Something Different Maybe.

I’ve been with AT&T for a long, long time. I joke and say that it’s been the best job I’ve ever had, but that’s mostly because between working with my AR partners and with Corporate AT&T, I’ve been here since 2009.

Fast forward to April of 2022. I finally got my dream job. Being able to do photo, video, and communications for the company in an official capacity. I had been doing photo and video and design work for AT&T a long before this, but it was always because my boss’ boss’ boss heard through the grapevine that I could do it and was then approached. But this was for real.

I had just come off of two years doing a special project role during COVID - we had sold off a large portion of our corporate retail stores to third parties, and they were all fresh faced and hadn’t ever seen the inner workings of AT&T to this point.. That’s where I came in. My job was to transform them in a few weeks into an actual AT&T retail store - understanding the ins and outs of what we do every day. I was good at this. Very good. I was given award after award, MVPs and even an InnovatER award for my role in developing a new style of training that went through the entire program.

I got a call from my manager, Keith Traster, a Director of Sales, to stop what I was doing and apply for this new role.

I applied, and all of a sudden I was thrown into a totally new world. I was hired virtually, my team was based in Dallas but in reality were all over the United States. Denver, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle. They were a star-studded line up of high performers and people that were actually shaping what I was - to that point - on the receiving end of every day. I went down to Dallas and the AT&T headquarters building for my first time on that trip. I remember my flight getting in late the night before our first meeting, and I looked across the street from my hotel room at the Discovery District and our headquarters. I thought I was so cool. I get to be part of this.

I’ve been able to do so much and accomplish so many things since that moment. I’ve been to Dallas a few more times over the last year and a half. I’ve gotten to have conversations with people that were under NDA and with executives that I’m fortunate to have been in the room with. I shaped the voice of the President of Broadband Growth and Distribution to a record breaking 1.2M Fiber subscriber growth over the last year. I contributed. I made a difference.

That puts me to now. I’ve been a high performer on my team. I’ve lead initiatives. I’ve been asked by other organizations how to replicate what I’m doing for their teams. But here we are. Earlier this summer, our CEO John Stankey announced his plan for all management staff to Return to Office - citing that culture and communication were key pillars in this.

While I’ll keep my thoughts to myself for now, I’ve now got a letter in front of me saying that I have a “choice.” To either move to Dallas to continue my career, find something local, or ultimately leave the company.

So if in the next few days you see a bunch of videos and updates to this site, take a look. See some of the cool stuff I’ve made. I appreciate you being here. Thank you.

Updating...

A COVID pandemic, a new position at work, and two new locations later it is becoming more and more clear that updating this as a portfolio and working space is going to become very important if I want to develop my career in the way I want it to go.

In the last while, I’ve been asked to do more projects for AT&T and do more design and graphic work in addition to my normal scope. Keeping up with my day to day and how KKP BOUDOIR is trending, I’m going to try to push my graphic and video work into the next level of what I am capable of.

To make that happen, I’ll be taking on more projects, pushing outside of my normal comfortable bubble, and pushing to do work that will be challenging and I will have to learn to do.

I’m excited for the next chapter.

I have noticed a trend,

I am not good at regularly posting to this photo blog. So I’m not going to - that’s fine. This is basically going to be me talking into the darkness. I realize fully that I’m the only one paying attention to anything on here, and that’s absolutely fine. Sometimes I need something slightly more long form than a twitter thread, so this is going to start being just a blog about whatever I’m into. Which is fine with me. It’ll still have photo stuff, because I’m always doing photo stuff - I mean next week we’re heading to Alaska and Denali to explore and see some amazing things. Hopefully I’ve got some interesting things to show when I get back.

Anyway.

A big push for me in the last little while has been improving my health and fitness. So I’m probably going to talk about that a fair bit on this blog. I’m not here for advice, and I’m not here to say that I’m some sort of expert. As someone that used to be fit, and now decidedly isn’t, this is simply going to be the outlet to vent some frustrations and some things I’m trying and learning from. I will probably also talk quite a bit about shoes. Don’t get me started right now.

