Fay

Against Me! - Sink, Florida, Sink

Thanks to Tropical Storm Fay, my sleep schedule has been greatly disturbed. Also, it’s rained a lot.

And the frogs are everywhere:

Late Nights at the Steak ‘n Shake

Kid Rock - All Summer Long

Night shooting

Spoon - I Turn My Camera On

Since I often work till late in the evening (and rise late in the morning), many days I don’t take my daily self portrait until I get home from work. This is almost always after 10:30pm. Therefore, I’ve been trying to take some more creative night shots. Here are some that I took a couple weeks ago:

These were taken at a random apartment complex me and Amy stopped at one night. Their basketball court looked really cool!

Here’s Amy hiding in the shadows:

And a car passing on the road nearby:

Another night I got silly at a car wash:

Night shooting is fun.

Freedom!

Dr. Dog - Heart it Races (iTunes)

One more day of work and I’m finally off! I worked six days this week and it has sucked balls… but tomorrow I get to go play with all of Keitha’s new lenses! Yay! And I upgraded by blog to WordPress 2.5 and didn’t delete everything. Double yay!

A Pentax Wedding, part 2

First, some appropriate reading music:
Bright Eyes - The First Day of My Life (iTunes)

And here are some more good ones from Lisa’s wedding:

A Pentax Wedding, part 1

Feist - I Feel It All (iTunes)

Saturday Keitha and I shot our friend Lisa’s wedding. It was quite an experience… Keitha shot using all primes and two cameras, and I managed with just my 18-55mm kit lens and the 50mm fast lens. It was stressful, but not as bad as I was expecting it to be–especially once the formals were done with! Here are a few of my favorites:

More to come later! (The bride hasn’t even seen these yet, so I don’t want to post too many!

A Photographer’s Life

So you’ll have to excuse the over-dramatic previous post. My little sister had just broken the news to me that she was pregnant and I was a little distraught. But life moves on. My parents know about the situation now and they ended up taking it better than I thought they would. The next seven months are going to be very interesting.

Besides that, nothing much of note has occurred. Work continues to be… work. Lisa’s wedding is coming up next month and I am more than a little nervous about that, as Keitha and I will be the official wedding photographers. We have shot one wedding previous to this one with good results… but still. This is such an important event for Lisa and her husband-to-be, I want to make sure we do the best possible job. And so tomorrow we are meeting her in Ocala to scope out the wedding location and do some test shots. Should be interesting. I think if we had done this with the previous wedding, we could have gotten some even better results (it was, literally, in the middle of the woods at a state park or something).

But before we meet Lisa, we are going to get up bright and early and do a sunrise shoot. It’s been a while since we’ve done this and I am actually pretty excited about it… except for the whole getting up early part. Oh well. Some of my best photos (at least as ranked by Flickr) have been taking during our sunrise photo-ventures, so hopefully I’ll get some cool shots tomorrow.

Yesterday Renee and I went to Saint Augustine Beach just to get out of Gainesville for a while. I didn’t think that I got any really fantastic shots, but when I got home and looked at them more carefully, there were a few I was happy with. Almost all of the photos were taken “from the hip” (literally) because I am very shy about photographing strangers. So I had to do some funky crops on most of them to fix the bad composition. Exampli gratia:

Man, tomorrow is going to be a *long* day. I will be getting up at around 5:45am (that reminds me, I need to go to bed!) and won’t get home until close to midnight since I will probably have to go straight to work after our meeting with Lisa. I have been listening to a lot of great new music and I hope I can get around to posting some of it next week. Until then… goodnight world!

Así es la vida

Today has been one of the few days in my life (so far) that I know I will never forget.

Beach House - Gila (iTunes)

DeVotchKa

I’m very excited about the new DeVotchKa album, scheduled for release on March 18. To hold myself over, I’ve been listening to the pre-release goody “Transliterator” over and over again. If you’re not familiar with DeVotchKa, please check them out. If you saw the excellent Little Miss Sunshine then you’ve already heard them, as they did the whole soundtrack, which included the great single “Till the End of Time.” Enjoy!

DeVotchKa - Transliterator (Amazon)

DeVotchKa - Till the End of Time (Amazon, iTunes)

PS- Thanks to Keitha and Out the Other for the DeVotchKa link!

I dislike VD.

So, I’ve had some interesting Valentine’s Days in the past years. I will admit to throwing “Anti-VD*” parties for a couple of years that were great fun. (Even let couples come one year!) But this year I decided to try to get a little more in the “spirit” of things, even though I was without a significant other so the holiday itself was pretty meaningless. Having given the day off to those who had boyfriends/girlfriends/other, I spent VD at work along with Joel and Katie. Luckily for Joel, he ended up getting a surprise date, courtesy of Katie and Jessica:

So Joel spent a romantic evening in the office with his hairy date and I ordered pizza for the front end and all was right with the world. Besides the usual things you would expect during VD in the ghetto (customers stealing roses, arguing over upgrade prices- “You stick a bow on it and mark it up to $40! WTF!?”) it was a good night.

But next year I think I might have another anti-VD party. It’s more fun to spend this particular holiday slightly tipsy (or completely smashed, depending on where the night takes you…).

*Isn’t it fun referring to it as VD? Because everyone hates VD, right?