Author Archive: ken

One of the projects I’ve been working on is an advertisement for my studio that will appear in the Sunday Fort Wayne Journal Gazette’s Living section. I wanted something that will be dramatic and edgy and will get attention. It also had to conform to certain size requirements.

My intern, Megan Tiffany and I started going thru photos to find one that would reproduce well in the paper (low resolution printing) and meet the size constraints. We settled on a photo of Natasha I had taken at an abandoned freight depot.

I had a fun shoot this afternoon with some dancers from the Fort Wayne Ballet. We shot in their dance studio and I opted to shoot very hi key. I used 2 1600ws and 1 800ws mono lights to blow out the background which contained some visual distractions. The dancers were lit with two 800ws monos modified with a gridded octobox and strip box.

Clockwise from top left: Barbara, Elizabeth, Tracy, Lucia

Clockwise from top left: Lucia, Tracy, Elizabeth, Barbara

Thanks to all the dancers and the ballet. Also thanks to Meg and Barbara to helping me out.

Ok, I won’t go into all the details of how I came to find myself shooting a in a barn in Charubusco, Indiana. For that you’ll need to send me an email or call me. It’s not that the explaination is mysterious or scandelous, it’s just that it’s immaterial.

This barn was a treasure of old rusty crap, which held a certain charm in its stages of decay. Along with all the stuff (including a old Ford truck), there was a very dead mummified opossum and a very live but quite sleepy raccoon. I spared you photos of both.

An old pulley

Steph

Steph (again)

Emily

Emily (again)

Steph and Emily being kinda creepy and scary.

As the photos show, it was an interesting and fun afternoon. The weather was perfect, but the day just did not last long enough.

I would like to say thanks to everyone involved in the shoot – Stephanie, Emily, Megan, Barb, Stacy, and Brittany.

Also – If you notice, due to the new layout I can now add larger images to the blog.

Thanks for reading!!!

You know, it never seems that there is enough time to get everything completed that you want to. Anyway, that’s the way I’ve felt lately. I’m glad to have the website re-write done and the blog layout updated. There are still some tweaks to do, but I am pretty pleased with it. Now there’s a million more projects to work on.

Kinda off the subject, this weekend, I helped out my intern, Megan, with her senior design project. She is doing a series of paintings on children’s tales with a modern spin. The paintings are going to be based on photos we took on Sunday.  One of paintings she is doing for the project is a self portrait. So we tried to capture her passion for design and the arts, and also throw a little personality into it.

Megan's Portrait

Yesterday I shot some new photos around the studio. It has been a while since I have updated them so it is about time. Thanks to my intern Megan for assisting. 🙂

The lobby as seen from the main studio area.

Things have certainly been busy around here. After getting my network up and running, I started working on changing the website. If you arrived directly to the blog, you find the rest of my website here – http://www.kenrieves.com.

The newly updated site uses a simpler approach to displaying my portfolio of work. It also makes it easier for me to add and change photos as well as makes it fast for the page to load.
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Also, tomorrow night is a fund raiser for the March of Dimes. For the silent auction I donated a photoshoot and a 16×24 canvas print. Hopefully it’ll generate some bids. In addition I shot some photos for them to use during the event in slide show as well as table decorations.

It should be a fun event for a worthy cause!!

If you noticed from last week’s posting, I’ve been dealing with adopting some new technology. Since I use several computers in the studio, I finally determined that networking them together and sharing a central file server would be a good idea. The server has 4 drives configured in a RAID 5 configuration so that if a drive fails, data is not lost. This should offers the benefits of file sharing along with data protection.

Now that everything is up and running, I wish I would have done this sooner. I can print to a central printer from any computer in the studio without switches or moving cables. One of the huge benefits is that, since I shoot tethered to a notebook computer on my mobile shooting station, I can now route the photos real-time to the central server. This means that image files are immediately available to all the computers as I am shooting. This saves a lot of time in that it eliminates downloading memory cards after a shoot, plus the photos are automatically backed up!

Isn’t technology wonderful!! 🙂

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Also, been working on a re-write of this website. I’m gonna leave the blog the way it is… for now. But the rest of the site, particularly the galleries, is getting a massive make-over that will organize the photos better, make them easier to view, and simplify adding and moving photos around.

Stayed tuned, the new site should be up and running in the next week or so!