I’m a numbers person. I love data, analyzing trends, finding small things I can change to make the sum of the bigger picture progress and develop. While the scale seems very stingy with decreasing it’s number, I’m looking for numbers. I’m looking for things that I can track and things I can point to as small successes along my way. Apple Health, the Apple Watch Series 4, and the activities app have been massive data accumulators for me. The biggest (and only, to be fair) complaint I have, is that while using the iPhone and Apple Watch is fine for just checking some numbers and looking at quick things, I’d love to look more into them and dig deeper. All of that, I feel like using my iPad Pro would be fantastic for. I realize that it’s probably a niche market, but it couldn’t possibly be that difficult to bring some of these features to a bigger screen.

I was told that Strava is a good app, that has a robust online presence with a lot of good analysis options and information, but it doesn’t seem to integrate terribly well with Apple’s activities app. I guess that’s the issue here, I want to have some native fitness information to dig into on my iPad. Strava is fine for when I’m actually running, but if I’m swimming (which is apparently something I do now) or working out in the gym it doesn’t really calculate the data as well as the Apple native stuff does on the watch.

If you have good options, please let me know. I also just grabbed the premium version of Nike Fitness Club, so hopefully I have a bit more variety in my workouts.

Anyway, that’s what I’m doing lately. If you read all of that rambling, I’m impressed with your ability to translate my incoherent thoughts into something actually reasonable. .

We've got to talk about Godox.

So I grabbed one of the Godox AD600BM after debating for months. I really wanted to spend a fortune on some new Profoto B1X's but the price tag is just ridiculous - and after reading (and watching) a billion reviews online I decided to try out the Godox line. I was really after some of their speed lights - which I still need to get.

The fact that all of these things work together now with the same trigger is just stupidly easy. I don't have to mess around with random pocket wizards or triggers for this and that or worrying about optical slaves or anything. Not only do they sync without any issue, I can control the output of each of the lights independently from the Godox XProN trigger.

Having the best equipment isn't what makes the photo - but having great equipment means making those fantastic images way easier to achieve consistently. I paired this light with the Godox P90L softbox - and that's probably my only regret of the system. It's easy enough to set up and tear down, but I'd love to have something that pops up as easy as an umbrella rather than showing up 15 minutes early to a shoot JUST to set up that softbox. That's an exaggeration. I'm being dramatic. The softbox is great. Get one. I love it. It produces fantastic soft light reliably and the power of that light makes shooting an entire family session easy.

ALSO that battery life is intense.    

Right. A Review. Tamron’s 24-70 and 70-200.

I’m going to keep this short and not too technical. I’m really not good at committing to this blogging thing. Fine. No more talking about it. Just feel like I need to talk about these Tamron lenses - they’re spectacular. 

With the Nikon kit, I got both of their standard new SP G2 zooms in the 24-70mm and the 70-200mm. Now, having used them for a wedding, a landscape travel session, shooting wildlife, and a bunch of different portrait sessions, I think I have a pretty good feel for them. I know nobody needs to be told how sharp these guys are. They’re razor sharp, at really any focal length in their range. I think the thing I’m most impressed with in the day to day use of them is the incredible stabilization. Hand held shots that normally would have had some shake or motion blur just don’t happen as often. 

I think the biggest challenge of these lenses was the perception of Tamron. Coming from using Canon bodies and lenses for forever, I always thought that Tamron lenses were just cheap lenses that Nikon users had to use because Nikkor lenses were slow to be updated and didn’t offer a whole lot of features. I thought they had to be junk - seriously. I know it’s not about the gear and a good photographer will get a good shot with or without the gear - blah blah blah. The fact of the matter is that nobody complains about good gear. It just makes everything easier and having quality glass means you can rely on it, focus on the other parts of your shots, and know that you’re going to get the sharpness you need without necessarily having the extreme conditions that yield DXO Mark scores. I really thought they wouldn’t be as good as they really are. I’ve been super super impressed. 

Canon’s L line of lenses are incredible - and I think that these Tamrons compare favorably. I don’t really see any need to spend double the money to get Nikon’s in house lenses. I got both the 24-70 and the 70-200 for less than the cost of one of the Nikon branded ones - and I’d argue that these are even better. I’d even say that they should be an alternative to the Canon L lenses. 

If you’re in the market for some standard zooms - I can’t more highly recommend these Tamron lenses. 

Product reviews?

​I took this picture up in Maine at Cape Elizabeth Light. Well, I took most of it there. The sky was actually from here, in Louisville, Kentucky. Check this out.

