fun in the sun

Played some croquet with some friends a few weeks back. Sombreros will add fun to anything, from photos to lawn games. Also, i found out that kittens love cameras. or camera bags, at the least.

Get ready

So, long time no post. Been real busy, a whole bunch of weddings and other gigs. I will post those as soon as possible, along with a few senior portraits, engagement shots, sports, news, and editorial. what can i say? i'm a bum when it comes to updating.

Here is a rather failed attempt at doing a composite of downtown lincoln, shot during the half time of the shrine bowl. I mostly just posted this after having a discussion involving my handful of illogical fears. I have a fear of falling down lots of stairs. not a short amount, but somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred or so. I had to climb a lot of stairs to go shoot this at memorial stadium, so that is why i am saying this. The really odd thing is that i really enjoy heights. I just would not like to fall down a bunch of stairs.

Also, and my brother scott makes fun of me to no end for this fear, i have a fear of pulling up behind a tow truck at a stop light and having the tow truck driver drop his tow-thing and pick up my car. yes, i realize that is crazy. but, just stop and think about that for a moment. that sure would suck.

enough rambling. as i said, updates will be coming soon. I will not say they will be coming fast and furiously (i hated those movies) but they will be coming.

p.s. the last of my 3 illogical fears is having my bottom jaw ripped off, like in that vampire/werewolf moving underworld 2. once again, it will never happen, but it still scares me thinking of those things.

Some new stuff

Fireworks, fishing, and family, oh my!

Week 2 of shoot out

The theme for this week is eyes to the sky. I tried to get some star photos, but nothing was that good. But, talked with a guy who was really cool. I love fishing, and the people you meet.



Head on over to HERE to see the shots from other photogs, some really nice stuff over there.

Congrats to Eric and Emily

Congrats to Eric and Emily on their upcoming wedding in a few months. I am looking forward to shooting it, it is an outdoor wedding, and i love outdoor weddings. plenty of great light, usually shorter weddings, and plenty of fun.

Mom

My mother had surgery earlier this week and is recovering fine. This makes me very happy. Love ya, mom. My mom is in the middle, my aunt on the left, and my brother on the right.

Red

So, last week fellow photog Clay Lomneth and I decided to start a shoot out. The theme for this shoot out is red. We were supposed to enter 4 shots, but i only have 2 this week. Head over to Clay's blog to see his shots, and feel free to leave comments.





Ideas for future themes are welcome. I think he has won this week, but I vow to come back and represent Lincoln on the next installment.

Storm

Some lightning from my patio.

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!

Back home

Mother at the farm.


Grandparents at the nursing home.

baseball

Baseball on nice day. Can't get much better.



Grand slam shot with a lens baby

Hyvee shoot

Did a shoot for Hyvee food stores a couple of weeks back. I felt like an idiot because i wore a blue button up shirt that happened to be the exact same shade of blue that all of the employees wore. I was asked several times, while loaded down with about 40 pounds of cameras and lighting rigs, which hyvee store i worked at. the answer was none. but, the good news was that i got to ride up on one of those giant scissor lifts, and i love me some heights. shooting commercial shoots is at times odd, because you have several people standing at your back telling you what they want, all the time. on a side note, that store is massive. like, think of large grocery store, and then add another medium sized grocery store to that, and then you have that store. it is big.



Another side note, sometimes i like to get artsy, as in the next shot. however, i do not know how to get the images to display how i want them to on this blog. the colors wash out, and the file that is on the web does not match my file on the computer. i know it has something to do with the sRGB thing, but i am not totally sure. i have tried my feeble attempts at HTML, and i always fail. after trying a few things to get the colors right on this image, i have given up on this. so, just imagine that it looks correct for color.

The Heater

Who wants some track action???

Probably not you, but you gonna get it! On a day trip back to fairbury, i saw a track meet going on, and the car of my highschool journalism teacher. so, i decided to go shoot me some track. but, when i got there, i found out there were only 2 races left in the entire meet. still, got some panned action goin for me.



The guy in the coat was my old jr. high football coach, Coach Don Mahlman. ( I could be wrong with the spelling of his last name.) You would be hard pressed to find a harder worker or nicer person than him. As a football coach, he had an affinity for smashmouth football, and would only call 2 plays pretty much the entire game. 24 and 23 iso. for those who dont know football, it is a run off the guard with the running back. we would ask if we could try some other play to maybe make the defense think that we had more than 2 plays in our play book, and he would tell us that if we could not get that play to work, then we had no chance of getting other plays to work. We lost a lot of games.



I believe the internet term for this is "pwned." for those of you who do not know what that means, it means she failed, sorta. i dont know, i hate internet speak. downfall of the english language and what not.

Jess

My little brother rocks. if anyone says otherwise, i will cut them.

State Bball

Grandparents

late in updating

Husker baseball game, shot with a lens baby.


My Grandpa pushing my Grandma at the nursing home.

Avoca Quack Off

Ok, it seems that blogger hates me, as it has been giving me a lot of problems posting photos. Safari is not working to upload photos, and neither was Firefox, until I ran it in Rosetta. So, you can take that as a lame excuse for not posting in a while. Hrmm. Stupid robots.

But, anyway, i shot the Avoca Quack Off last weekend, and it was a bunch of fun. nothing like a bunch of drunk people yelling at ducks to get them to run forward. dude at the bottom was eating some rockey mountain oysters. I have to say i love small town events. seeing a community coming together, in this case to raise money for the fire department, is always a good thing.

By the way, this is post number 99. unless i can think of something else (not too likely) i will probably do a review/retrospective post for number 100. i've got most every thing planned out, so i think i'm set for that.