The Past Before the Future

I know.

Deep title right?

Ha!

Aside from actually writing a blog entry I think coming up with the title is the hardest part…so, I give up…from now on it’s going to be the first thing that comes to mind no matter how stupid.

Anyway, today’s is relevant, thankfully. Last night I got the urge (as I sometimes do) to go through the discarded images from last year’s sessions and see if I could find a few gems to spark some creativity.

Some of them turned into very close crops like the one of Ashley above. I originally discarded it because the eyes aren’t tack sharp like I like them to be in my shots, but the crop wowed me so I had to work it and overcome that pickiness.

It’s been quite some time since I dirtied up a photo. I love playing around, and although I prefer clean n’ simple looking shots embellishments can really transform a piece.

The one above was done when creativity woke me up at 5 this morning. Such is life.

Back to work now, I have some jewelry photography to finish up today and then hopefully I’ll be able to post that up here too.

Hope you all have a great day!

-David

Central Missouri Humane Society – Charity Shoot

Finally!

I’m so happy this day came. I’ve been trying to do a particular project with the Central Missouri Humane Society for months.

See, here’s the thing. The Central Missouri Humane Society is having a very hard time staying afloat. They don’t turn animals away and they don’t have the funding for the essentials of care, let alone the space they desperately need. I don’t have much to donate except for some photo skills.

I felt this needed to be done.

So that’s what happened.

It was so much fun too.

A little difficult, but a lot of fun.

Read on for more photos.

Read more »

Jason and Jennifer – Wedding

Jason and Jennifer’s wedding…what a blast. You may remember them from the engagement photos I posted on here a while back. Maybe not, who knows.

The day started around 2:30pm with photographs of the preparation mayhem.

Read more »

Barack Obama in Columbia, Missouri

Well ladies and gents, if you’ve been following along today then you already know I worked very hard to bring you the images you’re about to see. After the other week when I missed the opportunity in Kansas City, there was no way in hell this one at Mizzou in Columbia was getting by me.

So, after a tremendous amount of effort, negotiating and professional photographerism (new word), I made absolutely sure I got in to this one.

Read more »

Alex and Megan – Engagement Session

This fun young couple was my last engagement photo shot for the weekend. I knew as soon as I sat down with them to discuss their wedding photography that Alex and Megan were going to be great to work with.

Read more »

Jason and Jennifer – Engagement Session

What a cool couple. Let me just start there. After some unsavory weather on our first session the skies cleared up and gave us a beautiful day to capture these two.

Read more »

Tin-Eye, The Photographer’s Bodyguard.

Let’s face it, image theft is rampant, and easy. Every professional photographer or visual artist on the net knows that much. With the number of websites in the world it is impossible to scour each of them everyday looking for someone stealing your work. Most of the answers to this issue lie in the realm of spending a lot of money to hire a company to keep an eye on things for you. Even that has flaws though as something always falls through the cracks.

It’s 5:30am here, and I’m awake fearing for my precious images’ well-being. That’s not really why I’m awake, but I am spending this fluke of free time today looking at something you need to know about. Tin Eye, and people if this thing delivers like it promises, well let’s just say that a career in IP law will be a very busy field soon.

The technology is still in beta right now, and the database is limited to about 900 million images. Obviously though – and this is the important part – the technology is here to find thefts of your work. I don’t know how it works, but it allows you to search the internet for your images, or altered versions of them. It is extremely easy to use, and at the moment it is totally free. Hopefully they will keep it that way. I imagine that a certain massive corporation will buy up the technology soon *cough* google *cough* and if they do I think the possibility of this being a free service is much greater.

I think beta signups are still open, so if you can you need to go check it out. I’ll keep playing with it, and let you know if I find a downside to this technology. I have to say though, unless they decide to charge hundreds of dollars to use it, I don’t see a downside coming.

*UPDATE – 10:57am*

So far I’ve tried to find most of the images that I have scattered around the web. No stellar results. I could view that as a good thing because that means it didn’t find anything stolen. It means something more important though. TinEye needs to update the database and crawl more websites. I understand that it must be very difficult to build something like they have. Fact is, it needs to evolve. 900million is an astronomical number of images for sure, but it doesn’t scratch the surface of the images on the web.

My stance is still one of hope, because the technology is fantastic, and the fact that I couldn’t find anything of mine doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.

My suggestion… crawl flickr, catalog their images. Then approach google and either work with them, or sell the technology. It has a ton of potential, but the database needs to get much much bigger before it’s a viable option for lesser known images and orphaned works to be found and identified.

New old stuff.

From time to time I go back and look at old shots. I’ve found that when I give myself a few weeks or months between the first time I see them and when I revisit them I usually find things I didn’t notice before. Like a good photo that I would have overlooked otherwise.

I’m not sure exactly why that is, but it feels like I’m discovering something nobody has ever seen before. I suppose in a way that’s true.

An Article and a Model.

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a safe, fun Fourth of July.

Life is busy as ever over here. I’ve been so swamped with photo and design work I’ve barely had time to think about writing, much less do it.

Google Alerts has become my new best friend, every day I get an email telling me what new stuff google has found with whatever search term I decide. Naturally, I decided that my own name would be the first thing I wanted to know about. Since I’ve started using this service, I’ve discovered that there are a hell of a lot of people that have my name. I did find something cool though.

I was interviewed several months back about my use of flickr.com for photography. The author didn’t know if the article was going to be published or not, so I just forgot about it. Well, it did get published and google let me know. How cool is that?

Here is the link

In other news, another out of state model made the long trek to shoot with me. Although we only shot for about an hour she was an all-star and we got a ton of great shots in that short amount of time.

There are several more images, but I can’t decide on my favorites yet…so you’ll have to wait a bit for the rest.

Hope you are all doing well!

-David

Reagan and Dan

I have never met a more laid back couple in my life.

Reagan and Dan have been the ideal bridal client every step of the way. They searched for a photographer that matched what they liked (glad it was me) and let me do what I do best…run around like a madman and take thousands of images.

At the beginning of the day I split up my photo-squad and sent my assistant Hector over to take shots of Dan while he was getting ready.

Read more »