Hello World.

Hi there! It's been a long time since my last post, it seems. I've been super busy with work, photography, and life in general.

First, as many of you know, and other's might have figured out, Lauren and I are pregnant and expecting our first born on or around November 17, 2006. We're very excited about it. On Friday of last week we went to the baby doctor and we listened to the heartbeat for the first time. It was just this little, steady and strong swishing sound. It wasn't much, but it was our baby's heartbeat...which made it all so very real! The next few months will be very exciting, as the baby starts growing very rapidly, and eventually makes first contact with us by kicking and moving. November will be here before we know it...and life as we know it will forever be different.

Also, this month has been and will continue to be very busy with photography work. I've been working on a side project shooting portraits for the last couple of weeks, and the client told me a few days ago that they'd like to shoot the rest of the company employee's as well. That is awesome news, because they are all really great people and it's been a pleasure getting to know just a little bit of them while photographing them. While the project isn't as in depth as a serious study of a person, where I would follow them in their routine for several days or weeks and photograph them until I captured one image that speaks volumes about who they are...it has been fun and I feel I've created some images of these people that work well as a portrait, but also tell a little bit about who they are.

I also was a second shooter at another wedding last weekend, and I have another couple coming up soon. It was very fun shooting this wedding, because it was the first I've done all digital. It's amazing the quality of these new digital cameras and flashes over film. I'm a hardcore fan of film, and I am blown away. The ability to zoom in a photo and see the pores of someone's skin in a photo is new to me...unless I'm shooting medium format. The quality's all there with digital, and I feel more free to experiment, because I can just look down and see if it works or not on the screen on the camera! Cool Stuff.

I've decided that I want to start writing more stories to go along with my photos. So, this summer, to help me finish my photography self study courses and also to work on this goal of more story writing, I'm going to start reporting about things that I see that interest me. Just sort of the type of stories you'd find in special interest columns in newspapers. I have an idea of something I'd like to write about:

There is an old drive-in movie theatre near my house that still shows movies in the summer. It's up for sale, and I'm afraid it won't be there next year if I wait to do something with it. I'd like to get ahold of the owners and interview them, get some history of the place, and shoot photos of the place in use at night, the line that forms outside on a Saturday night, and the place empty on a Sunday morning or something. I think it would make for an interesting story of a place that might not be around much longer.

I need more ideas, so if something unique is in your neck of the woods, or you think something would be cool to photograph and write about, let me know!