Back Again & Let the Grads Begin

[Delyed post from May 2, 2014]

Things are almost back to something you might call normal after a herniated disc in my neck sidelined me for a while. Today my first grad of the spring season with Village Photographers. (OK, actually I shot Life University back in March, but that's more of a pre-season grad.) It's good to be able to get back into photography work.

It was Faulkner University's graduation day today. I've shot Faulkner a number of times, and they're great people to work with. This was the first time--at least in recent history--that they'd held an outdoor ceremony. I had previously taken pics at ceremonies in their old gym and at the Renaissance Hotel and Conference Center. I missed the air conditioning and consistent lighting, but the scenery was much improved.

There were a little less than 400 graduates receiving various degrees today. That's a pretty big graduation for us. I could tell afterward that I'm still out of shape. It could have been bigger, but I guess some people just don't value participating in such ceremonies. 

It surely wasn't the weather that kept anyone away today. It topped out around 71 degrees, which is great compared to the 80-95 degree range of most outdoor commencement ceremonies. We could have had some better cloud coverage, though. We set up with no clouds and eventually God graced us with a thin but consistent cloud layer that held for most of the pageantry. It started to break up about halfway into the graduates crossing the stage. I was adjusting my aperture as often as every two or three graduates. 

 

We had no major issues; things went smoothly from start to finish. The only hang-up was getting out the parking lot. I was out in under 15 minutes because I had to park far from the stadium. The rest of the crew who parked close to unload and load equipment were unable to even start out of their parking lot for around an hour.

I'm looking forward to the, I think, 15 ceremonies I'm on this season. Did I mention how nice it is to be close to normal again? Eventually I'll get around to posting the results from my first official wedding photography gig. That was last weekend, but I'm still going through the pictures. You may also see a photographer's guide to having a great grad picture taken when you get your diploma. It's amazing how consistently people mess up their own picture.

That's it for now. Stay peaceful!

Montgomery Dragon Boat Race and Festival

The Montgomery Dragon Boat Race and Festival was August 24, 2013, and I was happy to be on the scene shooting all sorts of pics with Village Photographers as the official event photographers for the entire festival encompassing--I'm guessing--a couple thousand people. I know I shot around 2,000 pictures. You can find those pics in the mix with other photographers' pics through the Village Photographers website. I started the day by the stage and in the Athlete's Village and moved to the marshaling area after lunch. (Thanks for the tasty vittles, Dreamland BBQ!)

Here are some pics I took on my iPhone 3GS just to document the day and catch some cool moments:


Beginning of the day:

Overlooking the Athlete's Village, Stage, and River: 

Big Al pitching a fit after the Oar Eagles won the Battle for the Iron Paddle (War Eagle!):

Overlooking the Riverfront and Marshaling Area from the Harriet II:

On the Harriet II (Happy for some cloud cover!):

 End of the day bad duck-face selfie:

 Dramatic lighting on the Riverfront sign:

Cool old advertisement for Wrigley's Spearmint Gum:

Troy University Sorority Bid Day Kappa Delta Group Pics

August 10 was sorority Bid Day at the main campus of Troy University in Troy, AL; and I was happy to be on the scene shooting with Village Photographers. Bid Day shoots involve both candid and group photographers. Early in my days with Village, I shot the candids. I graduated to shooting the groups a few years ago. Thankfully we had enough photogs on the scene that I didn't have to pull double duty. Also thankfully it was a beautiful day and easily ten degrees cooler than last year.

Below are some shots I took on my iPhone 3GS during some down time. Again, these are random iPhone pics I took to document the day, they are NOT pictures taken for Village Photographers on a professional camera.

