So, headed out to try some time lapse tonight after spending the vast majority of my day virtually paralyzed due to a pinched nerve in my back (though my doctor says it’s a severely strained muscle. Whatever Doc.)

Anyway, I’m sitting around waiting for the shots to get captured after setting it all up. This is how photography should be! Ha ha ha. Note the two tiny sticks in the lower left just atop the hill. Yeah, those are my camera and my friend Shauna’s camera on tripods about 300 feet away from where we sit safe from all the blood sucking Mosquitos while the camera does the work!

Hey all!  Well, here it is!  I mentioned it was coming and here we go.

Your Mom is the most amazing woman you’ve ever known.  She’s been there for you through good times.  Through bad times.  But what makes her the Best Mom in the World!?  Click the comments link up in the right of this post,  tell us why your Mom is so awesome and she could win a FREE portrait session worth $180!  Here’s what you do,

- Click the comment link in the upper right hand of this post, tell us why your Mom is the Best Mom in the World.  These stories will be visible to everyone who visits here.
- We will collect the stories until May 1st.
- On May 1st we’ll go through all the submissions and which ever one touches us the most will be declared the winner.
- If, as in my case, your mother is no longer with us, the session can be used for anyone of your choosing.
- The session will be about 1 hour long and will result in up to 5 images being fully edited, printable at 8 x 10, and burned onto a CD.
- The session will take place in the subject’s home or at a favorite location anywhere in Edmonton.

And with that, please start submitting!  Cheers!

My Mom.

Inspiring photographer Scott Bourne gave Tasra Dawson a challenge in order to help her improve her photography. 

http://www.tasra365.com/

She accepted the challenge and started the above web site to chronicle her adventure.  Many others are taking the challenge as well.  I showed the site to my good friend Ralna who is also inspired to take up the challenge AND has challenged me to do the same.  I have in fact attempted a 365 project 8 times in the past.  Failure came mainly because I would miss my start date of sunrise, January 1st.  Miss that and the project is dead.

So Ralna suggested, start tomorrow, Sept 3rd, and use the next few months as a lead up to get my head in the game and get a routine going so that I’ll be ready when the time comes and will have the motivation and momentum to keep going.  Why the heck not! Maybe adding the slight competetive element of who will succeeed more often than the other is just what we both need to get out and shoot more.  We’ll see how it goes.

I will post my efforts to my blog on it’s own tab above.  Once Ralna has determined the path she’ll take for posting I will provide a link there as well.

Wish us all luck!

NOT my first entry.

Yellow Lillies

For a number of years my primary focus in photography was glamour.  Beautiful photos of beautiful women was my goal.  And yes, often they would be wearing little to no clothing.  I have been fighting with internal conflict over the controversy of such photography ever since the beginning.  Why do some people have no problem with nude photography and others are so infuriated with it?  Why should I feel guilty doing tasteful, beautiful images of beautiful women the way God intended everyone?  We’re all born naked.  Why is it such an evil thing to so many people?  Why should I feel like a bad person doing something that I enjoy, and that my subjects are grateful for?  I know that the perspective of a lot of people is that these women are suffering some sort of abuse by having do nude photos of them but these people don’t realize that the models are often VOLUNTEERS!  The women are being photographed because it’s what THEY want.  Not because I’m forcing them.

Bottom Line, the human body is God’s greatest creation (if you believe in a God) and I’m tired of apologizing for appreciating it.  I will continue to photograph it as well as all the other beautiful things this world has to offer.

In my attempts to become more involved in photography as part of my effort in getting my business up and running I’ve taken part in many of the new social media experiments.  I’ve joined Twitter, Flickr, started this blog, and have enhanced my presence on Facebook with a Facebook Page for business.  Next up is fine tuning everything and getting some of that mystical Google Search results holy grail of being on the first page of a search for Edmonton Photographers or Edmonton Wedding Photographers.

While playing around with these new tools and hangingout at other photographers blogs and listening to podcasts aplenty I’ve had the odd sensation several times now of referring to some of these people as friends.  Many of them of them likely saw my name for a moment when I first started following them on Twitter or from a comment I may have made on their blogs but really, they probably have NO idea who I am, so why am I calling them friend?  After spending a good chunk of time following the lives of others you get to know them almost like a friend.  But without that one on one interaction, can you really call them a friend?  Why not!? As far as I’m concerned we are ALL friends.  Some of us just haven’t been properly introduced.

And that’s a core thing for me in business and was a major point of conflict between me and an ex-girlfriend (she fiercly disagreed with me).  When I’m dealing with a client I don’t really want a client/business-owner relationship, to me that’s just a cold thing.  It says “I’m here to take your money and don’t really care that much about you as a person”.  No, I’d much rather have a friendship  that says “yes, I’m performing a service for you for which I must be fairly compensated but I care about how you feel about the results of the service I provide and eally want you to be happy with what you receive.”  I’m not looking to be your Photographer for this event.  I’m looking to be YOUR photographer.  For life!  Let us photograph your wedding in July and then 24 years from now, let us photograph your daughter’s wedding!  And during that 24 year journey allow us to photograph all your most memorable events.  We’re here for YOU.  Payment is just a neccessary evil.

