Day 29 - Project 365

Ok, so here was Day 29, the first day I had the opportunity to use a photo from a paid shoot as a day for project 365. Craig is the Owner of Bright Ideas LED Lighting. Part of his new Marketing Campaign and website are professional photos. The direction the campaign is headed in is "family" getting to know the people behind the project, an attempt at showing a company as human and not a faceless corporation. I think its a great idea.

At first, Craig's son was shy and would not talk. However, I was determined to get him to smile and being the comedian I am, I achieved a full on real smile. You can tell he didn't like it because he almost instantly removed the smile, replacing it with a face that 8 year old's are experts at... goofy ones. After I got a few good shots I asked them to move as I got several HDR background shots. My goal was to capture the illumination of the LED lighting under the counter. It is important to show that as that is the product we are marketing.

The camera must have shifted ever so slightly in between shots because the HDR didn't perfectly line up. No matter, I just moved and rotated it just a bit to fit. The problem was I was using the center arm of the tripod extended up. This is a sin in my book and I only use it when I don't have the space for the tripod fully opened up. You get a smaller footprint but reduced stability. Reduced Stability equals vibration and that leads to blur in long exposures - I hate when that happens! I finished the shoot at 3pm and after making a pit stop for a desperately needed drink, I headed straight home to edit the shot so I could upload it at 7pm on the dot. Ya... That worked out as well as me trying to multitask. I must have gotten distracted about a dozen times while editing. I had to head out to downtown Stuart to get night shots of the Arts Council building's LED Lighting Arrangement and night shots of Craig's house as his landscaping is all LED. 90 min later I get back home and start editing again only to run out of disk space. I am a digital pack rat and it almost pains me to delete things. I have over 25,000 raw photos on my Laptop Hard drive. I deleted 2500 a few nights back and promptly filled nearly every gig back up with video files from the project. I need a 2 terabyte fire wire hard drive bad! Well, I decide that I should take a break and grab the old Hard drive from my desktop, reformat it and use it as a storage drive for my 2008 and 2009 photos. I hook it up only to find crap that I haven't seen in 5 years. Well, there goes another hour. I find old pictures and old video files. I cried once watching the tribute to my grandfather. I figured that since I had to cry, everyone in my family would have to also. I posted the video to Facebook and with in 20 min my cousin sent me a message "you're an asshole!" yup... I know!

Well, I finally got back to editing and after cleaning the image up a bit more and adding the white gradient and title I was ready to post it. Well, that is until I decided to change the title. I am so indecisive some times. I stare at the picture until the photo talks to me. It tells me what it's saying and thats how I get the title. It really doesn't talk to me... I don't want to sound any more crazy then I already do. Tomorrow is a special day... My best friend Ange's birthday! I have something special planned for day 30. I hope she likes it.

Lighting:

AB800 Beauty Dish Boomed over head tilted down facing in between boy and man. 1/4 power
AB800 soft box, 3:00 1/2 power (probably should have been from other side to emulate window light but when I put it over there I couldn't stop the light from glaring off the refrigerator.)