Tha Gangsta Lean.

(As long as your mommy’s around…)

Happy Friday!

snOMG!

That’s what they were calling it in the twitterverse.
It’s snowed here two weekends in a row. I spent the time bundled up with the fam since my daughter’s only interested in talking about the snow.

I did manage to sneak out (and almost freeze my fingers off) this past Saturday to sneak a few pictures. It’s funny how such beautiful stuff as snow can bring a city like Richmond to a grinding halt.

There was ample sledding at local Forest Hill Park.

The local playground didn’t look as inviting as usual. More like something out of Silent Hill.

There’s just something about a bit of blue filter and a snowy road scene that just evokes desolation. You’d never know the sledders were just down the way.

I thought the images looked a lot like pieces from a film so I borrowed some post process techniques and made them look like this.
Thanks for visiting. I’ll try to update more frequently.

Down, Down, Down.

Everywhere we go, we manage to find a playground for my daughter to blow off some steam. This one is at my old elementary school, in Virginia Beach. Of course, this monster slide wasn’t part of the equipment when I was a kid. No, in fact, the entire place was a lot more lawsuit friendly. I seem to vaguely even remember a student breaking his arm on one of the jungle-gym pieces during recess one day.

It’s interesting what playgrounds look like these days. I think I’m going to pay closer attention to them since I seem to photograph them so often.

A Reunion, of Sorts.

When I left Pentax to come to Canon’s range of DSLRs, I was actually coming back. The first autofocus camera I’d bought years ago was a refurbished Canon Rebel X from eBay.

After having shot a Minolta SR-T 201 beforehand, it was a revolutionary step. It was like trading in an old Volkswagen Beetle with holes in the floorboards and getting a Lotus Turbo Esprit . I loved it.

I think I still have that body somewhere, but I managed to dig up an old Elan II body that I’d used and threw some of the new lenses I have on it during a recent trip to the playground.

I was goofing off, as photographs of my daughter often tend to be, but due to the lateness of the day, I managed a couple of interesting images.

I didn’t bother to clean the dust out of this ’cause I think it lends it a little more honesty. I’d forgotten how easy it was to love 35mm film. I think I’ll be taking the film camera out more often.

The Look.

Right before I pushed the shutter, I told Jennifer that this would be the best image of the day.

I was right.
Sometimes with all these digital cameras around, I forget how cool film is.

Altered Points of View.

I should say that when I first contacted Jennifer via ModelMayhem, I didn’t think she’d pan out. Why? ‘Cause hardly anyone from there does, at least here in Richmond. If the photographer isn’t an experienced glamor artist, a lot of the RVA talent isn’t interested. So I was elated when she agreed first to meet me and then later to schedule a shoot.

I’d run some ideas past her and gotten her okay, but for one, she said she’d have to do a wardrobe adjustment. Unbeknownst to either of us, that adjustment would change the timbre of the shoot. We went from creating an ambience-rich one-off image to something that, if we’d brought more changes of clothes and spent more time, would have been at home in the pages of a fashion magazine.

50mm.

Just a quick note to say that I’m lovin’ the “thrifty fifty” I picked up a few days ago.
I had forgotten how good it felt to be “wide open.”

The Ubiquitous Playground.

This one is in Dandridge, Tennessee, my mother-in-law’s home town. In fact, this is at the playground at the elementary school, as is this bottom one, which I grabbed with my phone.

Joy.

Yeah.
That about sums her up.

What A Big World It Is!

So I got this new lens and I’ve been dying to get a shot with it. I was stymied over the weekend after it got here ’cause I had nothing lined up. I shot a number of images through my office window, but none of them were all that interesting. In the end, I had only to look into the eyes of the youngest member of my family to find a subject.

The problem with the brilliance of my plan is that she doesn’t stand still. Like ever. Especially when she’s awake. Go figure.

This is a grab from a quick trip to the playground. She wandered around and fell in the woodchips a couple of times. She managed to climb on nearly everything there, but she was not a fan of looking in the camera. At any rate, this is kinda the way I see her now that she’s both ambulatory and headstrong: from behind.