​The original is a cool image on it’s own, but putting that sky in really makes such a difference! Here’s the original.

But before I get into how to make that happen, here’s a bit of an update.

I’ve got a wedding to shoot this weekend, along with a backlog of editing from Mothers’ Day, and a corporate shoot we did earlier this week that I need to get done by Monday. BUT. I’m super excited, because I just upgraded my kit. I think over the next few weeks of me using it, I’m going to review each of the pieces I got this week. 

In a rather sacrilegious move, I’ve bought a Nikon kit, and have moved that to be my primary shooting equipment from my beloved Canon things I’ve used for years. I love my Canon gear - it’s what I learned on and for video it is definitely king. I was definitely on the Canon side of the Nikon/Canon divide, but now I’m using both. I find myself doing quite a bit more photo lately though, and so for the ease of sharing lenses and making things much easier in post, I’ve bought a Nikon. 

I haven’t gone totally off the wall though, I made some sensible purchases. For the body, rather than going all in on the D850 - I wanted full frame, I wanted good dynamic range and low light performance, but I didn’t need 47.5MP files. I bought the Nikon D750, and I know, it’s a three and a half year old body, but it really is hard to beat for the price tag.

From there, I needed glass. I went with the absolutely superlative Tamron kit of both the 24-70mm f2.8 G2 and the 70-200mm f2.8 G2. They’re amazingly sharp lenses and the fact that I could buy both of those lenses for less than the cost of the un-stabilized Nikon edition of the 24-70mm meant it was a no brainer. On that stabilization, by the way, it’s incredible. I mean the fact that you can hand hold a 1/4” exposure easily with that VR turned on is just unreal. I paired both of these lenses with the super cool Tamron Tap-In console so I can manage focus profiles and really tune the lenses how I like to use them. 

Finally, after about a billion YouTube reviews, on a billion different tripods, I bought the Benro Travel Angel in Carbon Fiber, with the V1E ball head. Seriously it blows away any of the Manfrotto ones I’ve used in the past. The packaging, the presentation, and the kit it came with has really got me excited to go out and use it. 

On the list of things left to get: I need to update my pocket wizards, and I’d really really like to find one of those ProFoto B1’s that I don’t have to destroy what’s left of my bank account for. 

I will probably post more on each of those after I’ve had a chance to use them a bit. Excited to see what I can make them do!!

Special Bourbon!

Since I’ve posted last, I’ve been pretty busy. I joined the Professional Photographers of America, went to Chicago, shot a wedding, some engagement shoots, and some cool landscapes too! There’s one shot though that I thought was especially cool!

This is a bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle, one of the Pappy Van Winkle bourbons. Around here, and around the world, this bourbon is coveted by collectors and bourbon enthusiasts. It’s made at the Buffalo Trace distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, only about forty five minutes’ drive from Louisville. If you’re ever around and in the area, it’s somewhere that you definitely shouldn’t miss - even though they’re not on the Kentucky Distillers Association’s official Kentucky Bourbon Trail. What they do have though, is Pappy Van Winkle, Buffalo Trace, Weller’s, Eagle Rare, Sazerac, and Blanton’s among others to check out on several tours and tastings. 

To get that image though, I composited several different images together that I lit differently to get the effect I really wanted. I wanted to bring out that golden color of the bourbon, but make the label stand out and really isolate it against the black background really dramatically to highlight what an impressive bottle this is. 

So the set up: I used a black piece of foam core on the table, and put a clear piece of glass on top so it would catch the reflections. Behind, I put another piece of black foam core just to clean it up. I used the Nikon D750 with the Nikon 105mm f2.8 macro, put it on a tripod, and only moved the lights between shots so that later in post, everything lined up as close as possible. On the lights, I used two strobes with 36 inch soft boxes. 

Step one: I lit the bottle from the sides to get the silhouette. That also let me mask out the shape of the bottle for the next step which would make it very difficult to isolate the color. 

Step two: I put the light directly behind the bottle so the light would shine through it. To get the color right, I had to fire the strobe directly toward the camera through the bottle. That basically meant the entire background was blown out and completely white so isolating the shape of the bottle in the first step was important.

