Devon + Trent | married!

For my first solo wedding, I shot some friends that have been close to me the whole way through college.

The story: I met Trent first through living in the same dorm. We (along with a couple other guys) were hanging out at a freshman orientation (or equivalent) event, and we met Devon and a few other girls there. We all ditched the slideshow video that was going on and went to a coffee house close by. It was a good time; we played some games, talked, and hung out. At the end of the night, we all exchanged phone numbers in a true “hey let’s be friends!” fashion.

I’m sure our little friend group hung out a few more times after that, but a few weeks later, we heard of a 4 hour phone call into the wee hours of the morning. We then knew something was up. Soon enough Trent and Devon were official. The rest is history.

Over the years we’ve had many more good times. We’ve even dabbled in extreme music videos.

And now… they’re married!  How cool!    Devon was incredibly calm before the ceremony which is unheard of and super cool.  The whole day was a blast to photograph.  This couple is tha bomb. 

Take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads

~ Jon

A day in the life: Grandma’s house; HDR

The other day my brother, Dad, and aunt went to my grandma’s house to help out and do some cleanup work. It was a good time to

Pictures.

(that’s how my attention span works most of the time. )

My dad pouring over paperwork.

My Grandmama. She's an amazing woman. (sorry for making you nervous grandma! )

My dad doing his chain saw thang.

Grandma wanted a tree limb down. My dad's first method was to (try to) use the force to bring it down.

Unfortunately, that didn't work, so he resorted to the lesser method, chainsaw, which promptly got stuck in the tree due to unforeseen evil, gravity.

So, this picture...

[non-related, photo talk] So the above picture is an HDR (high dynamic range).  My first one, actually.  HDR is where you take multiple pictures of different exposures to get a really dark picture, a normal picture, and a really light picture.  Then, on the computer, you combine them to include more detail (since it’s multiple pictures in one).

Many people love HDR pictures.  If you search google, you’ll soon find pictures like these, which tend to be way too overprocessed in my book.  A TON of people (even decent photographers) love the overprocessed, details popping out everywhere look, but I’m not one of them.  It makes me gag sometimes.  I’m not saying I don’t like the pictures that I linked above, but I just don’t like the fake plastic non-real look that the term HDR is affiliated with.  You can make HDR pictures that look realistic, and I like those, but the mobs seem to like the overprocessed HDR pictures more.

Pardon the mini rant.  All in all, HDR is kinda cool.  I might use it once in a while, but it isn’t something you’ll be seeing here very often.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. ~ Oscar Wilde

Peace and love,
~ Jon

Pro-photo-grapher

A professional is someone that makes money for what they do…or something like that.

I would suggest staying away from calling yourself a professional in the photography world, as it could bring on a mindset that you are good enough, not requiring anymore learning or critique.  This is not a fact–but a mere thought into the situation.  I would not be ashamed to call myself a pro if I made my way from taking pictures, I’d just make sure to always learn and be open for improvement–not doing this is a good business model for failure.

So why all the pro talk?  I have officially been accepted as a Harding school photographer for the bison and the yearbook.  I’m definitely not about to start calling myself a pro (I haven’t been impressed by my own photography in a long time), but this is the first time that I’ll ever be paid to take pictures on a consistent basis–so that’s a step.

I’m excited for the challenge.  My goal for the year as a school photographer is to improve my eye for photography, come up with some creative portraiture, improve my lighting style, get thinking more outside the box, tell stories, and generally create some ‘stunna’ photographs.  ;)

This will probably also get me much more involved with campus events.  I already have been fairly involved with campus activities, but in the past I have been very choosy about doing things if they don’t sound awesome.  Now, I’ll probably be going to pretty much everything.  Hurray!

We’ll see where all this takes me…in the Fall.    Tootles,

~ Jon

I’m an Avatar

So I saw Avatar in 3D the two days ago.  It totally blew my mind.  I don’t know if it was the 3d that I liked (that was my first movie to see in 3D), or if it was the movie alone that made the move so great.  The answer I’m leaning toward is that 3D probably helped…a little.

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A little something

So, Owl City came to Harding last week. It was pretty awesome–one of my favorite concerts of all time, comparable only to Creation Fest back in high school.

And I was pretty happy with this last picture…one of my favorites of any pictures that I’ve taken in quite a while.

Picasa 3.5

So…I saw that Google’s Picasa 3 has been updated to version 3.5, and since I have been planning on getting it sometime, just as an alternate picture search tool for all my pictures, I gave it a whurl.  One thing that got me excited was its newly built-in face tagging feature (actually in the program instead of exclusively online), which I haven’t really had any experience with before now.  I’ve been told that apple’s iPhoto did this pretty well, but I had never seen it in action.

I haven’t used the program much yet, but while getting started with the face-tagging feature, I came across this.  I may be easily amused, I know, but I thought it was funny. 

Pumpkin tag

Suspicion

I thought this was funny. That’s all.

Cute and funny

Boring

I thought this was an awesome comic.

Shallow talk

I thought this was pretty good. I’ve been thinking about how I need to make sure I am being real with everyone. Sometimes I’m a perpetrator of just doing the small talk thing without actually caring.