Another CD Cover

I know it's no excuse, but I haven't blogged in a while because I have been busy... really busy. Actually, between a full time day job, two businesses, a family, friends, and daily life, I am surprised I have time to eat and sleep, but somehow it all works itself out. I know a lot of people that do a lot of things, so I am by no means special, it's just a fact of life.

But that is not what I wanted to blog about. I really wanted to update you with another CD cover I did for Stacy, the dancer from Austin. I have plans to do a total of three or four of these covers, but I have only been able to work on two of them so far. The first was a copy of a Tupac cover for his "Best Of" album. Now I am copying a Lil' Kim cover. I like this one a lot. First of all, Stacy was a blast to work with and creating this image was a lot of fun. Let me know what you think.

This is the original Lil' Kim cover that was the inspiration for the copy below.

This is the mocked up version. Not exactly the same, but pretty close.

What do your words say?

I am sure most of you know about word clouds or tag clouds by now. If not, they are representations of some body of text in the form of, well, a word cloud. It's hard to explain better than that, but essentially the word cloud is a bunch of words arranged in a cloud-like shape that show what words appear most often in some body of text. The larger the font of the specific word, the more often it appears in the text.

Why am I blogging about this you ask? Well, actually I follow a lot of people on Twitter. If you don't know what that is, check it out. I may blog about Twitter later, but for now let's focus on word clouds. So, the reason why I thought this would be a good blog post is because I saw one of my tweeps post a link to his word cloud and the name of the service he used to generate the word cloud. Now I have seen these types of services before, but this one is really easy to use and it gives you the ability to customize your cloud with a few simply clicks. The service is called Wordle. The great thing about this one is you can generate a word cloud of pretty much anything as long as you know the URL. Some services require the username and password of the account holder to do these types of things, but this one doesn't.

This is the word cloud from this blog (pwphotographer.blogspot.com).

I generated it yesterday using Wordle. I customized the layout to include

numerous colors, random angles, and a Roman-type font.

This is the word cloud from my sister's blog (lifeonlaurel.blogspot.com).

I generated it yesterday using Wordle. I customized the layout to include

four basic colors, straight angles, and a whimsical font.

So you can see from the images above that the word clouds can look quite different. And it only took me a few minutes to generate both of these word clouds. It's really a fun thing to do if you have a blog or follow someone regularly. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Copycat CDs and they aren't from China

If I offended anyone by the title of this post... too bad. It's a fact that China is one of the worst offenders when it comes to piracy of any type. Although CD piracy isn't as common as it once was, that activity is simply being replaced by other forms of media including DVDs and Internet music. But I digress...

The point of this post is to show you one of the CD covers I imitated using a photo I took of Stacy a few weeks ago. I mentioned in my post about the shoot that I was going to mock up several CD covers for her since she is a dancer that specializes in break dancing and is really into hip hop and rap music. The first cover I copied was Tupac's Best of Tupac Part 1: Thug CD. You can the original and the mock up below.

Original CD cover courtesy of Amazon.com

Mocked up CD cover (as if you needed to be told).

For the mock up, I had Stacy pose in a similar way. Then I completed the look in Adobe Photoshop. I used color adjustments to get the gold tone. I then created several layers to add the advisory label. Finally, I created a gradient for the title bar and added the text. Overall, I think it looks pretty close to the original. I plan to mock up the other CD covers in the next few weeks and I will post those as well. Let me know what you think!

Breakin' all the rules

Here, Stacy is in her traditional break dancing outfit.

She is part of Austin's Urban Transit crew. Don't let her petite

size fool you, she can bust a move with the best of them.

A week ago, I photographed Stacy, a local dancer. When I met her about a year ago, she was working her way through college teaching dancing to kids and waiting tables. Since that time, we have continued to stay in touch. She has always talked about her plans to go to Las Vegas to dance professionally. Well, now she is a college graduate from Texas State and she is getting ready to fulfill her dream. My part in that plan is simple. She needed some photos in various dancing poses as well as some headshots for her resume. The other week, we were finally able to coordinate a photo shoot in Austin. The two images you see here is only a small sample of what we did. Since Stacy is a trained dancer, she is well versed in all genres of dance. We took photos of her doing ballet, contemporary, break dancing, and 80's Flashdance style poses. In fact, Stacy is part of a dance crew in Austin called Urban Transit. If you haven't heard of them, check them out on YouTube. They are really good. The crew participates in competitions all over Texas.

