Thursday, April 17, 2008

Lament for the independant record stores

In reading a friends post on Myspace, I discovered a film that I must see called "Need that Record!" This is about the demise of the great American independent record store.
We grew-up around a record store in Cerritos called Best records. I didn't work there very long myself, but if I could have ever made a survivable career out of working in a record store, well, I might still be hip!
Best records was much like the store depicted in the movie "High Fidelity" but with more interesting characters. Those days are long gone...long live the independents!!!


Ah! the good ol' days. Guess which loser am !? ....

Beth's Post-Easter Easter Picnic



This past Sunday, Sandy & I went to her friend Beth's 20-something'ed annual after-Easter, Easter Picnic. She has this at the same park every year. Beth also has an amazingly huge Santa Claus collection that take weeks for her to set-up at Christmas time...and all the books she has around the house serves to verify that she is nuts!!!! ;-)

Beth has a great family and circle of friends....so why not put them all in a circle and take a VR shot, right?
Thanks to Stafford...we got this done. Click here to view the VR

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Start saving your money now for my B-day...Christmas...Retirement?



A few things I would like for your viewing pleasure...


The World's Most Extreme Photography Equipment

Posted Tuesday, 8 April 2008 by Lars Hasvoll Bakke in Technology, Photography
There are several categories of camera gear available: there's the sensible, the desirable and then there's the stuff that you'd never even imagined. Here's a selection of equipment that most definitely belongs in the latter category.


http://www.crestock.com/blog/technology/the-worlds-most-extreme-photography-equipment-117.aspx

Monday, April 7, 2008

Thank you, Kevin & Melanie





Last July, Sandy & had enjoyed a fun engagement photo shoot for Kevin & Melanie for a their as-yet unplanned wedding.
They have since settled on a date in August & we are soooo looking forward to this as it will be a fun group in a fun location at the Cafe Hidalgo in Fullerton, Ca.

I was recently checking my web-site stats & discovered their page on weddingannouncer.com with a very kind recollection of the day we shot these images.
If I could hire Melanie or her sister to do our sales & publicity, our business would really take off.
Here is Mel's story in here own words:

"Late this afternoon, Kevin and I had our engagement pictures taken by our friends Sandy and Dave. They far surpassed my expectations in every way. Dave, the more technical one, would make sure the lighting was just right for every new scene. Sandy...Sandy has an eye. She not only had a ton of ideas about where and how she wanted to shoot but she noticed little things and got them corrected to her liking.

I can't even tell you how many pictures they took. Usually I do not enjoy getting my picture taken but tonight was actually fun. Part of that had to do with with Kevin and his silly antics but a lot of it had to do with how comfortable I felt with Sandy and Dave.

Another cool thing is that Dave really wanted to do the shoot at the Orange Circle. I have a fondness for that historic downtown area and thought it was a great idea. Later, we all had dinner at the District Lounge and Dave put the pictures on his laptop and showed us right there. Some of them are great and almost all of them are far better than we've ever had of ourselves. He's putting them on Flickr later this week and I'll show everyone then.

*squee!* I can't wait!"

See more here

Thank you, Melanie

We can't wait.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Real Estate & VR Photography




Since a chance request to photograph the House of Brews, we have been thrown into a whole new realm of photography that I never fully considered doing before, and I really like it.
I photographed a home for a friend of ours as a result of this. These are not fully finished yet, but are looking pretty good so far.
Coincidentally, since this time I have also been introduced to VR photography. This is what you see in virtual real estate photography ads in which you can pan & zoom withing the image & see a whole room and walk through to other rooms. VR can be used for much more exciting things than real estate & we can't wait to show what we have planned in the works.
We will be creating VR for the House of Brews within the month and hopefully be getting the ball rolling on other ideas that I hope will be getting a ton of attention.
...Special thanks to Stafford at 360by180 for getting me hooked on this stuff.