Step three: I lit the label from directly in front of the bottle probably 15 degrees off of to the right of the camera so that the shadow would gradually fade as we got to the sides of the bottle and the label. That made the rather unsightly bar codes and surgeon general’s warning’s black out look more natural. 

Step four: this is a quick one. I overexposed the last image to bring back the reflection in the glass. I burned it a little to get a nice darker look and still keep the details in there. Because the glass is closer to the lens than the bottle is, I wanted to make sure the label in the reflection was slightly out of focus but keep it recognizable and legible. 

Step five: when I shot step two, the light from the soft box was slightly over the level of the bourbon, so this is the part where I had to remove that glare at the top of the bourbon in the bottle. I also had to go back in this version to clean up some of those spots and imperfections in the glass ... and a few unintended fingerprints. 

I changed the angle a bit next and got lower on the bottle, added a glass of bourbon, and then did that all over again to get the other shot! Anyway - it’s a good exercise to show that even without a proper studio, you can still get the effects you want in detailed product photography. 

Falls of the Ohio

There are some amazing places to photograph in Louisville - and this might just be one of my favorites. Across the river - I realize it's not actually in Louisville - is the Falls of the Ohio State Park. I'm told there are some amazing geological features, as well as some really cool fossils and rock formations and some gorgeous sunsets. 

I went out a few weeks ago with the new Tamron 24-70mm f2.8 Di VC USD G2 which is a bit of a mouthful but one of the sharpest, most amazing lenses I've ever used. I couldn't pick a favorite, so check these out. 

It's been crazy.

Ok, I realize that at some point on any blog I do I get bogged down with actually doing things to actually write about what it is exactly I'm doing. Hopefully, I can get a little more engaged with this again and start consistently posting things. 

I would like to really start looking into prints. I guess I have a pretty good resource when it comes to that in my father - I'll probably just ask him. I've had a few requests recently and I need to actually start looking into doing some of that more. 

That said - if you'd like some prints, please let me know on my contact page. If there's something you'd like to see that I may not have up, I can make that happen too. Check out my instagram for some of the newer images I've gotten. 

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I think next I should talk about something rather photo related. 

Lately, I've been afforded the ability to travel a bit more. I got to go down to Memphis Tennessee, and then all the way up to Portland Maine. What I came away thinking though is that photographically - these iPhone cameras are getting more and more amazing every time I use one. Not only can I shoot in DNG raw on my phone, I can actually then use full-out Lightroom CC on my phone and make what used to take connecting to my computer relatively easy and fun to do. 

... And then I got the iPhone X. The first smartphone to get awarded a 100 on DXO's ratings. Stabilized wide AND stabilized telephoto give amazingly crisp and clean images and that screen is something to behold. I'm going to be taking a lot more pictures on there soon. It's really an amazing piece of technology. Could there possibly be a better time of year to take a camera outside than in a Kentucky autumn.

Here are the first images I've captured on the brand new iPhone X.

View fullsize

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I'm not going to make this a lens review.

But that 24-70mm f2.8L.... If I could drool on like a digital level, it's that. Everyone says it's all about the glass, and to some extent, I knew that to be true. I'm a little obsessive though, so whatever - glass doesn't ever change that much, but on the body side, we get steady releases and updates to spec sheets. That's got to count for something, right?

I got to use Canon's 24-70 2.8L to shoot a recent wedding and I don't know how else to say that it was phenomenal. On the 7D's APSC crop sensor it really operates with an effective focal range of 35-112mm which I found to be a fantastic range for the wedding. It focuses silently, and almost quick enough that I don't realize it's happening with very little hunting except in the most low-light of situations. I realize everyone at this point has fallen asleep because that lens came out almost an eternity ago and has been widely known as one of Canon's sharpest lenses.

Now I understand. Take all of my money, Canon. 

Well, I guess I skipped June

I had been doing so good! A post as often as I could manage to post a good image. 

I guess with June, also came a busy period with work, two engagement sessions, a wedding, and a baby shoot too - all between trips to East Tennessee and Knoxville, and then to Lake Cumberland for some much needed R&R. I've seen some stunning scenery from the top of Mount Roosevelt, to the extra-terrestrial weirdness of a man-made lake and some just beautiful stuff along the way. 

