before the shoot, I get a call from the model. She's hoping I can excuse her tardiness--she spent the night in the hospital after a life-threatening asthma attack. I asked her if she was sure she wanted to shoot. She couldn't wait.

It was a good shoot.

Toys!

LV really wanted me to shoot his GI Joes. They've been waiting in a bag all summer. But his idea was to show the new Joe with the old Joe. Unfortunately, most of the rubber rings in the old Joes need to be replaced and no one in our neighborhood sells those rings. So we shot other toys instead, like the new Indiana Jones and Violet from the Incredibles.

I wanted to try something new with the lighting, so, even though I was using the rental umbrellas, I dragged out the giant light table.

Clients

I was supposed to meet up with a client at 3 p.m., but he had another shoot to attend. He asked if I wanted to go with him to the shoot. I was curious, but I still had too much retouching left. I said I would meet up with him after the shoot. At 10 p.m., LV and I were sitting at the Starbucks in Union Square wondering what the cut off point should be. I rescheduled (and tried to think of it as a cute little coffee date for me and LV).

Lighting

I tend to light everything high and directly in front. But on this day, I quickly learned to shoot with back light. It made things completely different from any shoot I've done before.

The sunlight in the picture on the left is was started all the back lighting. Then I wanted to exaggerate what was happening in the doorway. Then I needed to recreate that in the laundry room (before we got kicked out). I don't think I'll ever go back...

Juggling Act

Last minute shoots always require some dramatic planning. Planning for Wednesday seemed excessively dramatic. Everyone had something else they should be doing instead. (Example: I shouldn't be doing new shoots. I should be retouching in order to start printing so I can circulate my portfolio to find paying jobs.) But I found a team and found ways to meet all of their needs. The shoot was on.

More Abstract

I saw an ad on craigslist for a web designer/photographer. Trying to swap web designing for group shots didn't prove to work out previously, so this time I offered to photograph what they needed in exchange for what I needed. Not until the morning before the shoot did the idea really strike me for how to anchor the shoot. I wanted something more emotive than what I had, but "anxiety" and "happy" were just too vague. I wanted something specific. I decided to pull the more interesting announcements from my Facebook account. The picture above is "[Name] cannot wake up. :("

This is a picture LV, my lovely assistant, took of me taking a picture of "[Name] wants to bury her head in the sand and not wake up until 2009." LV's not into the absurd, so it really wasn't his cup of tea. I am his cup of tea, though, so he bared down, made nice with all the pigeons on the roof, and was a great assistant.

This wasn't really part of the series. More just to make use of the sunset and a group shot.

Is that you, God?

On yesterday's shoot, the model said her mother would say the makeup artist didn't show up because that's what she gets for shooting on a holiday. The makeup artist emailed to say her makeup bag had been stolen, which made me wonder if she too was pissing off God because she was working on Yom Kippur.

When the modeling coach (yeah) asked which holiday it was, I said that all of October is a Jewish holiday. I had just seen the B&H and Adorama schedules, and both were closed for most of October. I say, "I'm screwed if anything happens to my equipment this month." Later that day, my flash stopped working...

However, I had been thinking to myself how nice it would be to be contacted about shooting agency models. Why doesn't someone ask me to test their models, I wondered. That afternoon I received an email from an agency asking me to test two of their models. Yay!

The good thing about Adorama being closed all month is that they were giving away their rentals. I could rent lights for 13 days for the price of a 4-day rental. But there goes all the money from my Boston shoot: rental, repairs, transportation for heavy equipment...

To try to save some money (because after picking up rental lights at noon, I rented *more* equipment from Flash Clinic where I had just dropped off my broken kit), I carried 60 pounds of sandbags about 15 blocks. All that sand can fit into a tiny box, so the sight of me struggling with a small box invoked comments from a lot of people who thought I just needed some encouragement. Encouragement, no. More muscle, yes.

Flash Pop Bang

A model I previously shot referred another model to me. It was really great to have a paid shoot, but that didn't really put any cash in my pocket. On the last look, the flash stopped triggering. Model lights, good. Flash, no go.

Meanwhile, though, I did learn how to change the flash tube when I finally plugged in the third light I never use.

Something Different

I took a break from retouching (that's all I've done all day all week) to clean all day instead. It was different.

Fuzzy Little Pumpkin

LV hates clothes for pets, but, when I said I wanted to get a little puffy jack-'o-lantern costume for Streaky, he was game. Streaky on the other hand... At least he didn't try to take it off right away.

Follow Up

The post work is the mos annoying part of this job for me. I've been retouching all week. Tuesday I overnighted three disks from the shoot in Boston. Thursday it turns out you can't drag 200 raw files from the DVD to the desktop without it breaking, so I had to resend the files. Twenty-five hours later, I'm done ftp'ing all the 366. To avoid repeating the situation, I copied 20 at a time every hour. Yeah, every hour. I set an alarm in order to wake up every hour so there wasn't a break in copying files overnight. Now I have to get back to retouching. I *really* want to update my portfolio with all the work I've shot in the past six weeks.

One Big Bag

I wanted a bigger backpack to take to Boston so that I could fit everything and carry fewer bags. When trying to decide if I should get this back, I tried it on and the salesman suggested I'd be better off getting an assistant. I couldn't really see how big the bag was or that it might way more than a third grader. It's hard to say which would have been more difficult to carry around for 12 hours...