But back to the photo shoot... Stacy feels much more comfortable being serious or even goofy in front of the camera than she does being sexy. But trust me, she can do the latter very well too. After taking several hundred pictures of Stacy in various dance outfits and poses, we transitioned to more sexy FHM or Maxim magazine style photos. Finally, we wrapped up the day by posing in the style of some of Stacy's favorite hip-hop artist's CD covers. I plan to Photoshop the copy onto the images to mock up the CD covers with Stacy on them instead of Tupac, 50 Cent, and Lil' Kim.

This pose is a copy of a Tupac CD cover from his album

Best of Tupac Part 1: Thug. Stacy posed in the style of three

different artists' CD covers including Tupac, 50 Cent, and Lil' Kim.

Stacy, I hope you had fun and I wish you the best in Vegas. If you make it as a dancer, drop me a line and let me know. I'd love to make it out there to see you. Of course, I will expect complimentary tickets and backstage passes! :)

Up to the challenge

I was challenged by Jackie, a blogger and friend of mine, to post the 4th image from the 4th folder on my computer. It took me almost a week to do this because I most of last week out of town and I wasn't near my 24" iMac, which has all my images. So here goes...

It was getting late in the day when the flower girl decided she was
done rehearsing. You can see the tissue paper in her basket that
were representing the flower petals she would be laying down
the next day at the wedding. She is a cutie for sure, but just a little
overly dramatic, don't you think?

This picture is of Casey, the daughter of my wife's sister-in-law's sister-in-law and flower girl. Did you get all that? Well, anyway... it was taken on June 16, 2006 in Cary, North Carolina. I was the photographer for my sister-in-law's wedding and I was at the rehearsal when I captured this image. The participants at the rehearsal had been going through things for about 40 minutes when the flower girl decided she was done. She laid down in the middle of the imaginary aisle in a very dramatic way. As if she was telling her mom, who happened to be the wedding planner, that she didn't think all this practicing was really that much fun.

It is interesting to think about this image and where I was nearly three years ago with my photography. I had always been involved in photography to some degree throughout my life, but I only really began to try to make money at it when I entered the digital revolution. Actually, this wedding that I was in North Carolina to photograph was only my first "paying" job. I say that because I was paid by my sister-in-law even though I told her I would do it for free just to get the experience. I had only recently purchased my first Digital SLR, a Nikon D50, a few weeks earlier. That camera now is with my sister, who is loving it. You check out her blog and see the great images she is creating with the camera. I gave it to her as her Christmas gift last year and her Birthday gift this year (she doesn't know that second part yet, but she will when she reads this post :)

But now I have nearly three years of trying to make money as a photographer under my belt. Oh yeah, and a new camera. I bought a barely used Nikon D2x last year from a photographer in Florida, Tom Grissman, who was getting rid of his so that he could get the new D3. You see, even though I say I am trying to make money at photography, it isn't my full time job... yet. I work during the day and do photography and other creative work at night and on weekends. So far that is working for me, but if I felt I could really make it in photography, I would do it in a minute. Maybe one day...

To end this post, I must challenge four other people, in keeping with the theme. So here are my four picks:

1. My sister, Megan (of course)
2. My friend, Tyler
3. My favorite baby and child photographer, Piper
4. A player to be named later

Fashion for everyone

A few weeks ago I met Maddie, a college student, at a restaurant in Austin. At one point during the evening, we started talking about modeling. That discussion led to Maddie mentioning that she wanted to do some fashion modeling. Of course, I took the opportunity to mention that I was a photographer. And the rest, they say, is history.

So fast forward several days to last week. Maddie and two of her college friends met me at my studio. They brought their iPod nano full of music, some wine (for them, not me), and a great attitude. Her friends were there to help Maddie with posing ideas and they were fabulous. While I adjusted lights and made sure that Maddie was looking her best, her friends were instructing her on what pose to do next.



Maddie brought over three dresses and I used three backdrops to give us some different looks. We spent about two hours doing the shoot and took nearly 600 images. As you can see from the images, Maddie is very comfortable in front of the camera. Not to mention, she looks great! I think she definitely has a future in modeling.


For all of these images I used my Alien Bees studio strobes. I just recently purchased an Paul C. Buff foldable giant softbox and I used that as my key light. For the fill, I used some white foam core. And I placed a bare strobe with a 20 degree grid as my back light. I processed the images in Adobe Lightroom 2 and did some final clean up in Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Let me know what you think. Leave a comment on the blog. Thanks!

