Nikki and Steve were a lot of fun to shoot. We walked around the area to a few different places to take pictures. Did I mention it was hot last weekend. We were out in the morning, so it wasn’t the hottest part of the day, but it got to 90 degrees mid afternoon. They were great sports about being out in the heat.

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the day last weekend.

Looking forward to the wedding in August! See you then.

I was up at the Brainerd International Raceway (BIR) to shoot some pictures for Pat Rounds, the Orange 27 car. It was a lot of fun. It was quite a bit different type of shooing than I was used to. I got to work on my panning again.

I found out which corners where going to be where the action was, and tried to set up there, but I always seemed to be one corner ahead of where something exciting happened. You really need to be paying attention too. At one point in the race, the start officials had to hit the deck when a car came straight at them. And I had been right there earlier in the day!

Panning consistently was key to getting a lot of the shots, but these guys are almost always accelerating or breaking or shifting, so it was hard to stick with them smoothly. I think I got some that worked though.

At the beginning of the day, I saw another photographer with a longer lens, and went to say hi. He was inside the “hot zone” where spectators were not allowed to be, but I had been put on the pit crew for Pat, so I was supposed to be allowed to be there. Anyway, this photographer wouldn’t shake my hand, and wouldn’t give me the time of day, other than to tell me that if I wanted to shoot there I needed a media pass. I told him I had a pit crew pass, and he told me that wasn’t good enough. Fine.

I headed over to the registration tent, and asked for a media pass. They said sure, I should them a business card and $15 dollars. I was now legit. I headed back to show off my pass, but he was gone. Didn’t see him for the rest of the day. It was helpful to have though. I would walk up to the race volunteers, say “I have a media pass, can I shoot from over there?” and I always got to go in front of the fence, but behind the concrete barrier.

Well, I think I will try to get back sometime, just not sure when. I have lots of the pictures up on photoshelter, and I trying to contact some of the racers. Here is a small sampling.

I went to the Brainerd International Raceway to take pictures for Pat Rounds in the orange #27 car that you see above. It was a lot of fun, and I have more to say about what worked, and what didn’t, but for now, I am calling it a night. I just wanted to get a picture up. More later.

The first thing I did was try to get some images of the pitcher. To do this I was standing just off to the side, behind the plate, and shooting through the fence. With the sun shade off, and the lens right against the fence, they come out fine. I don’t see any lines.

Well, those aren’t too exciting really. I need some real action. Well, wouldn’t you know it, a pop up that the catcher and the pitcher ran to get.

I got it, I got it! Boom!

I almost had a great shot there. Two players colliding, the ball in the picture, and the focus on the back of the closest player. Oh well. Have to use a smaller focal length, or get the person looking at me in focus.

Then I moved over to the first base line. There was an opening in the gate that I could peek through. They walked a player to first, so no play at the plate. Then this:

Again, I like the shot. I was waiting for this one. The guy was taking quite a lead, and I was just waiting for the pitcher to throw it to first. But, as luck would have it, the pitcher doesn’t throw to first very well. This is the actual picture I got.

Somehow I don’t think that cutting someone off at the head is a good sports shot. I was surprised how sharp the image looked when I cropped 2/3 of the picture away, but I can’t imagine it prints all that well.

Anyway, that was only about 15min of shooting, and quite fun. I am definitely going to try to get back and shoot some more.

This last weekend, I had some family getting married. Alexa, who I have known for a while and is great with our girls (She watched Hanna Montana with them) and Ben, my wife’s cousin had their big day this past Saturday. My girls were also the flower girls.

I was not the official photographer, and so I tried to stay out of their way, and not poach any of their shots, but I was there… and other family members were expecting me to take pictures. I suppose not that many guests at weddings have a 70-200mm lens on their camera, and were playing with a remote flash during the dance, but hey, it was a good opportunity to practice, and this photographer wasn’t doing candids anyway.

I have more pictures up in an album in facebook too if you are interested.

Darth Vader and Queen Amidala were a top the Mike Endrizzi for School Board float (www.Mike4MPS.org) in the Minneapolis North East parade. It was a bigger deal than I thought and a hoot to shoot.

Mike went with a Star Wars theme obviously, and several characters actors showed up to get into costumes.

It was a really hot evening to be in a costume too. These folks were drenched when they took off their costumes.

I also learned how difficult a skill it is to hold a camera steady while you try to walk backwards at the same pace as the people walking, or riding in the parade.

Not wanting to leave all the fun to his friends, Mike dressed up in a Boba Fett costume, and rode his bike. He and Darth Vader got lots of cheers from the kids. They would run out to give high fives, and take the Mike4MPS bookmarks that the kids on the float were handing out.

I took a few moments to take pictures of kids both in the parade, and on the sides, but that will be a post for another day.

Ok, so here are a few stills of the hundreds that I took for the Richfield Gymnastic Club. The DVD’s are delivered, and now I will try to sell some of the stills to the parents. My current site wasn’t really laid out for this,  but I made a landing page that my marketing materials at the club, and an email that will be sent out to the parents that gave one, will point to here.

So, the way to sales, will be through photoshelter. I have recently started an account with them, and will be using their e-commerce site to offer the images for purchase. You can see them here. There are a lot of images there!

There are images from the rehearsal, the warmups, and the main event. It was a lot of fun to shoot. It was also a big editing job with over 3000 pictures taken.

Anyway, I got them edited down, and hopefully there are some images in there that parents would be willing to purchase. Here are a few more. Check out the photoshelter site for more.

I finally have a video up from the Richfield Gymnastics Club’s Spring Show. For this show I took almost 3000 images from the rehearsal to the warmups to the actual event over two days. Some of them were dismissed right away as I missed focus, or body parts, but I had over 2000 shots that I had to whittle down. These are some of them.

What I was asked to make was a DVD, that the club will sell to the parents of the kids. I created 7 videos from images over the event, about a 100 per video. Seven individual songs to create the videos. I then put them together into a DVD with a menu. The one above is not one that I put on the DVD, it has images from all over the night.

It was a lot of fun to make. I shot a bit of video at the event as well that I mixed in with the stills. It worked out well. The club loved the videos that I showed them.

I just noticed that my client finally got his web site up and running, so I can post the pictures that we took of him. (Web, Facebook) This is Mike Endrizzi, and he is running for the School Board in district 1 of Minneapolis.

Mike is a pretty busy guy, and always on the move. He also has a commitment to his family that evenings would be for family time, so he wasn’t going to give me much time. I wanted to bring out a light, and tone down the backgrounds a bit more, but he wouldn’t give me a chance, so we had to go just with natural light.

I think the top image is the one that turned out best. I was able to position him in partial shade, just at the edge of the light that was wrapping around the building. The other two I had to tweak in post a bit more than I would have liked to get separation of Mike from the background.

I have finally got the images together from Richfield Gymnastics. I will have more images to post later. I am trying to get the slideshows together. I am having a tough time with music. More on that later too.