WAKE UP CALL & portraits

I haven't updated this blog for almost 3 months, shortly before I left Alabama and move to Michigan. That's a lot of time. Probably I wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't had a phone interview with a photo editor yesterday in which he told me that, when people apply for jobs, he's more interested in looking at their blogs than their portfolios...

So, I thought, where to start? I've shot a lot of stuff over the past 3 months. Come to think of it, a big deal of our daily work is portraits, and yet I hardly post portraits here. So, I'm going to throw a few of them that I've taken since I moved to Bay City.

Portrait of a biking/hiking trail promoter. I had never taken any in-motion portrait before. The idea came up while driving to the state park where the trail is. I took it with a very slow shutter speed, panning and flash (-1 stop).


I had been taking portraits of volleyball teams for the season previews and got sick of the usual poses with the ball or behind the net and all that kind of stuff. So, this time I decided to do something different. I pictured the team in my mind as an all-girl rock band and my photo was their album cover, and this is what I got. It may not look as a "volleyball portrait," but the girls were very excited about it.


Figure-of-eight auto racing champ


Faithful voter: Charles Hamm's American flag has only 48 stars. "This is the flag under which I served," he says. The Monitor Towship resident has voted in every major election since World War II, saying it's his duty as an American.
The paper published the horizontal picture. I like the old look of the vertical one. My idea was to make it look a bit like a "World War II" picture shooting it with a very shallow depth of field and then taking the color saturation down.



James Murray and his son, Aevrik, were both born on the same day at the same time: June 20 at 2:33 a.m. James, in 1985 and Aevrik, in 2008.


This 16-year-old girl is a weight lifting champ. I asked her to give me a mean look, but I don't think this is mean enough; she still looks very lovely for a weight lifter...