At the end of the day

Wow, two posts in one day! It was pretty stressful, but it went from bad to good, so there's not much to complain about.

The week we got home from our vacation, I got a call from a frenzied mother of the bride. It was Wednesday night and her daughter was getting married on Saturday. It was seriously the wedding from H-E-L-L. Everything that could go wrong id go wrong, including the seizure the Bride's grandfather had just as they started to cut the cake. I went from a cathedral ceiling church with NO lighting to a conference room in the Hilton Garden Inn with single strands of white Christmas lights lining the room. Not much better. I ran my camera at 1600 and 800 ISO and the shots were still pretty dark. I figured I would just have to work with them in photoshop because the 3200 ISO setting on my camera was just plain crap. And I will find the WTD comic later that pertains to that later as I have a different one to show you tonight. When I got home and looked at the shots there was tons and tons of noise, which I expected, but there were little colored star bursts or diamonds all over the picture. At normal level, you could see maybe one or two. They were all sorts of pretty colors. Some were red, some were white, other were green or blue. But the more you zoomed in, the more you saw! I wanted to die! Apparently, my camera was full, and I mean FULL of "Hot Spots". Yeah, I thought the camera shop was pulling a fast one on me so I had to google it. Apparently, hot spots are an unexplained phenomenon. They know when they start appearing, but not why. And once they appear you either have to purchase a new sensor and have it put in or you have to manually edit out EVERY spot on the camera. They are visible only on high ISO or extremely long exposure shots. They get worse with shots done directly into the sun (which was not a contributing factor as I don't shoot at the sun. I try to stay away from it actually) and over time. So, while my camera is still perfectly fine for studio shots in a nice controlled room or outside on a nice sunny day, it is not a wise decision to take for weddings.

That definitely but a burr in my side as weddings are definitely the biggest form of income. Business has been going good enough that we had long been talking about upgrading my camera sometime this year. Well, this latest development sealed the deal. The tax return came in today and after we got the house payment made and the car registered, we went online to find me a camera.





Well, we didn't really sell the house, and Cory DEFINITELY didn't quit his job, but I did get a pretty sweet new camera body. We plan on investing in a nice new 50 or 60mm lens. Probably just the 50mm. So here is what my new baby will look like...






The Nikon D300s. Nikon's description says it best:

Extraordinary still and HD video imaging performance converge in the fast and agile 12.3-megapixel, DX-format D300S, delivering D-SLR versatility. Delivers stunning high resolution, low-noise images with striking detail and tonal gradation. High speed shooting and fast response—essential to versatile performance in a wide variety of shooting disciplines. Drives breathtakingly rich image fidelity, low noise and fast image processing.

One of the other super cool things is that it operates with the new SB-900 flashes. Not just the one I can attach on top, but it will also synchronize with other flashes as well... so if needed, we can eventually phase out these pesky studio floodlights. Maybe that will be next years toy. Anyway, I am so excited to be getting my new camera in a couple weeks, and hope I can find a super good deal on my new lens. I will be getting a lot of use out of it, and it will be perfect for nice portraits!

Now, my old camera has definitely been nice to me, and I have gotten my moneys worth a few times over, and it is far from being put out of commission. I am so glad we took the path less traveled by these days, and started out buying our equipment outright, and buying what we could afford. I am very happy that again, even when we're upgrading, we are still able to do the same thing. It is sad to see so many people with lives and families in ruin just because they thought the more money they put into something to begin with automatically meant they would succeed. I think we've learned so much more in the end, working within our means, being forced to learn how to take a good picture rather than letting the super smart camera do it for us. *Insert Mental Note... switching to Auto/Auto should be banned for all professional use...End Mental Note*

Anyway, after that wedding, I got really down on myself for the quality of pictures, even though there was nothing I could have done. My camera wasn't capable of handling the poor lighting (which they were forewarned about (but my new camera will, yay!!)) and the hot spots were tedious to say the least, as I had almost 200 edited pictures in the end, and each one had to be fixed. A couple weeks ago I got a call to go out to do a newborn shoot. I am SO glad I did. It went so well! The mom knew exactly what she wanted, and even had a website pulled up with visuals I really got some cute pics in there, and you can view some of those proofs HERE but here are just a couple of my favorite ones. She was so cute, and she was a super good baby! Please enjoy...