I'll leave you with this. It's not an image from far away, or anywhere exotic. It's right here in Louisville. It's a road like any other. But it pulls you in. It's warm. It makes you want to get out and do something.

The best part of exploring is that so much of what's around you is untouched. People don't seem to stop and smell the roses, much less take a camera out to a place they pass every day.

You should. 

WHOA

Landscapes are fun. I like landscapes. It's mostly the finding a cool spot that will get exactly the shot you don't have in mind. 

To get this shot I walked for about 6 and a half miles at Shakertown, just outside of Harrodsburg Kentucky. After packing about 80lbs of tripod and camera on my back for about three hours, I gave up, finding very little in terms of composition in the harsh midday sunlight. 

I headed to Danville where I had an extremely nutritious lunch of four doughnuts from Burke's Bakery. I decided I needed to get out of the city and head somewhere with a little bit of the green rolling hills and Kentucky flavor for a cool shot as the sun went down. 

Isaac Shelby's estate - just south of Danville should be cool. Closed. Cool. So lets head further south. I ended up in Lincoln County - named for Abraham Lincoln? Nope. Benjamin Lincoln - whoever that is. 

At this point I was annoyed. I'd wasted all afternoon trying to find a great spot to get a cool composition at exactly the angle where the sun would go down and nothing. I headed back towards Lawrenceburg. Got back to Danville and saw a sign for Perryville Battlefield - a Civil War historic site. I've been there before, it's got plenty of hills and a little gravel road takes you all out in the thick of things. 

So as I pull in the sun is hitting the tops of the hills. There's no way that pressed for time I'm going to find something cool enough to be photo worthy. I crest the next hill and it's covered in these yellow flowers. I ran the little Camry up the gravel road, grabbed the tripod and jumped out and got this shot. It's one of my favorites so far. 

I am 100% a plan the shot kind of guy. I try to plan every little detail out - not just in photo and video work, but in life. I'm one of those that doesn't tend to look too close day to day, but I know where I want to be in six months, or in a year's time. I like to set goals. I like to look forward and plan out what I need to do to get where I need to be. 

When I was carrying that bag around Shakertown there was no thought in my mind that my shot would take me to Danville, almost to Somerset, and then happen to be where I was to get the shot I didn't plan for. Sometimes good things happen when you least expect them. Sometimes you just need to be willing to take a chance. 

It's been one of those weeks..

This is for my Grandfather who passed away last night. He was inspiring. Supportive. Caring. He did so much but was so humble. He concerned himself with others at his own expense. He would always always do the right thing. No matter what. He taught me to see beauty in so many things - and he loved his gadgets. He would have been so excited to play with all of the camera toys I've gotten to lately. 

Tell your parents. Tell your grandparents. Tell everyone around you. If you care about them, tell them. Life is so short. 

With photography you're capturing an instant and turning it into forever. You're able to manipulate the light and the focus to make it pretty, but take a second and remind yourself that it wouldn't be anything without you there with the people you're seeing it with. Don't take it for granted. See the colors. Smell the roses. Take it all in. Don't waste the days you've got because you really really don't know how many you've got left. 

I'll miss you Grampa. 

Keeneland with WINTUCKY

Today (yesterday) was pretty cool - I got to spend the day galavanting around at the Keeneland track with the Q12017 top performers from the Lexington area. In May, we'll be doing some cool stuff for Louisville too. Why was I there? Today I got to pull the camera out and go crazy. I had a blast doing it. 

My role for the event was designing and creating the awards, then documenting with photo and video. The awards came out looking good! My WINTUCKY logo stacked next to the AT&T graphic came out looking nice and the frame set it off. I'm excited to get everything else together!

I'll have a video up sometime in the next few days.

Frankfort

So last Friday I ordered a new toy from Amazon. Today thanks to the goodness that is Amazon Prime, I got my Intervalometer. Right now, I'm exporting the files from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and I'll have a nice shiny time-lapse up in just a few minutes. What an intervalometer does is basically act as a remote shutter button but with the added function of adding a timer. Practically, it lets you tell your camera to take a picture every five seconds, or three seconds, or however long you want it to in between. 

In this case, I took about a three and a half hour time lapse of the Kentucky state capitol building, shooting a still image every five seconds. So now I've got minutes to time lapse goodness, right?

