Cusses/Royal Teeth/Heyrocco
3 bands. 3 shots. 3 exercises in ridiculously low light photography at The Sparrow in North Charleston…
Cusses
Royal Teeth
Heyrocco
You can see more pics here on my Facebook page.
Cusses
Royal Teeth
Heyrocco
Cusses
Royal Teeth
Heyrocco
A Night Out
Last night was the 29th annual National Night Out. It was also the first time the neighborhood I live in participated in it. I was on hand with my camera to capture some of the fun!
Local businesses sponsored giveaways and provided some goodies, such as Rita’s, the local Italian Ice shop!
When the sun went down, a giant inflatable movie screen went up and we watched a series of cartoons to keep the kiddies entertained. Our neighborhood watch did a fantastic job organizing this special event despite the dreary weather, but everyone had a great time. I hope they keep the tradition going! You can check out the rest of the photos on my community’s Facebook page.
Summer 2012 Senior Portrait Package
Announcing my Senior Portrait Package & Facebook Friends Special!
Here’s the deal, if you book this package for the extremely reasonable price of $399, I will knock it down to $379 if you share the ad shown above on your Facebook wall with your friends! You’ll need to make sure you “Like” my page here. Then you can easily click the “share” button on this image here.
Also, if you book this package and then successfully refer a friend who also books any type of session with me, I’ll give you a 2nd 11×14 print!
Here’s the package details:
On Location Shoot With At Least 4 Different Looks
Digital Copies of Final Edits
High Quality Prints:
1x 11×14
2x 8×10
4x 5×7
6x 4×6
Contact me today and book this package and let’s make a special portrait for your senior.
Change For Change Portraits
The 2nd installment of the Change for Change Art Show has come and gone, and organizer Darryl LaPlante did a fantastic job of putting this whole thing together. Don’t let this bad ass look fool you, the man is a giant softie:
I had originally planned on attending and checking out the festivities like a citizen, but after a photo shoot got rescheduled at the last minute I decided to lug out my gear to the Mixon Barn and setup a portrait studio to work the show like a soldier instead. I had about 3 hours to plan the whole thing out, including designing & printing up these fliers to hand out:
Setup under a canopy strategically located between the bar and the porta-potties, this is where I made all of these photographs:
Sooooo, if you are one of my victims subjects, you’re wondering what I’m doing with all of those portraits we made. Well, on Facebook, you can check out the whole set here. Please go ahead and like my page and tag yourself or your friends in the photos. Share the whole album with your friends!
Also, If you really dig the photos, you can purchase prints of them here. Profits from the sale of these portraits will go to Change For Change to benefit Water Missions International. If your significant other got his/her portrait made, you pretty much will get the best Karma points in the world for buying him/her one of these, so get on that!
Here’s a slideshow of them all:
I definitely had a blast interacting with everybody. Some familiar faces, some new ones, and some I didn’t even know that I knew. Some of the Charleston art scenes’ best were on hand and I had a blast talking shop with them all.
Since there were also some talented local photographers in attendance, I was able to hand my Nikon over to one of them. Ryan Belk took over shutterbug duties and snapped this shot of me:
It’s nice being on the other side of the lens every once in a while. A beard like mine demands to be seen!
Thanks again to the organizers – I hope we made some loot for the cause 😉
Change For Change Benefit Art Show Is Back
Just wanted to invite you all to the
What is the Change For Change Benefit Art Show you ask? Well, from their event page:
The Change for Change Art Show is back again for a second year to raise money for Water Missions International! It’s a FREE event where local artists have donated some awesome artwork and photographs to be sold for $50 or less. Artists will also be displaying/selling tons of other pieces as well.
Last year’s event was a blast, you can read my recap of that here.
Go ahead, visit their Facebook event page and get all the gory details. Did I mention that the art show itself is free? Come see some stuff and possibly buy some art for a heck of a lot cheaper than usual to support a great cause.
