catching up

I thought I'd start this post with my favorite photo from a shoot that I did for my friends Jason and Robin. Their son Elliot turned 2 so they asked me to capture the whole adorable event. Which I did. It was a sunny summers day and the yard was filled with jolly children, so it wasn't a challenge to get a multitude of good photos. Do have a look at them here. By the way, he's not a battered child, he got some sunblock in his eye.

I've also finally gotten around to posting my photos of Five Days Pending, my friend Jason's (not the same Jason, another one) cover band. They played at the Rex Theater and he asked me to shoot it because one of the members of the band was leaving for Iraq shortly. It was a tough shoot. The lighting guy at the Rex really kept me on my toes. The lights were constantly changing so I was always moving around and adjusting my exposure. I used a really high ISO so the photos all look rather grainy. I used it to my advantage and made the photos look high-contrast and grungy. It's like I told them in my letter to the client (which comes FREE with every completed photo job)

"I shoot in a digital format called RAW which is a very large file so that you can use these for making fairly large prints if you’d like. I use an editing program that’s similar to photoshop but without the gimmicks. Any editing that I do on the computer are processes which could be achieved in a color darkroom. I edit for exposure, highlight contrast, shadow contrast, and hue. Your photos appear very grainy. You might not be too happy about all the grain but this will happen even if I had shot with film. The grain happens for a few reasons. A low light situation where there is a lot of movement requires both a fast shutter speed (to reduce blur) and a wide lens aperture (to capture all available light). To achieve both of these qualities, I needed to set my camera’s ISO very high. The ISO rating determines the camera’s sensitivity to light. This is true for both film and digital. Think of newspaper photos of something in motion or at night."

And so on. Here's an example for your eyeballs. The other forty-six that I've chosen to share can be seen on my flickr site when you click on these highlighted words right here.


Last night I shot what seemed to be a rather popular yearly party in Bloomfield called Roller Boogie. It was utter madness and I cannot say with any confidence yet how the photos turned out as I have yet to look at them. The party entailed booze, roller skates, costumes, VIP rooms, and live music. Nearly all the light came from disco balls and christmas lights. As far as I can recall the first rule of Roller Boogie was "hooray roller boogie", the second rule of Roller Boogie was "if it's your first roller boogie, you must skate" and the third rule seemed to be "no standing still or pausing under decent light". Getting a clear shot of anyone was a struggle and keeping my camera safe from flailing bodies was a challange. I don't quite understand why Sneaky (the host) hired a photographer, but I did my best and tried to capture the feel of the party, if not too many clear images of people's smiling faces. The experience left me frustrated, but now that I've given the images 24 hours to stew in their memory cards, I'm looking forward to editing. I'm sure I'll find some diamonds in the rough.

But that is a blog for another day. Keep on the lookout this Wednesday for the Pittsburgh City Paper.Mariage Blanc has a review on the way of their new album Broken Record. The article with be accompanied by a stunning photo of the band by yours truly. While your waiting for the city paper, be sure to keep an eye on my deviantart and flickr sites. Also, be sure to enjoy this here website as much as possible. You can never have too much lomo in your life!

On that note, I say goodbye.