Well, by minutes, I mean as long as it takes to export 2,517 still frames from Lightroom. Then import those images as a frame sequence into Adobe Premiere Pro CC, then export all of that goodness out into YouTube friendly 1920 by 1080. I mean, I guess technically I could export them at the native resolution of the frame so 5184 by 3456... which is ehhh a little over 5k? Which is just ridiculous.

So one thing I'd like to say on here is that through doing this stuff - I met the guy behind @7thCause last week. This week, I met Thorney Lieberman. It's super cool to meet these people and I'm super excited about who I'll run into next time. 

About Thorney - the guy literally wrote the book on shooting the Capitol building. He's an architectural photographer from New York by way of West Virginia, and has done some pretty incredible photo work. I got to see one of the prints of his coal miners in person, and to say it was awesome is just not doing it justice. He and his drone (which he's probably going to make me purchase now) is in this vlog post thingy. His show will be up at the Frazier museum sometime pretty soon, so I'll keep you posted when you can go see his work in person. I'm looking forward to it. 

Check out the time-lapse in my newest post on YouTube. Make sure you subscribe there, and here. 

Keep it up

I've got to keep writing in this thing. This is rather work heavy, so if you're not interested in that bit, skip down that section. 

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Yesterday I went downtown for some work stuff. Work stuff ended up being pushed back so I ended up with time on my hands and my camera.

Now to give a little more insight as to why I'm even doing this video stuff - I probably touched on it before, but in my last rounds of interviews for this new position, the most constructive feedback that I got was they wanted more "Jon on camera" types of communication.

So: first person, organic feel, genuine, but pro quality.

The idea is that I'm going to be doing these cool documentary type shoots, but I also want to add some variety and maybe do something a little different. Maybe a vlog style isn't for everyone, but if we're supposed to build trust with an audience, actually let them in, see a different side of how the industry works or whatever... Maybe that sort of connection isn't a bad thing. 

It's a fine line. You've got to distribute some piece of information in a way that feels natural. That invites your audience to connect in a way that traditional news media doesn't get. So how do you do it?

Traditional talking head: Pro - it gets the message out and fast. Looks professional. Con - looks old, stuffy, not modern, also distances yourself from the audience and is a boring static shot that bores your audience to tears. People gain nothing.

It can be effective. Needs to have several angles and awesome B-Roll. Because it's a static shot though and can be generally one take, you're talking a quick grade, maybe some motion graphic overlays, and presto you're done. The most time you'll spend here is setting up the shot, and once you've done it the first time it's rinse and reuse territory. 

Social Media stream of consciousness: Pro - information almost instant. Connects with your viewers on their home turf where they're comfortable viewing. Con - It's tricky in our industry what constitutes "work" and therefore employees need to be clocked in for, and voluntary. You can't on one hand have strict guidelines on how devices are used in store and then ask them to like a Facebook page that's work related and might post things during off - not clocked in - time. We've also got to be careful because what we want to go out immediately (as I've run into in my last major project) goes through legal and they back it down saying only management level employees can get these stats and blah blah blah. The immediacy of social is a double edged sword that can come back and bite you very quickly. 

My pitch was the documentary angle with interviews. I think this bridges the gap. It will allow us to get information in that we want but not necessarily have to be immediate. Production time is heavier, so we'll have to actually sit down and cut this. So why not lets have some cool B-Roll? How about we introduce a main character that's taking you through all of these things for continuity? Obviously that'd have to be me because they're not going to let me hire someone. But lets make this something entertaining that people actually enjoy watching. Production values that are high, but not necessarily high budget, and quality cinematography that people will get the feeling that there is time and effort that goes into these shots and angles.

Me being on camera becomes less of an issue. I'm there to guide you to the story, provide context, and then let the story happen. At the end, I'll come in, wrap up, and try to reinforce the dots that should have been connected through the piece. 

So that's the idea - with this project coming up for Business In Retail, I wanted to get out of the way and really let the companies themselves tell their stories. Explain the difficulties in their day to day operations rather than say "oh, and this is a cellular iPad.. This is what we do with them." I'm not going to put something out there that patronizing. We've hired these people because in my opinion a Retail Sales Consultant's job is to be a problem solver. To take what a customer says and figure out how we can make their lives easier or more secure, more informed, whatever with our products and services. 

