My Eternal Media

Mama’s feet, Papa’s feet, and Baby’s feet. This is a pose that I love in black and white. It’s a little creepy in color just because of the fleshy color of feet, but it’s really cute and the best when you’ve got baby feet to include.

My wife and I were down in Utah for a good friends wedding and we were asked to do some family portraits by another friend. We did tons of shots and different poses but I wanted to share this one with you. And if you’ve ever tried to take pictures with an infant, you know how hard it is to even get them to behave this well.

This is the first shot, just looked kind of weird with her hand in there holding the baby feet in place;

So we took another one. Of course she was flailing her feet all over but it’s what would be behind the feet that I needed to combine them.

So here it is after I took the best of both, got rid of some distracting flip-flops, and converted to black and white.

It’s not really eye catching so i’ll try to keep this a short post, but I’m very excited about my new video transferring capabilities.

For months and months I borrowed and bought old 8mm/Hi8 camcorders to try and get some of my customers’ videos transferred over to DVD. Six of the Seven camcorders I obtained wouldn’t send out any signal from the tape, I think they’d record just fine but there wasn’t any way to VIEW anything. Finding a 8mm/Hi8 camcorder in “working condition” on ebay or craigslist was costing $150 every time and more often than not, the dang things weren’t “working” the way I needed them to. So I set out to find a brand new machine or even an adapter of some sort that would transfer these outdated formats. The trouble is that nobody makes anything of the sort, except SONY.
I have been in close contact with just about everyone over at SONY trying to get my hands on one of their super-limited-production 8mm tape transferring VCR’s. It took me about 5 months and several hundreds of dollars to get my hands on one, but I had over 100 tapes from customers WAITING on this little machine. Now it’s time to start processing these babies. See my Prices and Video sections for details on getting your old 8mm or Hi8 tapes converted to DVD. Because I guarentee that you’ll run into the same dead end after dead end frustration of failures that I did if you don’t have one of these machines.

There’s not much to say about this flier, they liked my other one so much they asked me to use that template to create a Slush Puppie Plus version for them. Here it is.

This is one of my favorites. Last year for Christmas my siblings and I decided that we were going to do a Family Photo of us kids (and spouses/kids) for my parents as a Christmas gift. We all got dressed up and went to the park and took a bunch of different shots of a bunch of different poses. Once we figured we had enough shots we went home a looked through them all. We all decided on this one of us on a bridge, except in each of the shots someone was always blinking or doing something “un-photogenic.” Luckily for me, I noticed that between the two different pictures we could make one good one. So I got to work. Here are the two originals;

As you can see, neither one is quite good enough for a Family Photo that’ll be proudly displayed in my parents home for years and years. So, taking the best of both photo’s, this is the final product!

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on some advertising fliers for a company called Harlan Fairbanks. They’re mainly a Canadian company that deals with “Specialty Food & Beverage Systems” but they’ve got an office in my hometown of Seattle, Washington. They approached me about doing a Harlan flier template that they could re-use for each promotion as it changes. They also wanted a more specific flier that would be geared toward a line of product they sell called Slush Puppie, but they still wanted it to be a template so they could update it accordingly. This sort of job isn’t my typical line of work but I’m surprised to find that many of the techniques are one in the same. They supplied me with all the text they wanted to use and a large collection of stock photos to pull from, but other than that there wasn’t too much that was set in stone. What I did was to take cue’s from some of their existing materials as a base, including the feel of their website, and create a new medium from there. That’s probably enough rambling, here’s the final products - front then back of each.

I got a request from the director of a soccer camp in Europe. He had about 200 pictures and wanted a collage made. Obviously to make a collage with that many pictures would end in a HUGE collage, so we narrowed it down to about 20 pictures and went from there. He was on a really limited budget and only wanted a very basic collage, so here’s what we came up with:

Apparently he was in a huge time crunch because I created this one to demonstrate some blending techniques (the top few pictures have been blended whereas the bottom ones are still mostly hard edges) and he said he wanted me to do the whole thing but was heading out the door with it right then for a ceremony he’d forgotten. I haven’t, as of yet, heard back what the kids thought. I sincerely hope they loved the camp and the memories that will be with them forever!

Anyone who has or has had a young child knows just how hard it is to get them to smile with everyone else for a picture. This last Saturday, my Wife and I had our good friends over for a BBQ. We had a GREAT time playing in the kiddie pool, lounging in the hammocks, listening to oldies, and just enjoying the sunshine. We took a bunch of pictures that night but the one I absolutely love the most is of my daughter Riann and I in the hammock with huge grins on our faces. Now, I had to combine two different pictures so that we’d both be smiling the way I wanted in the picture, but I think it turned out great!

Here are the two originals:

And I had a little fun adding a few extras to the final picture, can you guess what they are?

I got an e-mail from a college student who is making a Flash Video for a presentation and wanted to have a picture of a high-end professional mixing desk separated in such a way that he could animate the slider knobs in the video to suit his needs. This is the original image he provided me with:

For his project he only needed 10 sliders and a small section of plain black above those sliders. So this is what I came up with:

Each of the sliding knobs were sent as separate files so he could place and move them for his video. I’m hoping he sends me a final version of the video, just because I’m curious how the rest of it turned out.

Lately It seems like I’ve been working a lot on Panoramas. I really enjoy doing panoramas but they often take a considerable about of tweaking to get all these separate photos to look like one fluid picture. Here is a screen shot of all the photos lined up side by side .

This is a shot of the next phase in the process, looks a little more like one photo.

Unless you’ve planned ahead and used a tripod to set up your panorama, the tops and bottoms probably aren’t going to line up perfect when you put them all together, so there is often some cropping that must be done. In this case, the client was zoomed in somewhat for the first four pictures and then zoomed out for the last one so there was more than normal that wouldn’t be usable in the last photo.

Quite often when taking pictures toward the sun, the sky doesn’t turn out right even with the best blending techniques. In this photo I decided to use the sky from the right hand picture to bring the photo together.

And here is the finished photo.

All in all, I’d say it’s worth the hassle. By the way, this panorama turned out to be nearly 4 feet wide at 100%!

Ever since my first trip to Hawaii’s beautiful O’ahu island to visit my relatives in the summer of 2001, I’ve been in love with a little beach access walkway near their house. When my Wife and I took our second honeymoon, I made her stop there so I could get a good picture of it. This is it, unmolested.

The pole right in the middle has always bothered me so that was the first to go. Then I decided to remove some of the color distractions and just highlight a few of the elements I loved about the photo. So here it is, what I call “Walk To Paradise”