Well, it seems that I've been neglecting the blog. Though not because there's nothing to report. If nothing else, I've been very busy. Most of the new ground I've been covering has been at work where we're breaking into doing instructional videos. The challenging part is to make them interesting. Going into this project, I've watched a lot of videos produced by other libraries and most of them are groan-worthy. They mean well but having been involved with community theater as I have, I found myself looking at the screen and thinking "no, no, don't do that!"

After an extended campaign I finally got us some editing software that had creative potential and started working with it. So far I've only scratched the surface on the cool things I can do. Here you can see my first experiment with a green screen and an inimation filter.

Then we had a brainstorming session with a handfull of librarian and they came up with the idea of me shooting them giving afirmative answers. Then we got a few of our student employees to pose common student question for the camera. Since this was off the cuff, we didn't give much thought to planning questions that matched the answers we already had. When it came time to edit the video together, I was lucky in that I was able to find reasonalble connections between all the questions and answers. Also, it was a matter of finding something appropriate to put behind the librarians since we shot them all in front of the green screen. I was able to do that will all but one of the librarian since by chance she happened to be wearing a green shirt the day we did this unplanned shoot and it totally freaked out the chroma key filter. You learn a dozen things every day. In any case, here's what we came out with in the end.

Getting the studio set up

Around the end of March the new equipment for my studio arrived. Two back drops (one white, one black) and a set of three radio controlled strobe lights. All very cool. The back drops are part of a portable system but their tripod feet were too large for the room. So I improvised and built a frame out of electrical conduit. And now I can use the portable system when I need to do a remote shoot.
Now it's just a matter of working out a few bugs to get the lights to work like I want them to.

As part of my "homework" for a web 2.0 course I was asked to start a blog. However, I didn't want to absorb a bunch of my time doing a broad or general blog. So to keep a narrow focus, I thought I'd start a blog about the photography business I'm starting up. Hopefully this journey will be a fun one.

At this point, I'm just starting out. While I've photographed many weddings over the years, I've never formally tried to do it as a business. I really enjoy doing it, so why not make the most of it.

So far, I've started a cheap as I can get advertising campaign. I've also done a lot of word of mouth, just to let people know I'm out there. Maybe they'll tell their friends. I've also got listings on a couple of wedding planning web sites. Though one thing I've learned from that is that these days, people really expect you to have a web site so that they can see your work. I've spent some time developing that.

Something I'm really excited about today is that some studio equipment arrived yesterday. I'm turning the spare bedroom in my house into a studio. I spent last night assembling two radio controlled strobe box lights and another umbrella strobe. The back drop also arrived. While the back drop is the perfect size for the room, it's feet are too big. So making that work is a project I'll be working on.

Right now, I'm just thrilled to be another few steps down the road.