Grad Season in the Rearview and Ahead

From late April to early June, I was in varying degrees of grad season mode. I shot 22 ceremonies with Village Photographers during that time. For 9 of those ceremonies I got the wonderful pleasure of NOT being the lead photographer. (That's a pleasure as a veteran photographer because you get the opportunity to shoot public relations photos and have fewer things to worry about other than your pictures.) I took pictures of Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, President of the Alabama Public Service Commission Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh, and many other less notable notables. I lived most of May fueled by coffee, fast food, and Emergen-C. I suffered through a pretty intense sinus infection during a week of back to back grads. And, most significantly, I made a heap of money. :P 

Before grad season got into full swing, Village sent me to Clayton State University to shoot two days of cap and gown portraits at their Grad Finale in the Loch Shop campus bookstore. Here's a little sample of what that was like (as I played around with the driver mode on my multipurpose, waterproof, point-and-shoot Pentax Optio W60).

The first grad of the season for me was Jacksonville State University. Jax State has an outdoor ceremony, and we couldn't have asked for better weather this year. I got to shoot PRs on this one, and I got to shoot them with a 55-300mm lens attached to a Nikon D90 (D90s are standard equipment for Village events, but glass like that is not). It was sweet, and I got some of the best PRs I've ever taken. Here's a sampling I was emailed by the photo manager with congrats.

In fact, I was so in the groove of shooting graduation ceremonies that I took my camera and shutter-bugged it up when I went to see a number of my youth group kids graduate 8th grade at Southside Middle School and from Tallassee High School. Results from those two events would have been better if I had been able to borrow some Village equipment, but they're kinda funny about loaning stuff out during the busiest part of grad season--go fig. The Tallassee High School principal, Coach Battles, even kicked me off the field shortly after taking the picture second picture below. That's what I get for being unofficial. I hope the one official guy they had got a good one of everyone, but I couldn't help but think, "Who shoots a graduation solo? No second or third shot, really? These kids have no options!"

Check my facebook page for more on those Tallassee City Schools ceremonies.

Whew! Glad to get this posted finally. In the next few days I should be getting the schedule for summer graduations...happy, happy, happy to work.

Music in the Park...in the Dark

Blah, blah, blah... I'm tired but wanted to go ahead and post these photos. I'll write more tomorrow.
: P

[ADDED]
It's well past "tomorrow," but something needs to be said about these pics. What follows are some photos I took when my wife and I attended "Music in the Park" in Tallassee, AL, on April 12, 2013. It was a fund-raising event to benefit the restoration of the Mt. Vernon Theater in historic downtown Tallassee.

The pictures were taken with my Nikon D70, which is a poor choice for night photography, but it's all I had. I can't for the life of me remember the guy's name who was playing while we were there, however he was really good and played a broad selection from old Blues Traveler to new indy-pop hits you would recognize from commercials.

Good times. I wish there were more things like this going on in Tallassee more often.

Looking for a Wedding Photographer?

Anybody out there looking for a wedding photographer? Because I'm still looking for somebody to be my first full-blown wedding! (I shot a surprise wedding at my church a couple years ago, but I don't count that one because it was REALLY informal. It's a great story, even so.)

I'm penciled in for a friend's wedding in late June, and I've got a lead on one in early June and one in August. The end of April is pretty open. May is going to be pretty wrapped up with graduations, but that schedule isn't set in stone yet either. Now is the time to book me before I get enough wedding experience to justify raising my rates.

Speaking of rates, here's how I'd break it down for my first couple weddings:

$50 + $50 per hour on site + $0.555 per mile round-trip from Tallassee, AL.

That gets you whatever coverage you want of the "getting ready," bridal portraits, groomal (I made that word up) portraits, wedding party photos, ceremony photos, reception photos, etc. I take the pictures, cull the bad ones, do appropriate tweaks and touch-ups on the keepers, and deliver them to you with full printing and usage rights on a DVD or CDs. I retain the right to use the best of the best as samples here on my blog and other social media outlets.

I can arrange printing through a 3rd party service (probably Mpix), but I'd charge an extra $20 for the time and effort to set it up (might be worth it, these are wedding photos, and I haven't been thrilled with some of my recent Sam's results).

An additional $25 would get you a very basic single-angle video. The cost of a somewhat more elaborate video would depend on what equipment I am able to purchase/rent/borrow/steal if the bride wants it.

