voice of louisville

January Update

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This one is definitely a little late, but each month this year I'm going to try and give a brief update as to some of the projects I've done each month. January was a crazy one. I was coming out of a slow month of work (the holiday's always slow things down). The month started out with an instagram connection to local filmaker, Mike Vance (Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/mikevance). 

Next, was a shoot I did of one of my wife's friends. Her name is Neema, and she is a refugee from the Congo. You can read her story here: Neema. I did this and Mike's shoot right after I got my first canvas backdrop. I loved the tones and feel of it.

This next shoot was one for TOPs Magazine. This is a portrait of Renee Murphy. She is a news anchor here in Louisville for WHAS news. She was as nice in person as she is on TV!

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Next up was a concept shoot I did with my friends new Subaru STI. We wanted to capture some images that look like they could have been used in an advertisement. I love the look and feel of this image. This one shot took about 1 hour to shoot and 2+ hours to edit. I light painted with a Phottix Indra strobe and stacked the photos in Photoshop. I think the PSD (Photoshop file type) was over 3GBs. 

This was another shoot I did for TOPs. It is of "Super Mom" Chesson Hazelwood. Read the story here: http://www.topslouisville.com/Read/8939/Supermom%3A+Chesson+Hazelwood

This next shoot is for my friend's new company, Spartan. He is making awesome lid organizers and lid organizer mounting plates for Pelican 1510 and 1535 cases. I couldn't just have one photo because this product is awesome and I give it my highest recommendation. Seriously check it out! 

This was one of my favorite shoots. I wanted to challenge myself with lighting and I normally shoot with artificial light. This was all natural window light. I had a scrim up on camera right to diffuse the light even more. This was shot for the Voice Tribune's food issue. The restaurant featured here was the 502 Bar and Bistro.

Close to the end of the month now, I connected with local artist Mallory Mesiner. She makes lots of awesome drawings and paintings and does custom portraits! We did a few photos and a short promo video!

Last, but not least, we did a part 2 of my friends Subaru STI. This time the focus was one the car's details. I had to include a couple photos here cause this thing was a beast. 

Mike Vance

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Last week I had an opportunity to photograph Mike Vance. Mike is a cinematographer based out of Louisville. You can check out his work here. We did three different looks. My setup was pretty simple:

One Phottix Indra500 through a Photek 47in Softlighter v2 (camera right) with a reflector on the left.

Camera Gear:

  • Nikon D600
  • Nikon 50mm
  • Capture One Pro 10
  • Tether Tools Cables

All retouching and color grading for this shoot was done in Capture One. Here were my favorite photos from the session.

Goodbye Apple

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I recently starting photographing for a new editorial client. My first shoot with them was a fashion shoot for a local boutique. The shoot went great everyone was happy with the images. They sent me three smaller assignments two on Tuesday and one more on Thursday. I also had a test shoot scheduled on Tuesday morning to photograph a local Crossfit gym. My test shoot went well, got some really awesome images and a short video. I had time to swing back home and dump the RAW files on my MacBook Pro. I then left to the next shoot. I got everything setup, opened my computer to shoot tethered, and quickly realized it was taking a little longer to boot my computer than normal. 

I've had this laptop for 4 years now. It is a 2012 Macbook Pro. I bought it right before the retina macs were announced *roll-eyes*. When it turn on the only thing on the screen was a blinking folder with a question mark. I did a quick search on my phone and apparently this happens if the computer for some reason can't find the hard drive. The solution was to just do a repair hard drive function from the disk utility menu. I figured I will just deal with it later and shot the shoot the old fashioned way, to a super fast, super high capacity SD card. We wrapped the last shoot for the day around 4. I headed back home and tried to repair my mac. I had high hopes when the disk utility popped up. Then I realized my hard drive was not listed. After some more research apparently my hard drive has bit the dust. Along with all my files. I have backups on backups on backups with an overall cloud backup so I wasn't too worried, just super annoyed. Especially considering that all the photos were due my Thursday night. 

After a little panic attack, I fought the holiday traffic and rushed to Best Buy. I was not planning on upgrading my computer hardware until next year, but nothing ever goes according to plan. First instinct was the Apple section. The flashy new, super thin, super "intuitive," laptop looked super nice. I already new about the annoying USB issue (Apple, come on, really? Why? That's not pushing the industry, it's just annoying), and the not so great hardware "upgrades". The model I was looking at for my needs was the 15in, 512GB model for a whopping $2,799. After about 5 minutes using the Mac I decided I'm done. The keyboard sucks, the internal components are years old, there is no port besides the USB-C port. No SD card, no firewire, no Magsafe, no regular USB port. I would even be able to charge my iPhone without having an additional adapter. In order to basically use the laptop I would have to buy about another $100-200 worth of dongles and adapters.

After a few moments of "I can't switch to windows, it's outdated and slow" I started to consider the option of switching. The new Dell XPS 15 with a beautiful 4K screen looked incredible. The Dell XPS 15 was super nice, I loved the screen and speed. It was pricey but not as pricey as the MacBook Pro at $2,199. After even more thinking and pacing around the store I found the desktop version of the XPS with a better graphics card for only $999. I started thinking. I could get the XPS desktop, any monitor I wanted, and something like a Surface Pro for the same price as the Macbook Pro or the Dell XPS laptop. I walked out of Best Buy with two computer for a little under the price of one Macbook Pro. My main dilemma was I needed a powerful computer for editing photos and video that was portable to bring to a shoot to shoot tethered to. Now I have a powerful desktop that can be easily upgraded with newer tech and a Surface Pro 4 that I can run Capture One Pro to shoot tethered to on jobs. 

In one day I went from an apple fan boy to completely ditching Macs for a windows machine. I got all my files switched over (thank you Backblaze for continually backing up my work) and finished all the edits by Thursday. Apple really makes amazing things, I love my iPhone and iPad. They really push the industry and come up with intuitive ways to better the technology world. With this latest laptop from Apple I just couldn't continue to support them. They removed everything that a professional needs to do their work. I can't live without an SD card slot, or a normal USB port. I do miss having iMessage but I can get over that. I am very happy with my switch to windows and I don't see myself going back anytime soon. 

Voice-Tribune - 21C Hotel Shoot

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Monday was my fastest shoot from brainstorming the shoot to delivering the final images. I got a call that morning to shoot a feature the same day and have all the final images delivered before the final deadline Tuesday morning. The concept for our shoot was fun stuff to do around Louisville that was either inexpensive or free. Of course some of the cheapest and most fun things to do have to do with our awesome parks or the Big Four Bridge, however, the sky decided to open up and poor all day. After scrambling around thinking of something we decided on a shoot at 21C Hotel's museum of modern art. I made some more calls and finally found a couple I'm friends with who were free and willing to be photographed last minute for the cover. After a few more calls we got permission last minute to shoot at 5 that day. Here are a couple of my favorite images. 

Gear Used:

  • Nikon D600
  • Nikon 35mm & 50mm
  • Phottix Indra500 & Odin II
  • Photek 47in Softlighter v2
  • Capture One (RAW Processing)
  • Photoshop

Voice-Tribune - Veterans Day Shoot

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I was given the opportunity to photograph a local Air Force Veteran, Dave, for the featured article of the latest Voice-Tribune issue. We chose the Veterans Memorial Park in Jeffersontown as it was the most fitting. I arrived early to set up since we only had about 10 minutes to photograph Dave. We didn't time to photograph too many shots and had to fight the harsh midday sun. We walked away with some good photos that hopefully captured the spirit of our military and Veterans day.