The idea for this documentary series isn't to insult the RSC by encouraging here's spoon fed "scenario A requires solution B" type mindsets. It's why I've always been annoyed with role playing sales scenarios. They don't encourage critical thinking and going outside the normal, which for me is the hardest part that people face. 

So lets tell a company's story. Lets let people that do this every day connect dots in different and exciting ways and lets think outside of the box and see what we can really come up with. We've got a lot of brilliant minds that work for this company and sometimes I think we need to embrace that. We aren't robots. None of us do things exactly the same and have the same ideas about how things should be handled. Lets encourage that different thinking. Lets make a difference for a company that very well could make a difference for so many more people. 

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Yesterday when shooting some b-roll I ran into two guys from instagram who I'll throw their links up. You've really got to check them out. We talked cameras for a bit, but they got in my shot I was doing for a time lapse by dangling off the side of a building. 

Go check out @7thcause and @daddybandz on instagram. 

Video with some cool sunset time lapses will be up in the next few days. 

Video

So today I made a YouTube channel and a nice shiny video to go with it.

I included two people on here: Peter McKinnon, and Casey Niestat. Casey you've all probably seen before. He's incredibly talented and just sold his company to CNN for a gazillion dollars. His company, by the way, that he built while vlogging, riding a boosted board, and flying almost constantly. He won GQ's New Media Man of the Year and his videos are incredibly cool. The pacing is awesome and he does a good job of keeping everything within a storyline. 

Peter McKinnon is a newer one, and his YouTube channel is exploding right now. He's a wealth of knowledge in cinematography, photography, and editing all of it. Every time I go watch a video on his channel I feel as though I've learned something new. It's awesome. Go watch them both. 

The videos could be a regular thing. Who knows. During the rounds of interviews last fall some of the feedback I got was that they wanted some "on-camera" of me. It's something I've really not done before, but I'm getting better. This is my way of getting it out there and pushing a little more into being comfortable on camera and figuring out the right pacing, and how I need to work all of it in. It's actually incredible just how much work it is to make something like this on the fly and then button it up in post with a quick turn around. 

I think that's why Casey Niestat is really so cool at what he does. He did a new video EVERY SINGLE DAY for almost two years. Shot, graded, edited, mixed, published and BOOM.

Thanks for watching! If you're not (nobody is.. it's cool) already, go subscribe to me on YouTube. I don't know how any of it works, but they say more subscribers drives more interactions, which blah blah blah. Just go do it. Thanks.

A Work in Progress

Still piecing together what should actually go on here and what is "portfolio worthy." Should be interesting to see what ends up staying and what ends up going. I got my new business cards in today, and they're pretty awesome, so i'll be looking to bring some of that design language onto here.  

Not sure if I'll make a splash screen or just a standard image with the green abstract stuff kinda in the middle, but we'll see what I come up with.

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I'm slowly realizing that because most of my work is for AT&T internally, I don't have much to publish on here that can be seen externally. I'm thinking of starting some design projects simply for portfolio purposes, just generic stuff that can be put online. 

I'm pumped to be working on this.

Something New

I've used Adobe's Portfolio service for about a year now and while it's clean and elegant, only about a month ago now has my site actually directed there. It's been a pain with customer support and is really rigid and not customizable like I'd really prefer. 

While I develop my work to get out to a wider audience, I figure this is as good a time as any to revamp my site as a whole. A few of the photographers I follow highly recommend using square space for developing a site that really is what you want, and shows off your content in a really good way. I think I'll probably start using this quite a bit more, and might even move over my Arsenal pages. From what I can tell, this really does set apart some really cool stuff. 

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Now a note on work - 

For AT&T Mobility, I've been running rather a double job working in a retail location as well as working my way into more of a media role. I've been shooting talking head promotional videos - but here pretty soon I'll be shooting a few documentaries that will probably air both internally and externally. I'll be focusing on business for my next video, we'll be doing an on-site documentary type video on a local business or charity that uses our products and services and really telling their story. The how's and why's they got into what they do, and then allowing our internal viewers to really connect the dots and show how they're a part of what AT&T does in the community as a whole. 

I hope these videos really get people inspired and we'll be doing a lot more. 

Thanks for checking out the new site - this is going to be pretty cool.