Here's some of what I've done as just a guest at weddings:

This first one, it wasn't even my camera. It was the bride's, and so I had to figure out how to make it behave on the fly. These pics were pulled from Facebook, and have not been tweaked or adjusted.

This one it was my camera, but I was without a good external flash, and it was before I got quality editing software.

These are getting close to what you might expect, but were shot on a borrowed Nikon D90.

Here's my Pinterest board of the kind of wedding photos I'd like to emulate.

Call me at 334-452-3PEC or email me at pecaspers(at)gmail(dot)com to set something up.


Here are a few shots from that surprise wedding I mentioned, just for kicks and giggles.

Holiday Market

It's time for Holiday Market! "What is Holiday Market?" you ask. It's a local arts, crafts, food, etc. market put on by the Tallassee Farmers' Market. It occurs in conjunction with the Tallassee tree-lighting ceremony and Christmas parade. The market is open Friday from noon to 6PM and Saturday from 8AM to 1PM.

So why am I excited about Holiday Market? Because @PEaCe Photography is going to be there with a really awesome photo booth, and I'm @PEaCe Photography! Keeping with what worked well at Trade Day, I'm charging based on the size of the group. Groups of 1-3 people are $1, 4-6 people are $2, and 7-there's no more room are $3. At trade day, I couldn't handle a group larger than about 7 people, which is one reason I'm going tent-less this time. (The other reason is so that I can just compensate for the sunlight rather than try and control it.)

I'm hoping for better results this weekend than we had at Trade Day back in October. I've got far less $ sunk into being at Holiday Market, so I'm hoping to pull back into the black this Friday and Saturday.

The equipment I borrowed from Village Photographers couldn't be picked up until this afternoon, the real garland and wreath I'm using wouldn't survive the additional wear and tear of being set up for days on end, I just didn't feel like stringing all the lights over my backdrop stand, and so for all these reasons  and more I wasn't able to get in a full test of the set up. But trust me, it's going to be great.

The resulting pictures will be somewhat different from day to night. So I'm hoping a lot of folks come Friday evening for the most dramatic lighting. Folks who get theirs done in the day will still have a great picture, it just won't have the deep contrasty awesomeness of the night time shots.

Since I only had pieces of my backdrop up at any given time, my sample photo selection was a bit limited. Nonetheless, I have the cutest kid around for a model and I was able to compensate for the lack of the flash effect I wanted by tweaking the levels in Adobe Lightroom. Below are the resulting samples.

Customers can select from the following boarders:

Trade Day Prints Going in the Mail Soon!

Trade Day Photo Booth prints have been picked up, info labels are printed and affixed, and address labels are going on as I type (thanks to my beautiful, wonderful wife). Everything looks good for those to go out tomorrow. We are short one print because of an error neither of us caught, but we'll get that one printed at Wal-mart tomorrow and be back on track.

Are you terrified that I don't get my prints done at a professional level lab? I'm only slightly ashamed of it. If I were doing a major job, then I'd probably go with MPix or maybe Shutterfly. However, every penny matters and speed is more important than print quality for this task. I undercut MPix by 6 cents per 4X6 print plus shipping costs and don't have to wait for them to ship to me before I can turn the pictures around and send them back out. Shipping large prints also gets cost prohibitive very quickly.

Back to Trade Day...

You can see unboardered and more or less uncropped images in the facebook album linked below.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.373004172783703.89603.174367212647401&type=1&l=79c641f408

Here's what the booth looked like from the outside:

It's all over but the shoutin'--as they say--as far as Trade Day is concerned. Still, I hope that there plenty of people who holler back that they want more prints or photo sessions to get me out of the red on this one.

Trade Day Edits Done!

My hope was that I would be able to run my Tallassee Trade Day pics through Adobe Lightroom, doing only minor edits and then letting it apply the boarder, and have all the images ready in a matter of minutes. Well, that didn't happen. While shooting, I wasn't as conscious as I thought I was being about leaving enough room at the top and bottom of the frame to allow for the boarder and words. That left me with a lot of shucking and jiving to do to make each pic fit the boarder, including some filling in at the edges. (I only had to punt and add solid color blocks to the sides of one picture, and that one was a freebie of my pastor's family.)

