Hoo-ray! It's over!

The DC/Baltimore/NOVA Strobist group's shoot at the Frederick Key's stadium in Frederick, MD is over with. What a disappointment...


All the attendees were great and it was a perfect day out. I even managed to get two good pictures that day and two out of about twelve models that said they were going to attend actually showed up. What a let down. We had about 15-20 photographers from the group there and most of us spent the day either trying to squeeze in a shot with one of the two models or sitting around and doing much of nothing.

There was plenty of twiddling with gear, photographing setups, photographing surroundings, and wishing some one would show up for us to take pictures of. All in all, we did the best we could with as bad a situation as we were delt. Adam Pohl, the Keys' PR guy was great as well. He was the man who allowed us to do this shoot and accomodated us with several jerseys and access to the stadium with no one there but the cleaning crews.

The above photo is one of two that I managed to get. It's not my favorite, but John Miliker's arm wasn't blocking the Keys logo on the jersey like in the other one. I know I have at least one floating around of me sprawled out over several seats in the stadium like a bum.

So, back to the root of all evil... I was even supposed to have one girl, that I was told had previous modeling experience, meet me in Shepherdstown at 9:00AM. I told her I had to be in Frederick by 9:30, so I would be cutting it close. OK. 9:05 rolls around and she calls. Great. After getting off the phone I learn that she's just woke up...she even asked if there was a certain time I had to be there by *smack's forehead*. She told me she was going to rush so I said that's ok (what else was I going to do?. I called a friend of mine that was heading to the meet to let him know I was going to be late and delegated responsibilities (Thanks Jeff).

Sooooo....






......Twenty minutes later I get another phone call. Apparently she still wasn't ready and didn't feel comfortable going and was cancelling (?!?!?!?!). I mean, really...I'm sure she knew from the moment she woke up late that she wasn't going. Thanks for making me wait twenty minutes for you to make up your mind...

Anyways, I made it to the meet later, angry, and well angry. Of course I got over it. I mean, it wasn't the any of the models' fault that they're generally unreliable and undependable and that us photographers are generally at their mercy to trust them. After all, we're not the ones that that want to do something in name only. Man, I'm cynical.

Well a good ending to the day was fried chicken at Cindy Dee's, right on the border of MD & VA (that's not the best fried chicken I've ever had though...). There we figured out that the only reliable model is a paid model. It seems that un experienced models tend to say they want to model but never make it farther than in front of their own P&S cameras. I'd really not be in such a model bashing mood and it would probably be right of whom ever reads this to say, "Well one experience isn't a good way to judge by" and I'd tend to agree and say, "But of course, but the third or fourth experience is showing a trend here."

I think I'm taking a break from arrange these meets to focus on doing the photography thing for myself. I'll be keeping an eye peeled for venues of course, but it's pointless to try for bigger and better things when we have very limited capacity to function in the smaller meet ups due to things out of our control. Besides, that was way too much hassle and headache for two photos.

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Nothing new to report

And here we are. Stalled out a bit. Life and other activities kind of jump in the way. I had a shoot to go to last week that was a little disappointing. It was just a meet and greet for the DC/Baltimore/NOVA Strobist group. There's another one coming up next weekend that I'm stretching to find models for. Why don't I get paid for this, again? It'll all work out. I have some free time this weekend so I'm going to look into some things.

I did send a photo to the Bavarian Inn a
few weeks ago to see if they wanted to use it for advertising or whatever. I haven't heard back from them though. Maybe they'll give me a call one day.

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Hooray for business cards!

My next goal. I'll be making some of these up this weekend so I can hand them out to local businesses in the area with a flyer of my rates. I'm going to have to make a website, so we'll see how all that goes. If everything goes as planned, my long dreamed of goal to conquer the world should be nearing completion.


Did I say conquer the world? I meant, become a professional photographer.

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WHCC, the almost easy way

So I got my prints back from WHCC yesterday (Yay!!!). They weren't the quality I was expecting (Boo!!!). They were acceptable though (Meh...).

The blown up prints were great, I'll talk about those later. The 8x12's, not so much.

I got my account setup with the test shots and those were awesome. It was the quality I expected from them, so I was ready to order...


I sat down Friday night and opened Roes and this is were the trouble started. WHCC's directions aren't very clear in some spots. No where does it say that the quality of the photos you see in the ROES ordering software is going to be complete and utter shit. Pixelated and anomaly filled shit. I started to worry. After a post and PM on the Photography On The Net Canon DSLR forums, I received an answer I was looking for. Yes, it's just a thumbnail and they'll look that way. So after the reassurance, I placed my order of a bunch of 8x12's, four 24x36's, and one 30x45.

Waiting, waiting, waiting, Yesterday evening and off work early, I make it home about twenty minutes before the UPS guy shows up at my porch and hands off the order. I take them inside and inspect the 8x12's. They're good, but not the quality I got from the test batch. I did something differently.

So I'll go into that now. The 8x12's with the first batch where done by resizing the image in Photo Shop to 8x12 and 300ppi, like the website said. So on the second batch, I used the crop tool to set them to 8x12 and 300ppi. Apparently, this doesn't work so well. If you're ordering smaller sized prints, physically resize them using the image size box and don't just use the crop tool.

And then I was going to open the enlargements. I cracked open the cardboard tube and pulled them out...damn that would be a mess if I opened now and had to transport them. I ended up tossing everything in the car and driving over to Wise Guys tattoo studio. Travis, the client, had just left, so I put the 8x12's in his room and cracked open the enlargements. Niiiiiiiiice! They were great for the most part. I did learn some valuable lessons.

OK. Enlargements. I just used the crop tool as the website said and used the crop tool to "crop" to 24x36 and 30x45 with the ppi left blank. I actually just selected the entire image size with the crop tool so the setting would take. No other size adjustments were made. What I did learn was that 8mp is fine for enlargements of this size, but more pixels are better. One image in particular was amazingly clear. You have to make sure your picture is as sharp as you can manage on your monitor for enlargements of these size. Also, skin smoothing needs to be done very carefully. It looked like very small amounts of pixelation in some places on the 30x45 where I did some heavy skin smoothing. It was barely noticeable from close up and overall, everything turned out well.

With remembering to correctly resize my images, I believe I'm going to be very happy with WHCC's products and customer service.

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