Who needs high quality glass?

To the question "who needs high quality glass?" well... apparently, I do. You see, I bought a little plastic pinhole camera kit from the Houston Museum of Natural Science store several months ago, and I finally took it out on the streets of New Orleans to try it out during my last trip there. The pinhole camera simply snaps to together, which is easy enough. The hardest part is creating the pin hole. This is done by piercing a piece of aluminum foil. What's so hard about that you ask? Just keep reading. The great thing about the camera is that it uses standard 35mm film. The kit is made by 4M Kidz Labs and cost me about $12.00.

The instructions left a lot to be desired. Since I hadn't used a pinhole camera before, I was not clear on how long to hold the shutter open. The only point of reference the instructions gave me is "on a sunny day, an exposure of half a second will expose properly." The problem is I don't know what speed film they were using. I chose to use some 400 ISO film that my sister had in her fridge. I figured a little extra light sensitivity couldn't hurt.

The other tough thing about this particular pinhole camera is that to advance the film, you have to guess how many clicks to twist the knob. The instructions indicate a full rotation for the first few frames. After that, they say to turn the knob a few less clicks for every 6-8 frames. This is because as you wind more film onto the receiving knob, it takes fewer clicks to advance the film an entire frame. Unfortunately, that got me on several frames. There were many that I double exposed part of the frame because I didn't advance it enough.

So, how did the pictures turn out you ask? Well, not that great. Below are two of the best images that I made using the camera. The first picture is of a beer can I found in the grass on the banks of the Mississippi River.



This next picture is of a cat in a window of one of the many shotgun houses in the Garden District.



The exposure seems good, but the blurriness detracts from overall image. Reading the troubleshooting section of the instructions, it indicates that the smaller the hole, the more clear the image. I guess I made the hole too big this time. I will try again and see if I can improve my results. Check back for an update later.

A website is a lot of work

Over the last several weeks, I have been working extremely hard to launch a new website. The reason for the new website was two-fold. First, I created my own website originally using iWeb. While this served its purpose initially, I had outgrown what I could do with that program. Specifically, I wanted a more dynamic Flash-based website. Second, I had decided to rebrand my services to specialize in photography only. Previously, I had offered other services such as graphic design and video production too.

So, once I decided to go that route, I began considering the various options for my new website. My first thought was to learn Flash and design my website from the ground up. While that sounds great, I quickly learned that Flash isn't easy to learn. And I am not that well versed in web design. In fact, I know just enough HTML to get me in trouble. Other than that, I need WYSIWYG software to help make it possible for me to anything more. My second thought was to buy a Flash template from a website such as iwebtemplates.org. They offer prebuilt Flash templates that anyone can customize and publish. Alternatively, you can pay to have their web designers customize the template to your specifications for an additional fee. While the pricing of the templates were reasonable, around $70 for most templates; I was still unsure of my ability to customize the template to my liking. And the option of having their web designers do the work quickly added up to a lot of money.

After much deliberation, I chose a third alternative. I elected to buy a template from bludomain. They offer prebuilt Flash-based websites for creative professionals. The great thing is all of the customization can be done through a very user friendly web interface. Of course, you are limited to how much customization can be done versus unlimited options if you buy a template from a website like iwebtemplates.org. Despite that limitation, I was very happy with the flexibility the template offered and the whole process of customizing the site was easy. I actually purchased a template that was originally priced at $400, but at the time I bought it (January 2, 2009) they were offering it for only $100. I thought that was a pretty good deal.

It took me nearly a month to customize the website, but that was because I couldn't work on it every day. I spent a few days every week during the month of January until I had it almost done. But before I could officially launch the website, a potential client asked me for my website information. Instead of giving out my old one, I decided to go home that night and launch even though I had a few more things to finish. I figured I could make the final changes to my website after the launch. And I was right. Making changes to my site now is just as easy as it was before the site launched.

This is a screen capture from the home page of my website. It cycles through

various images from my portfolio while music is playing in the background.

The menu slides up from the bottom to access other pages of the website.

So, if you can't already tell from this post, I am very happy. I would recommend bludomain to anyone interested in a dynamic Flash-based website, especially if you are in the creative services industry. To check out my new website, go to www.pwphotographer.com. Post a comment and tell me what you think.