WHAIES Masquerade Ball Photo Booth
This evening I had the pleasure of sponsoring & running a photo booth for an event at Windsor Hill Arts infused Elementary School for their Masquerade Ball. I tried to do something different this time by bringing a portable photo printer with me to print out photos on the sport for the kids. Boy was that a challenge! I wasn’t prepared for the backlog of photos that needed to be printed as I concentrated on shooting. By the time my wife Amy realized we weren’t going to be able to print everything by the end of the party, we were scrambling for ways to service everyone in a fair and timely manner.
Most of the kids and parents were really cool about the delay, and I’m deeply sorry to those who had to wait. For those who opted to get their photo delivered, your child will get them this week at school. In the mean time, please feel free to browse the gallery here. You can purchase different sized prints or share the photos on Facebook with your friends! Amy & I are proud to be able to raise some extra money for the PTA while providing our community with this service at a minimal cost. We’ll keep trying to find the best way to make it work while keeping the costs for the families low!
Hurricane Irene In SC
I woke up yesterday much like every other day. Late in the morning I got the phone call from my wife, “They’re closing the schools down” she said. It seemed like Irene was going to hit us and destroy life as we knew it (well, that is what they told us if you had read any news websites or looked at one of the many 24 hour news channels on the old fashioned TV).
Low and behold, the rain came down pretty hard for about 5 minutes as I drove through the Charleston area. The wind was blowing enough to make some palm fronds and grass bow down (although they pretty much always do that at the coast – they’re very amiable to swift breezes).
On the porch of one apartment complex in Mount Pleasant, a toad took refuge in a corner. You know it’s bad when the frogs are out.
The destruction was imminent. Just look at what this demolition site at the old Navy Base looked like during the heart of the storm. It was quite frightening, even though it has looked like this for months now – how long does it take to tear down a building anyway?
Not knowing what to do, I hurried home (after I was done working) and evacuated my house. I left the dogs though because someone had to guard my stuff. My wife and I dropped the kids off at a friend’s house and we did what most upstanding citizens would do during a hurricane – we went out for drinks at Taps. We had to forage for food though, so I walked across the parking lot and got some Mexican food from Senor Tequila. While I was walking, I noticed that the sky was on fire, so I took out my iPhone and snapped this:
After quite a few rounds of hoppy dark goodness, my wife dragged me home. The next thing I knew, I was waking up this morning with a slight headache. I quickly ran to the medicine cabinet and downed some Aleve. The dogs wanted to go outside because they tend to do that, and to my horror I saw the destruction Irene left in my yard.
It’s gonna take me minutes to clean up these leaves. Oh, the humanity. The rain even filled my children’s wagon (well, it did earlier this week from one of those late summer storms – I just never got around to dumping it). A leaf even made it’s way in there as well – Mother nature is not one to be fucked with.
Food Truck Rodeo!
We were sitting around eating brunch at IHOP, which lets face it – the food is barely edible, when the discussion of the Food Truck Rodeo came up. Darn it, why didn’t we think of that before we sat down to our egg substitute and Go-Gurt topped excuse for a meal? One of the vendors at the Rodeo was Happy Camper Snoballs, who the kids & I remembered from Kulture Klash 7. We could at the very least stop by the event for some sweet cold goodness as dessert!
We couldn’t believe how many people showed up at Mixson community development in the Park Circle area of North Charleston. Parking was scarce, but the walk was well worth the treats that lay ahead. We hopped on line to grab some fruit infused snowy heaven in a Chinese take-out container.
While on line, we saw local photog Jonathan Stout taking some video of the lines. He’s got a cool art show coming up called “The 3 Amigos Ride Again, For the First Time” with Meta Sapient & Proton Factories at Local Coffee Bar on May 13th.
