Being A Photographer . . Being A Doctor

If you have ever watched a medical show on TV . . ER, Grey's Anatomy, Scrubs . . inevitably there will be an episode when the doctors are stumped. They have a patient with some mysterious ailment. Tests are run, questions are asked, consultations with other doctors are made, but to no avail. Whatever the patient has, the doctors cannot figure it out, and they feel helpless. Usually in these shows there is that "aha" moment when the doctors stumble on a clue and discover what is causing the problem, and all ends well. Sometimes they stumble on the answer, and realize there is nothing they can do to fix the problem. This is usually the moment when a doctor realizes that despite his or her great skills and knowledge, they are after all human, and there are some things that even they cannot fix. Sometimes, as a photographer, I feel the same way.

I have photographed a bunch of events and activities and people over the years. Most of the time I get to photograph people under fairly controllable and pleasant conditions. There are usually options. If it is raining, I can usually find a covered area. If it is too sunny, I can find some open shade. Rarely am I in a position where I am stumped, when there are no options except for the worse one. This past Saturday was on one of those. At times I felt helpless, like the doctor with an ailing patient, and the only answer I could give that patient was there is nothing I can do. It was hot . . very hot, and it was sunny . . very sunny; and I was in a location where there was literally no place to go that was not hot or sunny. Some of the photos . . not all . . would be difficult to obtain under these conditions.

All of my experience and skills seemed to mean nothing at that moment. Well that is not entirely true, my experience did help me work through most of what I needed to do to make things work; but I knew at the time that the pictures would have been so much better under different conditions. I walked away humbled by the experience, much like I imagine a doctor walks away from a dying patient knowing he could not save that person. I am human after all. Fortunately the people I was working with that day were very understanding and patient with me (I hope). I do not like to make excuses. I was hired to do a job, and for their sake as well as mine, I wanted to do the best job possible. But even the best of doctors confront situations when they can do nothing more for their patient. It is not a failure, but it is humbling.

Breaux Vineyard Wedding (Loudoun County Virginia)

Breaux Vineyard in Loudoun County Virginia is one of the premier wineries in the Washington DC area. They recently added a very nice event building to their property, setting them apart from many other wineries in the area. Breaux did a great job hosting Saturday's wedding of Marty and Cheryl. Here are a few images from Saturday. Click on image to enlarge.

Ashland High School Oregon 1981 - 1984 Slide Shows

While on staff with Rogue Valley Campus Life in southern Oregon during the early 80's, I had the pleasure of working with high school students at Ashland High School. It was during this time that I started to learn photography and played around with multi media slide shows. Being the early 80's, we were of course dealing with film and slides and cassette tapes. This was before cd's and dvd's, and really before the advent of VHS, so I have no visual archives of the slide shows I produced back then. I do have the audio tapes though. The sound quality is basically just okay, but not too bad after sitting in the basement all these years. Some are better than others.

Below are links to those audio files, with some notes along the way. Some of these files are large, so be patient for them to load. Also below is a link to my website for some of the Ashland photos from these shows.

Ashland High School Photos

Ashland Fall 1981 Slide Show Audio

Ashland Spring 1982 Slide Show Audio

Ashland Fall 1982 Slide Show Audio

Ashland Fall 1982 Interviews (for the slide show, unedited)

Ashland Winter 1982 Slide Show (for the original show, there was a break in the audio track about 3:30 into the show for a film clip from Chariots Of Fire. I shortened the break for this file.)

