On to Brighter Avenues

I see the headlines flashing across the top of my screen here saying, "38 Bodies Recovered After Vietnam Typhoon....Senate Confirms Roberts As Chief Justice...Danish Santa Paid for Reindeer's Death (?)...At Least 60 Dead in Iraq Car Bombings...Five U.S. Soldiers Killed by Roadside Bomb...Static X guitarist guilty of minor sex..." (All of these stories and more can be found on www.earthlink.net) and I feel ridiculous about having personal issues. Nothing like a little news to make you feel like a microbeing in a macrosystem. It's difficult to think that you're at all out of whack when this world is so depraved. Yet I suppose it's all relative.

Like my title says, on to brighter avenues. It's a good day. I was working on some wedding photos I took last month (yes, I know, they're taking me forever to complete) when I heard on the radio that my tattoo artist/friend's fire performing group is doing a show tonight in Kansas City. I've been wanting to see Scary Carrie spin fire for a long time now, and she and I have talked about my photographing them sometime, so I'm wondering if I should try to catch them tonight. Granted, I am still working on the wedding photos, but I don't see why a night out would hurt.
The wedding photos. Let's get to that. The bride: Fair-skinned, natural blonde, blue eyes that are sensitive to flash (read: red-eye in every picture); the groom: medium/dark complected black guy, wore glasses during ceremony and group pictures (read: flash glare in every picture). Groom's family ran late for the wedding, grooms' father was best man, neice was flower girl (read: the wedding had to be held until groom's family arrived). Wedding indoors, in a room that was windows on 3 sides (read: hell of a time with the flash once the sun went down). Groom's family: medium/dark complected; Bride's dress: beaded satin, eggshell white; bridesmaids' dresses: yellow (read: I'm having a really shitty time adjusting the contrast and brightness of each and every photo so that you can see peoples' faces and not burn out the dresses). After cutting down the initial 600-something pictures to just over 500, I'm coming to the conclusion that I need to raise my prices for weddings. Perhaps charging 1500$ or so (photos not included, of course) will deter anyone else from booking me for their lovely matrimonial events. Aware that that's not a nice thing to say (or a very business-like attitude, for that matter), let me say that my session fee for families, kids, and other casual affairs is only $60, which includes my travelling to your location. So there.


These are a couple of my favorite portraits I've done here recently. If they appear crappy when you're viewing, it's b/c I had to reduce the images so much to upload them (dial-up, remember?).














These kinds of photos I have a good time with.
Less stress, less like work.

In any case, it's a hum-drum day and I'm really just taking a break from finishing the wedding pictures. I did, however, want to say that the final count on the ratlings was 14; 5 have been harvested more for Sabine's sake than anything--she doesn't even have 14 nipples, so I can't imagine how haggard she would be after nursing 14 babies for 4-5 weeks. The remaining 9 are up and walking around, clumsily, but don't have their eyes completely open yet. I'll post some pictures of them soon.
Till then....