I was honored to be asked to participate in the We Are Wisconsin photo project this weekend; please click the link, read about it, and—if you’re so inclined—”like” it and follow the project on Facebook.

It was really great to connect with so many people and hear their stories… there were so many people from such different walks of life, with different reasons for being there. It was tough to winnow this down to just a few shots to post here, but you can see them all on the project page.

We’re less than a week from Fresco Opera Theatre’s latest production, Ding Dong the Diva’s Dead!

I’m also very excited to announce that after Saturday’s performance, you will have the chance to get your picture taken with the Viking Girl and Vampire!  For a free will donation to Fresco Opera Theatre, I will shoot you with these celebrated characters and post the files for you to download and print or e-mail – makes a great Facebook profile picture, too!

So come on down, hear some world-class music in a fun show, and support this great local arts organization!

I admit it, week five and I’m already resorting to a bit of a cheat…

First, it’s really not week five anymore – I missed that.  Second, while I did do a ton of shooting last week, I decided when I started this that I wasn’t going to piggyback on shoots I was doing anyway; P26 shots should be specifically for P26.

Well, since I’m playing catch-up here, I’m bending both rules and posting a new treatment of an old image.

I do a reasonable amount of post-processing, but—other than the obvious exception of all the black and white conversions—I tend to stick to generally representational color: the colors look more or less like they did to the naked eye.

I’ve been branching out and experimenting with different looks lately.  The Fresco Opera promos got a touch of a cross processed look (“cross processing” is when you develop color transparency film in color negative chemicals or vice-versa), and I liked how that turned out.

I’ve been using some of my older shots as color-tweaking fodder.  This one seemed like a natural fit for something fairly extreme.

Yeah, the treatment is a little trite for the subject matter, but I’d never done this before and wondered if I could make it work.  Trite or not, I liked the result, so here it is:

Fresco Opera Theatre has a really fresh, interesting vision; their last show was “Dueling Divas” and featured the performers singing from a boxing ring and competing for a title belt.

Their next production is called “Ding Dong the Diva’s Dead” and will feature opera death scenes staged as classic horror movies. It’s fun to work with people that have such a clear vision!  The models were absolutely terrific, and wonderful to work with.

Here are two shots from the session… Madison folks, keep an eye out for the promos, and come to the show, October 8th and 9th at the Overture Center.

One of my main goals for this project is to push myself to shoot in ways I normally wouldn’t.

I often like to have a bit of motion blur in my concert shots; they add a nice dynamic touch that really helps capture the excitement of the moment.  I tend to limit them to smaller accents in a larger, overall sharp image, though.

I really love a good, full-on blurred shot every now and then; I just tend to shy away from shooting them myself.  Whenever I see I good one, I always think to myself, “you should work on that.”

So here we go… my daughters often like to have “dance parties” and this is a shot from today’s:

I’m finally posting some shots from my backlog…

These shots were done at the University of Wisconsin Hospital; I was working on a video for the United Methodist Hospital Ministry, and needed some stills to supplement the visuals they provided. I tagged along with the chaplain, who was a very cool guy.

We visited and spoke with a few people, and I grabbed some shots here and there; nothing was really set up, and once again this is all available light. (I guess I shoot without flashes much more than I realized!)

I came away with several photos that I used in the video, but these shots of hands were my favorites; they summed up the experience for me.

I was planning for this week’s photo to come from the Hillside area of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, where we were supposed to be for Family Fun Day Wright 4 Kids (can’t get used to the new name), but a fever of 101 kept us home – poor kid!

So… here’s a picture of some onions.

We’ve had a share from Greenspirit Farm for a few years now, and pretty much every week, I look at the veggies and exclaim, “I want to take a picture of that ________!”  Well, I finally did it.

I know at least one of you is thinking, “hmm… doesn’t capture the sensuality I would expect from a Weston veggie knock-off” and you’re right.  But that wasn’t really my goal; to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a pair of onions is just a pair of onions.  (I couldn’t get a composition I liked that included the leaves with just one.)

I also meant to break away from black and white this week, but this will be another example in the black and white conversion post, which is in the works.  Color soon, I promise!

As I mentioned in the kickoff post, I’m going to be pushing myself out of my comfort zone a bit.  I always see things that I think would make cool shots, but I rarely follow through and actually get out there to shoot them.

I had the pleasure of meeting photographer David Franzen a few weeks ago.  David’s blog is at pixel-and-ink.com; go check it out (but please come back!).

David takes the kinds of photos I wish I took when I’m out and about.  In the interest of doing some more of this kind of shooting, I saw these clouds and thought, “hey, why not?” and took the shot.

Out of my comfort zone: check.
Shooting everyday stuff just because: check.
P26 week 2 complete: check.

Thanks for looking!

Let’s kick this thing off!  (if you don’t know what P26 is, check out my previous blog post…)

Okay, so I light most things.  It’s not that I don’t like natural light, it’s just that I don’t like worrying about finding shade or dealing with the ever-changing amounts of it; clouds come and go, the subject doesn’t stay in the good light because it’s boring there, the stupid earth rotates… you just can’t win!

It’s not always practical to light stuff, though, and I need to just get over it.

I don’t actually attach any particular value to using lights or not using lights… they’re just different approaches to get different results; IMO, neither is implicitly “better” than the other.  For me, lighting is just easier because it’s predictable.

But it’s time to let go and accept the chaos once in a while.

This is my younger daughter, doing her movie star thing.  Okay, really, she’s sitting on a little scooter thingy and just hanging out with her sister and cousin, but she looks like she’s contemplating what she’s going to wear on the red carpet.

And there was some insanely heavy cloud cover, so the light was very soft and totally consistent… I almost feel like it was cheating!

It’s July 1st – half of 2010 is behind us, and half is ahead.

Seems like the perfect time to launch a “Project 26”; I don’t have time to really make an honest go at a Project 365, and I didn’t manage to even get a Project 52 together back in January.  So here at the halfway point, I’m launching a Project 26!  We’ll see how I do…

Back in January, I was thinking I’d call this “POW!” for Portrait Of (the) Week.  I’ll still post quite a few portraits in the P26, but I’ll also be pushing myself out of my comfort zone a bit.

I plan to get back to more natural light shooting, as well as other subject matter than people. I recently had the chance to hang with a large group of photographers and shoot and share our work; it was very exciting for me to see so many different visions, and it inspired me to go back to revisit some of my older subjects as well as to try some new things.

Some will work, some will fall flat; it’ll all be fun (at least for me!).

I’ve also been meaning to make a Facebook page for a long time, and I’ve finally done it.  Come check it out, and if you like it, “Like” it!