Ashland Spring 1983 Slide Show (added to this is a section that was shown at the Baccalaureate Service)

Ashland Fall 1983 Slide Show

Ashland Spring 1984 Slide Show (added to this is a section that was shown at the Baccalaureate Service)

Ashland Spring 1984 Interviews (for the slide show, unedited)

I'm Still Here

I cannot believe it has been 3 months since I last posted something on this blog, so more than anything I just want people to know that I am still around. I am still photographing weddings (I have 5 weddings over the next 15 days), still traveling, still alive. Things have just been somewhat busy, and I have not had anything burning inside of me to write about. Well actually that is not entirely true. There is always something I am thinking about and working through in my mind . . so maybe I have just been a bit lazy when it comes to updating this blog, which really bugs me. It has always been a pet peeve of mine to visit blogs that are outdated. So much so that I hesitated even starting this blog out of fear that I would at some point become absent, which is what happened over the past 3 months. I am not promising that I will do better over the next 3 months, but I will certainly try.

Re-Purposing: Film X-Ray Protector Now A Coin Pouch

One of my pet peeve's and minor source of aggravation is searching for coins in my car. Yes, there is a coin compartment, but in my car that area is below the dash in an area that I cannot see, only feel. So when I reach for loose coins in that compartment, I never know what coins I am grabbing, and in most cases there are at least a half dozen coins that end up on the floor. And inevitably the coins I end up with in my hand are not the ones I need for the drive thru or the parking meter.

So the other day I was looking through a drawer of old camera gear and I came across a couple film containers. These containers were designed for unprocessed 35 mm film. Theoretically these containers protect film when going through x-ray machines in airports. I bought these years ago and don't ever remember using them. Anyhow, as soon as I picked one up I thought of my coins.

One of these containers fits perfectly in my car's coin compartment. The beauty of this container is that it has doors on each end, so one side of the container is filled with pennies, nickels, and dimes. The other end is filled with just quarters. I can now grab the container from the compartment, open the end for coins that I need, and be done with it. No more coins on the floor. No more aggravation.

The First Look on Wedding Day

If you read my past blog posts, or if you know me, you know that I am a big fan of the bride and groom seeing each other prior to the ceremony, primarily for the sake of photos. It just makes the whole day go a lot smoother, and my experience is that couples who choose to do it this way are really, really glad they did. But I realize that many people cannot break with the idea of first seeing each other while walking down the aisle (my experience is that most brides are looking either at guests or at me and not at their groom while walking down the aisle). I realize that this is their wedding and I can only offer advice, otherwise I have to go with what is given. But that does not mean I cannot at least plead my case, and here I do it once again.

This link is to some photos taken of grooms (not my photos) when they saw their bride for the first time on their wedding day. The photos were compiled for this article because of the emotion expressed by the grooms. If you study the photos closely, you will see that of the 24 grooms/brides represented, only 4-5 were taken during the actual ceremony and walking down the aisle. All the others were taken during what is commonly called "the first look", when the bride and groom have their moment of seeing each other privately before the wedding. This goes to one of the arguments that I have previously made: that I see more emotion coming from grooms during the "first look" then I do during the walking down the aisle moment; and this goes to another argument I have made: the "first look" actually ends up being a much more special time for a couple than walking down the aisle.

Again, I realize that this is not the case for everyone, and in the case of this article, there certainly was emotion in the 4-5 "walking down the aisle" weddings represented by the photos. I would just encourage couples to think it through, perhaps throw out your original conventional thinking and consider this: how would you plan this day if this was the very first wedding ever?

Binders Full of Women

Dems are doing their best to find something . . anything . . that they can pin on Romney in order to turn around Obama's slide in the polls. Big Bird didn't seem to help. Blaming the death of our U.S. ambassador in Libya on a YouTube video that no one ever saw didn't work. Boasting about an artificial drop in unemployment didn't help. Pretty much everything the dems have tried has not helped, and that now includes "binders full of women". That does not mean they are not trying though.

Here are a couple thoughts I have regarding "binders full of women":

1. During the debate, Romney said:

“And so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Please note where the "binders full of women" came from:  women's groups. That's right, women put women into binders, not Romney. If these women's groups had instead put women into . . well, what else would they put these resumes into? So if women (and men) are having problems with "binders full of women", they should aim their fake anger at the women groups that put them there.

