Inessential Stuff

This is my good friend Del Engen. After a long career at Microsoft, he chose to pursue his passion, both in film and music, by training and then working in film scoring. He recently asked me, far too tentatively, if you ask me, if I would mind doing a photoshoot with him for his professional website. Del has been a friend for 20 years, so I was glad to shoot with him.

And I had some specific things in mind. First, Del’s condo has one wicked view of downtown Seattle and the Space Needle. So I thought it might be fun to shoot there. The outside, even on a cloudy Seattle day, is always much brighter than inside. So there was a bit of lighting challenge which I thought would be fun, and would create an appropriately cinematic look. It involved placing a strong light high at about the 2:00 0′clock position (if I am the center of the clock and Del is 12:00) and then a smaller fill light at the 11:00 position, which I triggered with my brand new RadioPoppers (which I use now instead of PocketWizards). I really liked the shadowing it gave, and putting the attention on Del, while showing a bit of the warm interior and still exposing correctly for the Seattle clouds and Space Needle outside.

We also shot at a coffee shop across the street where there is a piano. Again, I mostly went with dramatic cinematic lighting, keeping it to one light both for the convenience of shooting and for dramatic light and shadow. Finally, as we were crossing the street, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a shot Del in the sidewalk, with the road dropping down into Seattle below. It was a really fun shoot. I have up a small gallery here of some of the images.

Introduced a new cat to the family, which Marcus has named Bamboo. He’s a total lover-boy and purr-bug. Just don’t mess with his carrot-toy that hangs from the ceiling. He’s pretty protective. He also has enormous paws, so I think he’s going to be big. I love this cat. Big. Bam. Boo.

Not everything stays in Vegas. Take, for example, these awesome mustache props I picked up at my photography convention. I confess that not all my friends understand (nor support) my mustache fascination, or as one friend has coined it, my “mustacination.” But handlebar mustaches delight me. They delighted Marcus, too. So after a kind of rough start (see hover-text below), we got a nice portrait with mustaches! Awesome.

Marcus has learned to ride a bike. I had tried to get him interested in biking before, but he waited until I was out of town before he got the biking-bug. So, back in town, I took him down to the park and took some photographs of Marcus biking around (also a good excuse to try out my new fisheye lens). So here is a small gallery of Marcus on his bike.  “I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike . . .”

I attended the Wedding & Portrait Photographers International conference in Las Vegas, and though I didn’t have a lot of time, I did squeeze of a few shots on my way to the airport on the last day.  Here are a few photographs.

This is Patti. We met through a mutual friend, though I had never met her in person before, since she lives in Las Vegas. That changed, during my trip to Vegas for a photography convention, where we met up and did a photoshoot.

I wanted the images to be trendy and fashionable, because Patti struck me as that way. We started out with a shoot outside at sunset and shot into the darkness, with a fine view of the city. And when my lights didn’t work as planned (I’ve since ditched PocketWizards for RadioPoppers), we used her truck’s headlights for some unusual off-camera lighting (see above). Then, quite cold, we retreated to someplace warmer and finished the shoot.

Patti is getting married in Chicago this fall, so if I’m lucky, I might get to work with Patti again.

I really enjoy taking pictures at night. On our recent trip to McCall, Idaho, I saw a couple things that made me stop the car and shoot.  First, this McDonald’s in Lewiston.  Very sweet; love the retro look. And, on the way home, a large model of a dinosaur skeleton in a very small building near Grangeville. Something you just don’t see every day.