Big Sis

This is my older sister. Yes, my OLDER sister. She might look 13 in the photo, but if you reverse those numbers, you’d be closer to reality.

But in the 228 days since I set up my studio, I haven’t been able to get her in a real studio shot! But now we have it!

A Wine Time

Today I went out to a winery in Leesburg called Dry Mill Winery (http://drymillwine.com/) to take some family photos for a Grandmother’s birthday gift from her kids. The day started off wet and overcast, but by the time I got to the site, it was 80 degrees and sunny. Go figure.

Anyway, I scoped out the site about 20 minutes before the family got there, but it was full of people (there was a party bus visiting) so it was a little hard to find some good locations. Plus, the ground was all wet from the rain earlier in the day.

Luckily, the crowds left when the family showed up. We shot in front of the side of the main house, which had a rustic antique-y wood barn look. This was good because it kept us out of the wet grass, and it kept the family in the shade, where the light was much more even.

As you can see, they’re quite a good looking family. It was a real easy shoot, I hope that I get more gigs like this one!

Warm March Day

I spent all day today judging a piano festival. Seriously, 7 hour day, with one hour lunch of back-to-back-to-back listening to little kids play piano and hand-write comments. Kills the hand.

Anyway, when I got home it was nice and warm and sunny, so Tay and I went out to take some pics around the house and neighborhood. The previous photoshoot we did outside I used some umbrellas, today I wanted to try the beauty dish as a fill light. I think the beauty dish absorbs too much of the light, so IMO, during bright light like this, umbrellas are better. But it still looks kinda cool. I mean, how else are you gonna get that reflection of the sun off my car well exposed and still be able to see Tay?

Mmm hmm.

My Hard Drives

Okay, so they may look bigger and more intimidating than they really are, but those are my hard drives. That beast on the right is my newest acquisition, a 4 bay Raid5 enclosure. Basically, I stuck four 2tb drives in there, and the computer can read them all as one giant hard drive. Even though it’s four 2tb drives, it’s only about 6tb of space, because (in laymans terms) one drive’s worth of space (2 terabytes) is reserved as a backup in case any one of them fail. So, if a year down the road one of my hard drives stops functioning, I just throw in another one and i don’t lose any data! Important since I’m amassing a huge amount of photos, video, and music projects.

So I have that guy on the right, the drive next to it is a 360gb drive which I had previously used as my video drive but filled it up in no time. I will be emptying that onto my new one. The one farthest left is another 1tb external drive, which is just about filled with randomness. Old programs and the like. My computer itself has an internal 1tb drive which I use as storage. I also have a 500 gig network storage drive and a 320 gig iomega portable drive bringing my grand total storage space to (keeping track?) just about 8.68 terabytes, or 8,680 gigabytes.

Hopefully this will hold me over for a while!

Anyway, a couple of years ago, Matt and I were talking about recording a Christmas album to release to friends and family as a gift, and I still think it’s a fun idea. We had this pretty awesome version of some song going… but then my hard drive crashed. And now I can’t remember for the life of me what we were doing. So in an effort to recreate whatever we were working on, I started playing some different chords around “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”

Then I realized the progression I was playing was very close to Karma Police by Radiohead, so I tried playing that chord progression on its own with the God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen melody over top. Worked surprisingly well… until the chorus. So maybe I’ll figure it out further, maybe I won’t. But it’s still kinda neat, so I taped it. Here’s Karma Police if you need reference.