So I havent written since the Superbowl. Sorry about that. Things have been crazy busy, and also very sad. So here's my February wrap up.

I finally got a new computer and camera and lens. I'm still not fully rebuilt, but I am able to shoot and edit so life is good. Just waiting on my Photoshop so that I can try to fix some past problems. I love Nikon, and the D700 really does make my life easier when it comes to shooting EVERYTHING!

I left for Las Vegas for WPPI (wedding and portrait photographers international) convention at the MGM Grand and experienced Vegas first hand.

A few things about Vegas that I now know.

-Vegas is good for a few things:

-Strippers

-Gambling

-drinking

-shows

However, I dont do the stripper thing, and I cant afford to Gamble. I would only go back to party and see some shows. I was also there for 4 nights. I now know 3 nights is long enough for me.

Thats ok, WPPI was freaking awesome! I learned so much, shot some photos of The David Burke to update his website, he did the same for me, and enjoyed getting out of Pittsburgh for a while.

Here are a few of the Photos of David from when we were shooting. Gotta love it. This guy is a great photographer, and an awesome guy to hang out with. He helped keep me accountable when we were in Vegas, so this was a chance to get out of the casino and grab a few hours of fresh air!

This was with my new Nikon D700 and my Sigma 70-200 2.8. 320 iso, 1/500@2.8!

iso 200 1/1250 @ 2.8

iso 200 1/320@2.8

iso 320 1/800@2.8

I came home to my Grandpa in Critical Care. He passed away last Tuesday February 24th. My Aunt Judy, Dad, and myself were there when he passed away. I love him dearly, and will most certainly miss him. I lived with him for two years while I was going to school and he played Grandpa, Dad, friend, and mentor during that time. He was 87 and a devoted man of God. He was an example of living out the actions of Jesus. My Aunt was telling me that one year he recieved 60 Fathers Day cards from people whos lives he had impacted. Thats the kind of man he was. Once he experienced the salvation of God, he started living it, started acting on it. He didn't have much to give, but he sent cards to hundreds of people for their birthdays and anniversaries, and counciled many individuals and couples.

If I can grow up to be half the positive influence that he was, I'll have made a serious difference in the world around me.

Here he is on his 85th birthday.

This past week was tough. I lost a very dear friend, someone who would just pat me on the knee after my cousin died, and give me a hug after a bad day, and give me simple, honest advice. He was a simple man with good down to earth wisdom. He will be greatly missed my his children, grandchildren, and pretty much everyone who met him as far as I can tell. When I'm finally able to gather my thoughts, I'll put a true post out about my Grandpa. For today, this will have to work.

With the past week behind me, I head to Florida on Friday for Spring Break in Panama City with a group called We Minus Me. They are a Christian group looking to influence college students through pop culture. I'm gonna be shooting photos and video for thier new website! I'm super stoked. But how couldnt I be! Beach, warm weather, SPRING BREAK! I hope I can still Skim Board. More to come soon. I promise to not let another month pass without a post, but I'm not sure if I'll have internet while I'm in Florida.

Many of you are not familiar with the albums that I offer, and to show you the quality of the product, I wanted to show you the albums as they come.

The first album is a Kiss Wedding Book. These are beautiful hand made albums, and they are what I use for an engagement book. They are a beautiful album, the turn around is unbelievable, and the customer service is the best that I have ever experienced. These albums are the standard album that I use for my engagement/guest books, but they are also available for family, children, and senior sessions, as well as wedding albums.

They are a really cool albums that comes in great colors like brown, blue, black, purple, and green, and the leather is so soft and supple. They get shipped in this really funky bag to protect them. As my business grows, I am intending to move all of my storybook albums over to KISS. Their customer service is honestly probably the best that I have ever experienced anywhere or in any industry.
My second album is an Leather Art album. These are also beautiful albums, they come in a wider variety of sizes, but you only get to choose brown or black. These are also great choices for family, children, and senior sessions, but they take about 8 weeks to receive.

They really are a beautiful albums, and I am very pleased to offer both.

As a side note, for other photographers out there. Kiss Albums was started by photographer Kevin Swan, and their customer service ROCKS!!!

Aperture Vs Lightroom

So I've been playing with both of these programs for the past two months, and I initially bought Aperture because the demo was 10x's better than the lightroom demo. This may be because I only have a 1GiG of RAM, but lightroom takes alot longer to render photos than aperture does, and I get the "beach ball from Hell" quite a bit more often.

As a result of that, I love what aperture can do for archiving photos. However, Lightroom is a much more powerfull editing tool, (from what I have seen) and the ability to be able to have presets that work in Lightroom and the scrollover tabs to see what the photo looks like with different presets, is much more useful for me, when it comes to quickly editing photos.

On the other hand, Aperture has a much faster way to edit down your favorites, and discard the photos that you do not like, than Lightroom does.

I dont have the answer as to which one of these programs is the right one. I think that Aperture is Awesome for archiving, and Lightroom is awesome for quickly editing with presets. If there is a way to then transfer your selected images into Lightroom from Apeture, I think that is a really fast way to get your selected images ready for review.