There was live music, dogs, drinking, and food – a regular party going on! Afterwards we headed over to the North Charleston Arts Festival, which by comparison was like going to a church fair (probably because religious services were letting out in the convention center at the time we arrived). There was some great photography on display by the likes of Kathy Hare and Leah Sparks (as well as a lot of others) at the Arts Festival though. I bet if they had the Food Truck Rodeo at the Convention Center, it would have been an interesting mix of people 😉
As usual, you can check out my Flickr Stream for all of the photos I took today. Many of the photos in this post made heavy usage of the Tonal Contrast filter effect in Nik’s Color Efex Pro because I felt like making gritty high dynamic range style photos today.
Kulture Klash 7 Recap
How do they do it? The organizers of Kulture Klash, the low country’s festival of art, dance, & music have managed to top themselves again. For the 7th installment of bi-annual event, the stand-out attraction for me was the live wakeboard demonstration provided by Chuck and Chalice to coincide with the festival’s water theme.
OK, lets rewind a bit to yesterday afternoon, when the site of the festival was freely opened up to the public to view the art installations.
In addition to art for sale, the show featured artist interpretations of the quintessential Surf Shack:
This photo is all about BadJon, his framed art, and his giant Alien Bees ring flash:
Moving along outside, as the crew put the finishing touches on the wakeboard pools, the kids and dogs took advantage of the opportunity to get as dirty as possible!
What better way to cool off in the hot Charleston sun than with an all-natural snow cone from Rena Larch and her Happy Camper Snoballs?
Artist and the man behind (and in front of) the scenes at Kulture Klash, Scott Debus presented my kids with the coveted Blue Power Ranger, which also squeaks. I know this because I was woken up this morning to the sound of a squeaking Power Ranger!
The free art viewing was the perfect place to check out local art with your family. The kids were able to run around and be kids, people brought their pets, and the atmosphere was very relaxed. We also had a good vantage point to check out some of the Charleston Air Show, which local photo buddy Montwerx was covering from behind his lens.
Now it’s time for the party! I returned to the Klash a little after 8:00PM to an already packed house.
There was live music, dancing, and hula hoop girls all around! So began an adventure in low and no-light photography.
This works to my advantage, because the best way to tell the story of a party like this is to show the motion of it.
Also on hand was the newly founded Girls Rock Charleston, who performed an interpretive dance to live drumming:
The roar of the guitar and beat of the drums reigned in the alleyway next to Storehouse 10 as the band named Cusses took the stage.
As with past Kulture Klash Arts Festivals, there were live works of art being created during the course of the night, including a giant surfboard and this huge canvas:
Over in the next alley was the Urban Wakeboarding demo as well as another stage. The wakeboaders started out on one end of the alley on the back of a pickup truck. On the other end was a winch that pulled them across two pools joined by a rail jump in the middle.
Needless to say, nighttime action sports photography is not the easiest thing to do! That didn’t stop the throngs of cell phone videographers that lined the barrier broadcasting to their Facebook friends the watersports event of the evening. Sometimes I feel we’re all the stars of The Truman Show. So says the guy with the camera…
On stage was the dub sounds of Charleston’s Dubplates:
It was time for me to depart. The amazing thing was that at 11:00PM, a whole new crowd was coming in through the gate to experience a whole other set of performances. It’s an amazing festival that truly is whatever you make of it, and I couldn’t be more impressed by just how much awesomeness is packed into one evening. I’d love to see everybody’s photos and hear their stories about the evening, so please share!
As usual, you can check out the full extensive set of photos I took on my Flickr Stream.
Kayla & Kegan
My kids’ grade school held their annual community fair this past weekend, and my son was very excited to get a chance to hang out with one of his favorite classmates, Kayla!
The kids slid, jumped, and climbed for hours on a beautiful spring day.
I though I’d let my son have a say in this post, so here’s my interview with Kegan about his buddy:
Joe: What do you want to tell everybody about Kayla?
Kegan: She’s very nice!
Joe: What is your favorite memory of Kayla?
Kegan: She came to my birthday party and got her picture taken while playing.
Joe: If you could tell Kayla one thing right now, what would it be?
Kegan: I’m so happy that we are friends!
I’m happy they’re friends also 😉
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