After the storm

Shot some photos down by Fairbury (my hometown) of the destruction caused by a tornado. This shoot was slightly different, because I knew one of the families that was hit. I started out by Reynolds, a quite small town about 14 miles SW from Fairbury, looking for one of the houses that was destroyed. I eventually found it, but the residents had already left. From what the clean up crew said, they probably will not rebuild. I always feel terrible when I have to cover things like this, because I hate profiting off of peoples pain.





Another house that was hit was that of Doyle and Brenda Mannshreck. They have been family friends since before I was born, and I stopped by to see how they were doing, but sadly Doyle and Brenda had already left. They had a beautiful house just to the north of town, and now it has no roof. The thing that made me happy was that when I pulled up was the droves of people who were sitting outside. I was told that the head of american family insurance had already cut them a check for the house, so that was another happy moment from what was a terrible event. It was good to see people hanging out in the ruins of the house drinking a beer after a full day of picking up the pieces.

The important thing to remember from these events is that the families did not get hurt. Buildings can be replaced, tvs bought again, but thankfully no one was injured. My heart goes out to those who lost something in the storm.

new background

I like to change my desktop background to match the seasons. A nice feet up baseball shot from rosenblatt gets the job done.

A cloudy day congrats

Shot an engagement session yesterday with Chris and Andrea. They were at first worried about it being cloudy, but i am glad that i convinced them that I could take just as nice photos with a cloudy day as a beautiful sunset. I am very pleased with how the shoot turned out, and i really like the feel of these photos. Congrats to both of them, and they will be getting married in about 6 months.

It was a lot of fun shooting all of these, as shooting on a cloudy day lets me get creative with the flash. Having a cloudy day lets me really the subjects pop. i would say on average i was exposing 2 stops underexposed on the sky and popping the flash at between 1/8 and 1/2 power. I was only using one flash the whole time, but i think it worked well. but, popping the flash at 1/2 power sure is a battery destroyer, as i had to switch out batteries a couple of times in the 4 hour shoot.

Update!

Some baseball and croquet. hooray!