I was thinking the other day, I work mainly in the IT industry and it’s common practice among my peers that whenever new software is available it’s a sign that it’s time to whine and complain about how much it’s going to suck and to wait at least six months for the developers to work out the bugs.  I must be broken because when I learn of new software I can’t wait to get my hands on it and try out the new features.  I realized a while ago that they’re complaining and fears are not very well placed or thought out.  What I realized is that NO software is EVER complete.  Regardless of peoples beliefs, software will always be in beta, especially as it gets more and more complex.  (For those that don’t know, the Beta phase of software development is one of the last stages of testing before a final release of that software.  It often includes having members of a specific industry or even the general public involved in the testing.)

Then tonight I was thinking again, discussing with Mel through the last few days and then talking with a possible client this evening I realized that almost nothing is ever final.  I’ve spent much of the last two months stressing over pricing structures and package pricing.  We finally came to a decision a couple weeks ago and now while talking again we’ve decided that some more changes are in order not only to our pricing but to our web site as well.  I then realized that it doesn’t matter what we set our prices to, we are free to change our prices as we see fit to better appeal to our customers while still being fair to ourselves.  We may have settled on one pricing structure for now, but guaranteed, we will change it.  Everyone does.

I have failed miserably at the diet.  By about 6:00pm yesterday I had begun to get extremely irritable and had a migrain rolling in.   I certainly can’t say it was the diet because I’ve had many days where I’ve barely eaten anything at all and have been just fine.  Yesterday I ate a lot of green veggies, peppers and a cantalope so I SHOULD have been fine.  I guess my physiology just didn’t want to start yesterday.   I finished my day off with with some McD’s chicken nuggets and Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

I’m going to look into some better tasting options and I’ll give it another go in a few days.  Or I’ll try something totally different.  I’m still going to do the eating better thing, but I’m not going to be strict about it.  Yet.

BREAKFAST – consists of half a cantalope and a can of tomato juice.

Wow, I never thought a half cantalope would fill me up so well.  I just hope it can hold me over till lunch!  So far so good.

LUNCH – consisted of the other half of my cantalope, can of tomato juice and a pile of red and yellow peppers.

Well, the cantalope from breakfast did actually last me mostly till lunch.  But I did lunch almost three hours ago and for at least the last hour I’ve been freaking STARVING!!!!!!!!  I’m going mental!  I want a steak!  I want BBQ chips!  I want honey garlic chicken wings!!!   Mmmmmmmmm

And of course a co-worker JUST walked by as I’m typing, munching away on something crispy and crunchy in a crumply sounding bag.  Damn him!  Okay, so I never told him I was doing this.  It’s not his fault.  He just doesn’t know.  He just doesn’t know.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

K, I’m good now.

So this blogging thing might be easier if I wasn’t working so much that all I want to do when I get home is pass out.   But I’m about try changing things up a bit so that I’m in a much better brain place and more able to do updates.

As of Friday morning I will be taking part in a little experiment of this Mayo Clinic two-week diet which promises you can lose about 20lbs in two weeks.  A lot of the information I found online about this diet says that it’s not a healthy diet, Mayo clinic has nothing to do with the diet and does not endorse it at all and generally to just stay away.

However, I was given the inforation sheet by someone who I feel to be very trustworthy who is currently giving it a try herself.  After only 4 days she’s already down 6 lbs!  And she claims to work with people who have done it and been very successful at it themselves.

I figure what the heck.  It’s only two weeks.  I’m sure that I could probably stop eating altogether and I’d be fine just from all the stored meals I’ve got right now.

So, I will write my thoughts and progress here as I go along.  First goal, stick to the plan!  Second goal, write about it.  Here we go!!!

I was gonna write a bunch of crap about stuff that you probably don’t want to read.  Suffice it to say I feel like crap for bailing on the opening party of my friend’s new studio.  I was just too tired to deal with a crowd.   Sure there’s more to it than that, but that’s the basics.   I really wanted to go too.

On a lighter note, I urge everyone who can deal with subtitles to go check out Chandni Chowk to China.   What an awesome movie!  Comedy, drama, cheese, action, adventure, okay maybe not so much adventure, kung-fu, song and dance…and Deepika Padukone…She’s so cute!  Anyway, the movie freakin’ rocks so go see it now!!!

Sleep deprivation is not a fun thing.   The first thing you really start notice about it isn’t the slow reflexes or inability to focus on tasks at hand, not for me ayways.  For me, its lapses in memory.   Not remembering to pick up something right in front of me and getting my iPhone charging cord stolen because I left it in the middle of a hallway.  Not remembering what I did with my camera and panicking over possibly having left it on some boxes at walmart only to thankfully find it on a chair in the living room.  Having no idea what day it is or if your supposed to be somewhere. 

It gets really bothersome.   It makes it difficult to learn new tasks.  It makes it hard to remember todo things that need to get done or that really should get done.  It remembering some important things difficult and forces you to really concentrate on remembering some things which in turn only causes you to forget other things.

So do yourself a favour.  Get some sleep.   Stop reading this and get some sleep.  Go.  Now.

Oh yeah!  Battlestar Galactica started again!  Awesome!  Now I just need more episodes of the 4400, Heroes, Eureka, Kyle XY, Terminator, Dr. Who and Torchwood!    Yeah……