Freedom to play

We (Joshua & Co. Photography) were downtown this weekend to shoot a wedding at the Curtis Hotel. I was a little stressed when first hearing about some of the challenging lighting conditions – candlelit ceremony and an all blue ballroom – along with logistical issues in getting the wedding party around downtown before the wedding.

All those worries were quickly erased from my mind after embracing it all and playing around with what the situation presented. A little mishap ripping the crotch of my pants climbing up on a pickup truck helped lighten the mood, and cool me down. Pictures to come of that debacle later.

After it was all said and done, I look forward to the next "difficult lighting situation" and I really can't wait to shoot just about anything at The Curtis again. Wow, that place is fantastic.

Anyways, here's to the happy newlyweds Maggie and Lou!Thanks for letting us do pretty much whatever we wanted with the cameras.

The future looks bright

So I have begun a new venture with a great friend and now partner Joshua Buck called Consortium Productions, LLC. We've been talking about starting our own visuals company for some time, but never actually did anything about it. Life seemed to always generally get in the way. Now that I've finished grad school and he sees the writing on the wall with newspapers as employers we decided to ball ourselves up and jump off the ledge to see what we can do. Having the freedom to seek out the kinds of projects that are of interest and have potential for great things is a refreshing notion.

We don't intend on only doing photography. We've already lined up some multimedia work and some video projects as well as a website development assignment. Thus the "Productions" part. We plan to help create just about any kind of visuals needed. In knowing how important branding is we set up a separate division for our wedding and portraiture work with Joshua & Co. Photography. Essentially, we are going to do anything we think is possible. Now, if I could only get going on truly learning After Effects for some fun motion graphic ideas....and I'd really like to do some VJ performances too. So many things we want to do, just have to figure out ways to make time for it all.

I have to say, setting up a business the proper way from the start is difficult and sobering. But it is becoming more apparent that in doing everything properly from the start we will be in a better position to succeed. Though it's only been a few weeks, we have been able to drum up enough work over the next several weeks that there won't be too much time sitting around staring at the monitor and Lightroom tagging our enormous archives of images with searchable meta data, yet.

If you haven't gotten it yet, I'm really excited about what we have already accomplished and some of our visions for the future. It's going to be some fun. Stay tuned, I'll be sharing some of our adventures in visuals. Have a look around our sites when you get a chance. Thanks for looking

Lofi Fun

While I was in Minnesota I broke down and picked up a Holga and a couple rolls of FP-4 to shoot while at my brother's wedding. I was inspired by a good friend of mine who had shot her pimpin' gold Holga at my own wedding earlier this summer. I'm still working out the variance of the viewfinder to the actual film framing as well as the focusing guesstimations. There's something refreshing about taking a step back from technology and being forced to lose absolute control.

Holgas are funky little plastic cameras that each have unique quirks like light leaks and vignettes that are never the same from one camera to another. You get either f/11 or f/16 at 1/100th for a shutter and little icons that represent distances for the manual focus lens. Since this was the first roll of film I had run through the camera, it was all going to be pretty much a surprise. All in all I think the results were fairly to be expected. Now I'll try some color film and some different exposure tricks to see what else I can come up with. That's all for now.