Thanks for reading!

It’s amazing how digital photography has changed the business of photography. While the basics photography has not changed as much, it’s all about capturing light regardless of the medium (film or digital), the backroom of the business is drastically different.

Some people suggest that it is less expensive to run a professional photography business because there is not the need to buy film or pay for processing. However the truth of the matter is quite different. In the days of film, a high quality camera and lenses was a long term investment. You bought a camera with the assumption that you would use it for several years.

However, in the digital age, camera’s have a built in obsolescence. This is true due to the medium – the digital sensor. With film, the medium (film itself) is constantly being upgraded. New, better films were being developed that improved image quality. The digital sensor is built into the body of the camera. To take advantage of higher resolution or better quality images, you must upgrade the entire camera. This gets quite expensive when you consider that camera models are usually upgraded in a signicant way about every 18-24 months. Along with upgrading to a new camera, you must also upgrade your computer software so that it can read the new image file formats. Luckily, a good lens will last quite a long time, becauses advances in optics occurs at a much slower pace than computing power.

So, let’s say that you are keeping relatively current on camera models. Due to the increases in resolution, image quality is improving, but also file sizes are increasing proportionally. So now a single photo can easily be 20mb in size and that number is constantly increasing. To give you an idea, that means that a standard CD will only hold less than 40 photos. If the photos are retouched or manipulated the file sizes can quickly swell to 150mb or more. So what do you do with all of these large files? The answer is large amounts of redundant data storage (so your clients images are safe) and RAM, plus powerful computer processors.

Overall, digital photography has certainly changed the business, but it has not really made it cheaper to do business. It has just shifted the costs around so you are constantly chasing technology.

Now to be fair, you can capture some really great photos using older lower resolution digital cameras, but especially on commercial side of the business, clients are expecting you to keep abreast of the newest technologies. Nowadays switching to a new technology is something like converting pdf to word a couple of years ago.

As you might have guessed I have just recently had to upgrade some computer network hardware to handle advances in technology. So, this is the end of my rant. 😉

Ok, one final thing, totally unrelated to any of the above. I love wide angle lens shots. So I naturally had to shot a photo of our dog Abby. She is a red-tick coonhound/lab mix and has the characteristic hound dog nose and ears. Perfect for a wide angle shot. 🙂

OK, for those of you that know me, you realize I get some strange and wacky ideas for photos. For me, sometimes the stranger or wackier the stronger the urge to try to create the image. I guess I like the challenge. So, a couple of months ago I got the idea to create a science fiction style photo with a beautiful heroine doing battle with a monster of some sort. I sketched out a rough idea of what I was looking for and then comtemplated how to create the image.

First off, I knew that the image would have to be a composite of several photos of objects of different scales, all shot specifically for this project. Some of the many challenges were lighting, scale, perspective, depth of field, plus finding the right props. Although I’ve done many composite images in the past, due to the many factors involved, this was by far the most difficult.

Click HERE to see a larger version of this image.

As a photographer I draw my inspiration from a variety of mediums. For instance, one of my favorite magazines is Communication Arts. It is a magazine geared towards advertising professionals and features articles about all aspects of advertising and design.

My strange image this week is actually a work in progress and I’ll likely be making improvements to the image over the next couple of weeks, as time permits. It’s been a fun and challenging project and I look forward to showing you a final, complete image.

I’d also like to thank Steph, Meg, Barb, and everyone that watched the shoot via Ustream!!

Thanks for visiting the blog!

Well, the last few weeks have been pretty busy with a variety of shoots, everything from products to people. Today I shot some photos for the local chapter of the March of Dimes. The March of Dimes does great work in our community, so please check out their website to learn more and how you can help. We shot in the NICU (Neonatel Intensive care Unit) at Dupont Hospital (so a special thanks to the nurses and staff). I want to say thanks to the parents of these extraordinary children for letting us intrude into their lives for a few minutes to take photos.

While spending the afternoon at the NICU was educational it was also a bit heartbreaking, some of the premature babies are so small, that their weight is not measured in pounds, but grams. It’s amazing that with the proper care from these highly trained and dedicated doctors and nurses, these tiny infants have a chance to grow up and flourish.

There are more photos to go thru, but since I’m late on my blog posting, I thought I’d share a few this afternoon. Thanks for visiting my blog this week.