After working our butt’s off the entire year, and not spending much dough, we decided to do a little shopping. Thanks to our new Professional Services Exec. from Adorama, Jeff Snyder, we now have 4 more speedlights. This currently gives us 8 portable lights, allowing us to brew up all kinds of lighting scenarios. We also purchased the Vagabond II portable power pack, from Paul C. Bluff, Inc. This will now allow us to take our studio lighting into the field as well, without have to run a mile of extension cords, or a generator. It will also open us up, to a whole new world of diffusers and modifiers, giving us many new options for lighting. Basically, we can now light a small town, if we chose to do so.

We’re Portable Baby!

As you can see, our blog has had a major face lift. It took the fine surgeons over at BigFolio, about 20 seconds to give us our new look.

We are really excited to be using this new Wordpress theme, as it will offer us a vast amount of control and functionality over our blog. So if you’re not familiar with Wordpress, and have about a week of spare time to absorb the mountain of information out there on it, check out – wordpress.org

We’ve finally moved forward on the website, and contacted the folks at BigFolio, giving them the go ahead. Just for the record, BigFolio Rocks! They had the whole back end of our new sites, up and running, in less than 12 hours. Pretty amazing, consdering that it takes me that long, just to change the font. Now that the back end is up, it’s up to us, to put in the pain staking hours in front of the computer, uploading images and tweaking it.

We should have it completed within a week, so check back soon.

Today, we attended the Joe McNally Location Lighting Seminar, in Washington, DC. To say that this was a life changing experience, would be an understatement.

For those of you who have no idea who Joe Mcnally is, you can start here – joemcnally.com/blog

For starters, this guy is a character, with personality galore. With everyone still half asleep, and lacking the morning java, Joe walked out on stage, and immediately fired a joke off. With hardly no one in the crowd acknowledging it, he walked away while mumbleling through the microphone, “Joe make joke”. We almost fell out of our chair with laughter, and could wait to get rolling with the next 7 hours, of what would be, our day with Joe.

For starters, this isn’t really the type of seminar that you should take, if you’re new to photography. Joe spends very little time, if any, discussing what camera or flash settings you should be using. It’s about light, and how to see it, get the most from it, and work with it. He starts the day off, using just one speedlight and diffuser. Over the next few hours, he goes from one light, to 3 or 4 speedlights, with all kind of different modifiers. The whole time that he is talking light, he’s actually giving live demonstrations with models. You basically get to listen to the thought process behind the shot, and then see the final outcome. What a great way to get the point across! The day wraps up, focusing on the “big guns”, your powerful studio lighting with portable power supplies. It was quite interesting, seeing the light, that all of the differnt types of modifiers for these strobes, produce.

The best part about this whole day, was the little pieces of information that we walked away from it with. Although we both are pretty knowledgeable, when it comes to lighting and lighting in the field, there were constant little 3 second bits of information or tricks, that will remain priceless. A huge thanks to Joe and NAPP, for giving us this opportunity.

Well, we finished the back lit sign for Tom and Rick, over at Champion Billiards, in Arlington, VA. The sign arrived a day early from our printers, but who’s complaining. All I can say, is this thing looks “HOT”. It’s going to look amazing at night, when it’s lit up.

If you’re ever in the Shirlington area, stop by and check it out. They also have great food, and great bands most Friday and Saturday nights.

This coming Friday, we’ll be taking the day off and heading to Washington, DC. Why you ask? To spend the day with the one and only, Joe McNally. For those of you that have no idea who Joe is, I’ll cut through the chase and get right down to the nitty gritty. He’s a location lighting guru!

So stay tuned, we’ll have some great stuff for you when it’s all over.

Matt

As we wind down from a great year, our site is going to take on a whole new appearance over the next few weeks. We have decided to make this leap, due to the fact that we offer multiple services, as a photography/graphic design company.

Our vision is to make life, just a little bit easier for our clients. We plan to have multiple websites, for all of the services that we offer. Our plan is, to have one main splash page, where the client can select the appropriate service. They will all still remain under our current URL, however, each site will compliment the service that’s being offered, just a little better. Our new look will not change anything with our proofing site or blog, just the actual website. Once completed, when a client chooses to go to our wedding site, they will be taken to an elaborate site, showcasing and work. If they choose design, they will be taken to a commercially designed site, that reflects that industry.

We are both very excited about the upcoming facelift, so stay tuned!