I've been learning guitar slide for a whole day, so it was time to record a track.
While the leaf colors of West Virginia have already shifted to their deeper, muted palates, the warmer climate of Richmond, VA is just now exploding with electric yellows and reds.
Yesterday I joined 62,000 other people at Milan Puskar stadium to watch WVU get revenge on TCU. And boy, did they ever. It took one minute and one second of the game for WVU to pull ahead by 7, and they never stopped. Final score: 34-10.
It's not really practical to get action photos from all the way up in the stands, so I took a couple that I hoped would convey the feeling of being there. Even my wide-angle lens can't fit everything in, but it feels kind of like this:
We did have a couple of celebrity appearances...
Most of the events that I attend with large numbers of people aren't arranged so you can see them all at once, and it's kind of staggering to see what 62,000 people looks like. I zoomed in to decontextualize just a couple of sections of the stands, trying to give an idea of what the sea of humanity feels like:
Had the pleasure of editing this wedding video for Sensational Images. A beautiful affair with some marvelous music and dancing. Thought I'd share 3 minutes of the joy.
While in Pittsburgh this past weekend, I got to see the beautiful gothic church where the final scene of Kevin Smith's Dogma was filmed. It is totally abandoned.
Due to extenuating circumstances, I did not feel comfortable letting myself in, but I heartell the inside is a soaring graffiti palace. Maybe I'll make a special trip to document what it has to offer before the building is bought and torn down. It's goddamn shame something this beautiful is going to waste. No pun intended.
If nothing else, I can always remember it fondly as my favorite moment in Ben Affleck's acting career: I got to watch his head explode.
(Nah, Good Will Hunting was my jam.)
There are a few things I want to share along with these sample images from yesterday's wedding.
1) This Lens!
It caught the eye of the Sensational Images videographer working with me at yesterday's wedding, giving me a chance to tell her what I'm about to tell you. This is a Nikkor 50mm portrait lens that was given to me by one of my best friends. One of the reasons I first chose Nikon over Canon was that their cameras have used the same lens mount since before digital cameras were invented. That means I can take an old 35mm lens like this that lets in TONS of light (it has a max aperture of f/1.4) and pop it on my modern DSLR. Because there are no digital components for the camera to communicate with, it requires total manual control, but this is an excellent way to learn. I've always loved the images this thing produces, and thought you might too, so almost all of the samples I'll show below were taken with this lens.
2) The Inanimate
Weddings are about human relationships, of course, so most of the images that wedding photographers take are of people. But I'm a big fan of capturing the inanimate scenes in which those relationships play out during the evening. When clients are looking back over their photos, these help bring them back to the physical space, the lighting, the ambiance of the night. For this reason, many of the sample photos I'll show will also be of inanimate objects and scenes.
3) The Photos
I've still got plenty of wedding photos and videos to edit, so I sat down early this morning to knock out this beautiful event I shot yesterday for Sensational Images. Here are a few quick samples from before the reception!