2. I can pretty much guarantee that before Romney asked for a list of women's resumes that ended up being given to him in binders, there were whole binders full of men given to Romney. That's right, binders full of men. Where is the outrage? This is obviously a sign of disrespect toward men. Think of it: binders full of men. Come on men, can't we come up with at least a little bit of of our own fake outrage over this?

Politics: Things I Don't Understand

1. Here is all you need to know about Mitt Romney and how much tax he pays: If I offered to give you an amount equal to how much Mitt Romney pays in taxes (roughly $2 million) or how much Barack Obama pays in taxes (roughly $162,000), which would you take? I'll give your 15 seconds to decide. What, you don't need 15 seconds? You'll take Romney's 2 million? Why? Yeah, it is substantially more than Obama's $162,000, but won't you feel guilty because Romney paid at a lower percentage rate? That doesn't matter to you, you just want the 2 million? Yeah, I don't understand either why people are making such a big deal about the percentage rate and not looking at the total amount of money being paid in taxes.

2. Why can't people honor the truth rather than spin a lie? When I watch a game and they show a controversial play in slow motion, and it is clear what the correct call should be, I'm okay with getting the call correct, regardless whether it benefits the team I favor or not. Sure, some calls are not clear cut, even on replay, which is why in most cases they rule with the call that was made in real time on the field. But I am more interested in preserving the integrity of the game and honoring the truth than I am with elevating my team. The same should also apply to politics. I can understand supporters wanting to spin bad results into something good, but people are too smart to fall for that. A bad debate isn't because of the altitude of Denver or because Obama is so concerned about protecting the office of the presidency not to fight back or because Romney lied. Obama just debated in the same manner that he has performed as president: detached, uninterested, lazy, arrogant.

3. The left seems to always be really concerned about the little guy . . the guy who doesn't make much money. The left dislikes big business and big money. Not all on the left, mostly those who do not have any money hate those who do have money. As a general rule though, the impression that is put out there is that liberals only like big money when it is something they can take and redistribute to those who do not have money. So why don't these people hate political campaigns with the same vigor. The Obama campaign for example pulled in $181 million just in the month of September. That is a lot of money raised and spent just to elect one person. Seems like a waste to me. Just think of how many teachers could be hired with that kind of money. I can understand conservatives embracing big money . . I don't understand why this kind of fund raising does not repulse a liberal.

4. There were fewer jobs created in September than in August, and there were fewer in August than there was in July. In January 2012 275,000 new jobs were added, followed by 259,000 in February, yet the unemployment rate stayed the same 8.3 between January and February. This was follow by months of very small job creation, ranging from 45,000 to 181,000, not enough to change the unemployment rate more than .2 percentage points. For context, 181,000 jobs were added in July 2012, and the unemployment rate went up .1 percentage point. I don't understand how we can add 114,000 new jobs in September and the rate goes down .3 percentage points. Actually I do understand: fewer people are looking for jobs and the government has dropped these people off these rolls. Basically the country is losing jobs, so you don't need as many people to fill those lost jobs. We're just choosing not to count millions of Americans, which artificially makes the unemployment rate go down. This kind of math is apparently something Obama is happy to embrace, which I don't understand (see point 2).

Eric & Carrie Wedding - Sept. 29, 2012

A few early picks from this past weekend's wedding with Eric and Carrie. It was a great wedding and a perfect day. Click on photos to enlarge.

Shooting In The Dark

This photo is by no means a great photo. It has its problems. I'm posting it here though because when you consider the conditions that it was taken, it is pretty impressive. It was dark. How dark? I was standing maybe 120 feet away, and while I could see the outline of the boat, I could not see the couple or anyone else on the boat. Those two big lights in the back were not all that bright. Between the darkness, distance and engine noise, the couple could not hear me or see me. To me it is pretty amazing that in near pitch darkness an image like this could be captured. Exposure details:  iso of 6400, f-stop of 2.8, 1/15 shutter speed hand held.