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A few weeks ago Daniella and I drove to South Carolina for my baby sister`s wedding. It has been years since I`ve been to a wedding in a non-photographer capacity and I have never had the opportunity to walk the bride down the isle. The whole trip had been amazing – I got to hang out with my family, I watch my little sister get married to a man she really really loves and spend a lot of one-on-one time with my daughter. Daniella has been great throughout the entire trip – she uncomplainingly toughed out a 13-hour car trip, 3 nights in a hotel and a lot of strangers trying to pinch her cheeks. Unfortunately I did not have a chance to take a lot of photos – my hands were full with a 3-year-old and in any event I thought that it would be incredibly rude for me to get into Olga`s and Roger`s wedding photographer`s way. Olga and Roger had a beautiful outdoor ceremony at the Silver Coast Winery in North Carolina; during the ceremony Roger sang Justin Bieber`s “Baby, baby” for Olga – the video of his performance actually made it to justinbieberzone.com. And here are a few of my photos:
Here are some more photos from the entire roadtrip on Flickr. Another update (04/17/2012) – just found out that the video of Roger singing Justin Bieber`s song made it to Celebs website. -
My 3-year-old daughter Daniella loves going to the Carnegie Science Center. One of her favorite things to do there is play with a stop-motion animation machine. She would pull a few toys from a box, put them on the machine`s screen, press a big button, move the toy, press a big button, repeat… This weekend we decided to do a slightly longer animation at home. Daniella did pretty much everything by herself. I did set up the camera for her, but after that, she was pretty much on her own. I gave her a camera remote and complete creative control. This is what she came up with…
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I had a blast photographing Jonathan`s Bar Mitzvah. First of all, the whole family is amazing – loud, loving and fun. And, as an added bonus, I worked with Jenny again.
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I want to warn you from the start – this is a rant. I don’t rant to often, so please bear with me. As it is the case with any business, photography has its good moments and bad moments. If I meet with a client who wants me to slash my prices in half because she found someone of Craigs list who will photograph an entire wedding for $500.00, I get understandably upset. When people come up to me in coffee shops when they see my camera and tell me how they are photographing weddings with their digital Rebels, I get really frustrated. When Panasonic released its ill-fated Lumix camera commercial that featured an exhibition by a photographer who did not know the first thing about photography, I did not know whether to laugh or throw a shoe at my TV. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that there are days when I love photography and I want nothing more than to go out and shoot. And, there are days when I wonder why I ever picked up a camer in the first place. Recently, I came across two opposing (kind of) views on photography. Well, they are not really opposing, more like the whole cup-half-full vs. cup-half empty thing… CNN ran an opinion piece by a Los Angeles-based news photographer Nick Stern where he ranted and raved about the decline of photography as a profession and about how apps such as Instagram and Hipstamatic actually cheat the viewers. A few days after reading Nick Stern’s piece, I came across a blog post by Allen Murabayashi, a co-founder and the CEO of Photoshelter. His blog post was titled “Rant: I Love Photography”; in that post Allen spoke out against all of those who complain about this and that in photography. His message essentially was “Stop moaning and complaining, grab a camera and take some photos”. I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with this rant (I really wanted to make a point when I started writing, but now I forgot what it was). However, if you have any interest in photography, these two opinions are really worth reading and show two sides of the same coin. Oh, and as an added bonus, I found out that Ken Jeong is a medical doctor. Wow!
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Check out this handsome guy! His name is Jonathan and a few days ago Jenny and I photographed his Bar Mitzvah. When we got to the party, Jonathan`s mom asked me if I could shoot a short video clip of their grand entrance. Normally I don`t shoot event video; I`m not a videographer and the only time I actually do anything with video is during engagement sessions or when I am doing work for my corporate clients. However, since the family only wanted a few minutes of video, I put my second camera on a tripod, put an LED panel in the hot shoe, pointed the whole setup at the ballroom`s entrance and hit “RECORD”. Now, my primary job (really, the only job) was to take still photos and that was what I concentrated on. I did not really pay much attention to what was going on with the video rig behind me. When the family`s grand entrance and speeches were over, I grabbed the tripod with the video setup and moved it off the dance floor. As I was dragging it to the corner where my spare gear was stored, I noticed that the camera was off. At a closer look I saw that the battery door was open. I closed the battery door, turned on the camera and hit the “PLAY” button. To my horror I realized that the video that the family wanted so badly was corrupted. I don`t know if somebody accidentally bumped the tripod or opened the battery door with malicious intent, but the result was the same – I had 1.35GB of corrupted video. When I got home I stayed up half the night trying to find remedies for fixing this problem. I found a piece of software for Mac OS called Treasured – it analyzes corrupted video files, sends information about scanned video files to a http://aeroquartet.com (movie repair service) and they (movie repair service) give you a quote for restoring the damaged file. In my case, the quote came out to $119.00. After more searching, I found two open-source scripts (one written in Perl and one in Python) that claimed to be able to fix corrupted MOV files. Neither script worked out of the box; luckily I know both of these programming languages and after about 3 hours of tweaking I was able to get the Perl script to work. Unfortunately, that script only managed to extract the video stream from the corrupted file – the audio was still missing. Finally, I came across two software packages – Grau GbR and Pro Maintenance Tool by Digital Rebellion (actually, Jenny found the later for me). Pro Maintenance Tools managed to recover video, but not audio, and did a much better job of it than my hacked Perl script. Grau GbR managed to recover everything! The only caveat was that the free version of this software only recovered half of the video file. To do a full recovery, I had to buy the full version (good for recovering up to 5 video files) for 29 Euros (approximately $40). They have an unlimited version available for 100 Euros. So, if you ever find yourself in a situation where your camera shuts off while recording, you have a few options: Grau GbR Pro Maintenance Tools iSquint (supposedly works for smaller videos) Python script (did not work for me) Perl script (worked, but did not recover audio) Treasured Good luck:) -
All of you guys who emailed me over the last couple of weeks – thank you so much for your concern. To quote Mark Twain, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”. In all seriousness, I`m still somewhat alive and reasonably well. I had a really good reason for dropping off the face of the earth for two months without any blog or Facebook posts. Several good reasons, actually… Reason 1: On December 28th, 2011, my Irina and I had another beautiful baby girl, Sophia. Now I`m a proud dad of two girls, which means that Irina and I are not getting too much sleep these days. Reason 2: School, school and more freaking school! I am struggling through my last semester of grad school. In hindsight, taking two grad level classes when you have a new baby was a bad idea. Reason 3: Between my 9-5 job at the University of Pittsburgh, school and family, I managed to photograph two Bar/Bat Mitzvahs and three commercial gigs. Which basically means that in the last two months if I weren`t at work, school, studying, playing with my kids or shooting, I was editing. All that aside, I am probably the happiest man on earth right now. My kids are absolutely amazing, and my wife is the most supporting and wonderful woman in the world. On another note, I`m like the proverbial shoemaker without shoes:) These are pretty much all the photos I had time to take.
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Since Noah`s Bar Mitzvah was really close to Irina`s due date, I was worried about getting THE CALL in the middle of Noah`s Bar Mitzvah. My friend and amazing photographer Katia Forero graciously agreed to help me out and second-shoot this event with me in case if I had to take off at a moment`s notice.
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This has been an amazing year for my photography business. I worked with a lot of wonderful clients and photographed a lot of cool events and commercial projects. I am also very thankful to incredible photographers who helped me out this year – Jenny Karlsson, Anita Buzzy and Katia Forero. Here are some photos of us in action… Jenny
Anita 
Katia 
… and me … 