Two Events

In the morning, I hit a local grocery store for the follow up event to the tasting that had been canceled the day before.

Then I headed out to the mall for two fashion shows.

Mostly, I was interested in seeing how all my pictures from July were being used. That's my portrait of Christian in the phone. :0)

Boston

I was so glad I booked my trip by train. (I was even happier I got on the Acela.) It rained all day. So much that the event was canceled, but I took pictures of the signage in the subway before heading to the hotel.

Busy

I feel like I had a lot to catch up on before doing a shoot in Boston. I needed to go get my backup camera repaired, drop a disk of high res images from a look book shoot, send invoices, make an appointment to talk to an account director, and pick pictures from a previous shoot that I want a model release for. I think I got it all done...

When One Isn't Enough...

We haven't had side-by-side TVs in the living room since we moved in two years ago, but, when the final game at Yankees Stadium was going to be played at the same time as the Cowboys on Sunday Night Football, it was time to roll out another TV with rabbit ears.

Family Affair

"Fill the frame" is the most basic advice given to anyone who wants to take a good picture, but I wasn't about to compete with this crowd for pictures at the Christening. I like the story my picture tells.

*sigh*

I knew I had to be in a rather remote area of Brooklyn at 3 p.m. for a quick meeting and that I also needed to take my backup camera in for a repair. But I didn't feel like moving. My 3 'o-clock was to meet the head of a modern dance troupe and check out a rooftop location for a shoot. I made it there on time, but the camera repair shop was closed by the time I got back to Manhattan. Well, the one I went to wasn't closed, but they had to send me to a sister location that was closed. So the Rebel awaits its repair.

On the Wall

Scrappy had no idea her art would be displayed in an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum until five minutes before we left for the opening gala. We had the postcard on the refrigerator and I'm sure it must have been mentioned in class, but Scrappy was still shocked to see her work displayed. Then she went looking for the chips and cookies.

Re-re-re

I've been retouching for three days now... The wacom has made retouching so much easier on my wrist, but all the work is still a pain in my neck. There's always something else that could be improved. Maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist.

Day Three

Day Three of shooting was so long, it easily felt like a week. We shot a meet-and-greet in the morning, prepping for the show in the afternoon, the show, and then the wrap party... It was definitely a good time.

On the Big Screen

After a second day of shooting Christian Siriano (that was the shoot in July where I couldn't disclose details), I had to go check out the billboard created from the July shoot. (The red dot in the middle that says "LG.")

While my pictures made it into the reel playing on the screens at the fashion show and make up a bunch of the content on the lglotus.com (you can download my work as wallpaper!), my stills weren't in the 10 seconds on the billboard. (Christian looking at fabric on the screen just right of center.)

Still, I was part of that billboard in Times Square. :0)

Props and Sets

I can't post the pictures I took earlier in the day, but this the family enjoying the new studio prop.

New Props

I picked up a new client from craigslist who wants to pay for portrait sessions, but also wanted me to have a really comfy chair in my studio. I thought this was a bit ridiculous because he wasn't going to pay enough to off-set the cost of a good armchair from someplace cheap, like Target or IKEA. Then I took a look at the used furniture for sale on craigslist and found this lovely Workbench armchair.

Regular people selling their used goods on CL don't deliver, so I had to find a rental car large enough, pick Scrappy up from school, get to the rental car, pick up the chair, hope we all fit, and then return the car after dropping the chair at home. Luckily, LV was working in Manhattan that day and could go move the chair to the sidewalk and then hop on the subway with Scrappy after we wouldn't all fit. I beat them home, enlisted the help of a neighbor to move the chair, and was able to return the car before the rental time ended. It was more drama than I usually like on a Friday night.

A Lot of Shoting...

...means a lot of iced coffee and bruises.

The best part of shooting so much in one week? Always having iced coffee ready in the fridge. The worst part of shooting so much in one week? Carrying so much equipment every day. I have bruises all down my every limb and big crazy bruise on my hip from lugging a 30-pound strobe kit.

Test Shoot

Because I don't have enough on my plate with needing to turn around images, I stuck to my test shoot for this week. We did a variety things, ranging from kind of bizarre to totally bizarre. (The are slightly bizarre and normal.) And then she got hurt. And it was 90 degrees outside. And I kept getting phones calls from my contact person for this coming weekend's shoot. The posing was good, the lighting was good, but "the shoot" was... eh.

Beautiful Lighting

We went to see Gavin DeGraw again. This time we hung further in the back and upstairs--it wasn't as hot or stuffy, therefore I did not feel like passing out. Being upstairs also meant I had a great view of people using built-in flashes too far away from the stage. (See examples below.)

I'm such a snob, huh?

The opening act included an electric mandolin. I did not think I would ever pay to see someone play the electric mandolin...

More Clothes

I can't believe that's my yard. I also can't believe I figured out how to light that. It's like I've been reading. It's more like I woke up, having learned from all my past mistakes. And then my yard turned out looking this lush.

Back to School

First day of a new school year? Time to break out matching sweater vests... Although Scrappy was super nervous about her first day of third grade, it seems like God and Streaky are there to shower her with support.

Stuff

Kind of crazy to think that less than a year ago I quit the office job and a little less than a month ago I almost gave up on this photography idea. Here I am shooting, shooting, shooting...