Autumn 2009

The 2009 Autumn Nature album is being loaded this October. Check back often for new pics!

New Albums Uploaded, Canon Shooting

Autumn 2008 has been added to the Nature category. Check out the latest shots from this beautiful season in the Galleries page. Also added is a small group of shots taken at the Lake Erie shore in August this year. Enjoy, and please feel free to leave your comments in the Galleries or the Comments page.

In other news, if you are a Canon EOS shooter and don't know much about Picture Styles, check them out in your camera's manual or on Canon's web site. I've recently being toying with these settings with my Rebel XTi and they can save a lot of time in the digital darkroom. Great stuff.

Happy Halloween. everyone!

Sliderocket

Web 2.0 is all the rage these days. From online easily shared apps to social networking and user generated content, to web-based file storage, it's truly amazing. Entranced by it myself, I just found a great site for you creative types out there. SlideRocket is an online alternative to MS PowerPoint. Using recent technologies it makes your stuff really pop and so far seems to work great. It's a nice option to hard-drive-based software, right up there with Google Docs.

It's Why I Do "Budget"

Seeing the agony in my wife's face as she picked and chose only a handful of prints was hard. She was so distraught. She had missed her only brother's wedding months before, and now was ordering prints from the wedding photographer's web site. The painful experience was two-fold in nature. First, it was hard looking at all those great shots, having missed being there (she couldn't go due to a surgical recovery). Second was the cost.

I, too, was flabbergasted. $15 each for 4x6 prints. $20 for 5x7. And ever higher from there. Not out of the ballpark for a pro studio (with good work I must mention), if you just want a small package. But to get a small sample of this important event became a huge cost for us. Just 10 4x6 prints totalled $166 with tax. No package deals, not even volume discounts. Just really high prices. We are of modest means, so this is quite a cost for us, and worse, we end up with such a small sample of the event. We feel cheated. As a photographer, I feel robbed and insensed.

Folks, this is why in the past I've done so-called "budget" wedding work. I just can't see charging such exorbitant prices for such priceless memories. It shouldn't cost your family weeks worth of groceries to have pictures of your wedding. And it shouldn't cost the couple (or parents) the price of a honeymoon to hire a decent pro. I mean, c'mon already. What could warrant such a high price?

Yes, good wedding photography has costs. There is equipment, staff, lots of time for prep, shooting, and processing, overhead, insurance, you name it. But how much is too much? Shouldn't a business run thin enough to offer a good product that doesn't prohibit sales? Is it really worth it to most clients to spend that much dough on pictures? The total take on this wedding must have been in the thousands after print sales. Thousands.

I'm still on hiatus from shooting weddings, but now that I've experienced this I plan to shorten it and start offering the service again sooner. If you and your family are rich, go ahead and hire a high end studio. You will get really good work, at a very high price. But if you are like me and my family, and money doesn't grow on your trees, there will always be good semi-pros out there who will charge reasonable prices for capturing your wedding memories with quality workmanship. I'm one of them. Stay tuned for more wedding info soon. I'm coming back to market.

Moving Pictures

As a still photographer I've always been a bit pensive about getting into video editing; after all, 30 frames per second is a lot of images! But with mini-DV tapes stacking up I've finally decided it's time to take the plunge and start creating DVD's and online videos. It may never be for professional shooting, but who knows where it could go! So now it's time for somthing new.

After a tremendous (somewhat obsessive) amount of research I've chosen Sony Movie Studio 9 Platinum as the tool. With the lowest system requirements, a rich heritage in the professional world, a great price point, very good user reviews, and its amazing audio capabilities, this one is hard to beat. In fact, for about $100 you can't get much more for your money.

After I get the software installed and try it out I'll post some comments about it, and of course, samples. It should turn out to be an exciting new adventure!

Look of the Blog

If you came to this page via the main web site you noticed its different color/theme. For a while it was similar to the site (black background, etc.), but it's a place I like to experiment. Seems that the white background makes it easier for reading the larger posts; white text with a dark background can be harder on the eyes. Anyway, this one uses a fairly nice template, too. Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts!
--Al

Scrubs

I'm not much of a poser but hey, this one is cute I guess. Yup, I'm in scrubs for the first time in my life, prepping to be right there for the birth of my second child. After seeing this photo I almost wondered if I should have gone into the medical field. Nah.