I'll be uploading the best of each group to facebook in a day or so. Prints will likely happen Saturday, mailing...probably Monday. To tide you over until then, here's my kid!

Wedding Photography, Anyone?

I think I've finally got the equipment I would need to actually pull off a wedding! I've got a decent camera, a handle mounted flash, a hot shoe mounted flash, a portable studio flash set (partially malfunctioning, but I've got a work-around figured out), lenses to cover the range of 18mm to 500mm, an HD video camera, and the ability to borrow whatever else I might need from the nice folks over at Village Photographers. (I'd probably end up using a Village Nikon D90 as my main camera, but don't tell my camera that because you might hurt its feelings.)

I can only think of three more things to make this happen:

1) Samples

2) Advertising

3) Clients

Where would I get wedding photo samples? Hey wait! I've been to weddings with a camera in hand...

When my friends, Chris and Lauren, got married, Lauren handed me her camera and told me to do my thing. She had a professional photographer there, but she wanted plenty of coverage. It was just a point-and-shoot camera, albeit a pretty good one. The point is that I didn't have full control and was unfamiliar with the camera, but I still came up with some pretty fantastic pictures. I pulled the images below from facebook, so the image quality is a bit degraded, but you'll get the point.

Next we have some from when I married my friends, Jimmie and Rebecca. You read that right, I was the officiant of their wedding along with the pastor of the church. So that's why I didn't take any pictures of the ceremony. That would have been REALLY distracting. I did have my own camera for these, but I didn't have an external flash; thankfully their reception was well lit.

Finally, we have some photos I took at my friends Drew and Betsy's wedding back in November 2011. I was actually in charge of videoing the ceremony, but it only made sense to take some stills too since I was doing it partly with a borrowed Nikon D90. I didn't feel the freedom to move around during the ceremony, so those are all from my aisle seat with ambient light only. I did have an external flash at the reception, but it was my small one instead of the big SunPak that I have now.

So... I've posted an ad on Craig'sList, and we'll see what happens. Below is what the ad says:


Wedding Photography on a Budget

Best wishes and congratulations! Weddings are great, but they can get really expensive really fast. You can spend thousands of dollars on the wedding photographer alone. But you don't have to!

I've been doing professional event photography with Village Photographers of Auburn, AL for over eight years, but I'm just now trying to get into the wedding business for myself. My lack of experience in the wedding market can be a big money saver for you.

If you've got money running out of your ears, then please pay someone who will bring in a full crew and has tons of experience doing weddings. It's (hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime day; you're memories are worth the investment if you have the funds. That said, I have friends who paid thousands of dollars and had to fight to actually get what they paid for and paid extra for every print, while my wife and I got a friend of her father to shoot our wedding for a few hundred bucks, and we got all our images with basic edits, 4x6 prints, and full rights to print whatever else we wanted. Our friends have really great pictures. We have great pictures.

Usually, you get what you pay for. Sometimes, you get way more than you pay for--this could be one of those times. When I know the time, travel, and other expenses that will be involved in shooting your wedding, then I will quote you a price. The more weddings I have under my belt, the more the price will go up. Still, I intend to remain at the "bargain" end of the cost spectrum. Additionally, I work on a "reasonable satisfaction" guarantee; if you aren't reasonably satisfied with what I produce, then you decide how much the end product was actually worth and only pay me that. I've never had anybody ask for any of their money back.

I'm already on the hook for a photographer friend of mine, but I'd love to get some practice before her wedding in the fall of 2013.

Check out some samples of my work on my blog: atPEaCePhotography.blogspot.com
I also have a facebook page.

Contact me through facebook or leave me a message at 334 - 452 - 3PEC (that's 3732) with your name, contact info, and wedding date, and I'll get back in touch with you as soon as I can.