Family Portrait Present and Past

Family portraits, just like family, are important. Over the years they will change. There will be new additions and sadly there will be people that will no longer be there.

My Dad died just over seven years ago. He never got to meet my Niece and of course we never had a family photo including both my Dad and my Niece. I had an idea of creating a photo that included all of us. I searched through photos from when my Dad was alive. I was looking for one that was as recent as possible and that had him in a pose that would be appropriate to incorporate into the family photo.
It was important to visualize and plan out the shot so that it would look like my Dad fit into it naturally. I found a photo in which he was standing. That determined that the rest of the family would be standing. I wanted it to look like he (or his ghost) was with us but was participating from a distance. Behind the fence seemed appropriate.
It was then a matter of compositing my Dad into the shot.

I think it is a great way for families to keep lost loved ones with them.

I Am a Photographer

I have been a photographer since I was fourteen years old. That is getting near thirty years now. I learned with a 35mm film camera. It was a completely manual Praktica camera.

I believe that is the best way to learn photography. It forces you to really understand light and how the camera works. Shooting film is rare now and even I sometimes forget when shooting hundreds of photos that I used to be limited to a role of film (24 or 36 exposures). That limit made you think about a shot before you took it. Understanding the principles of photography helped you picture what that shot would look like when it was developed. Yes, you had to wait until the film was processed and printed (often a week, later as little as one hour). No looking at the back of the camera to see the shot you just took.

Learning the basics is important and it served me well as I went on to focus on film and video production.

Film and video production is a little different than photography. You have other things to deal with like story, actors, audio, editing and of course motion. But it is still a visual medium. It still primarily relies on light passing through a lens and being recorded.

Through all the years I have been doing film and video, I have never stopped shooting photos. I just hadn't been doing it professionally. Recently I decided it was time to start shooting professionally. I have known a few really good and successful photographers that became photographers long after I was shooting. I thought to myself, why am I not also doing this. So now I am.

In this blog I intend to share some of what I have shot and will shoot and share how I shot it. I also welcome any questions on either what I shoot or photography in general. So please comment and submit questions about photography that you would like answered.