Hanging out with friends Ariel Zambelich, Ben Fredman and Brandon Kruse @ a Thai temple in Tampa.

About 2 or 3 years ago, after receiving a recommendation from a friend (thanks Ben Fredman!) I joined an email list-serv called A Photo A Day, which was started by Melissa Lyttle, a photojournalist at the St. Petersburg Times. A Photo A Day, or APAD as the members affectionally refer to it as, started a years ago as a small email group and although still relatively small today, has somewhere between 2000-2500 members, I believe. The rules are simple. Each member can post 1 photo per day to the group, sometimes accompanied by a caption, or background info and the rest of the members can share their thoughts about the image, what works, what doesn’t , etc. Although the backgrounds of the majority of the members leans towards the photojournalism side, there are wedding photographers, commercial shooters, and corporate photographers on APAD. Its a great place to get feedback on an image you are unsure about, or just connect with like-minded photographers. I may not be as active in the group as I used to be, or would like to be, however I owe a great deal to APAD for providing me with an amazing venue for feedback, knowledge and more importantly, friends. My formal education is not in photography or the arts, so APAD and other groups/workshops/experiences like APAD have proven to be priceless in terms of education, fraternity, inspiration, etc.

Geekfest is another story. Geekfest is APAD’s annual gathering which has taken place for several years now in different cities across the US; Portland, Austin, Chicago, and most recently in Melissa’s home base of St. Pete. I attended last year and had a great time. There are a lot of different photo workshops, conferences and seminars which have their pluses and minuses, but Geekfest is a great weekend of fun that packs a handful of incredible speakers into relatively small and intimate setting. Compared to some of the more commercialized conferences that might make you shell out closer to $1000 to hear the lectures/speakers, Melissa charges attendees only $100, which is a small price to pay given the cost to run the workshop Im sure.

However, to me, the speakers and lectures are secondary to the commradarie, friendship and good times that I walk away from the weekend having gained. I have met several amazing individuals via APAD so getting to catch up with old friends and meeting new ones is my most valued part of Geekfest and regardless of the amazing speakers, I plan on attending in the future because of this.

A sampling of the amazing books/DVD's from Brad Moore and Kelby Media Group! Thanks guys!

A few weeks prior to leaving for St. Pete I received an email from Brad Moore, who works for Kelby Media Group / NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) under Scott Kelby. He informed me that the NAPP/Kelby headquarters were just a few miles away from St. Pete and extended an invitation to give me a personal tour of the facilities. Thankfully I took Brad up on his offer and after landing in St. Pete prior to Geekfest, Brad and I had an awesome lunch (see iphone photos below) great conversation and I had an awesome time touring the NAPP facilities. What looked rather unassuming on the outside, quickly gave way to a colorful world of everything Adobe on the inside. The workspaces were brightly painted and outfitted with personal touches, huge monitors a vibe that cannot be described. There were no 10 year old Gateways here, it looked like everyone had a decked out machine with lots of huge monitors, Wacom’s printers, and everything else you would need to have fun and be creative…efficiently. Having watched several episodes of Photoshop TV, taking a tour of their lovely studio space was pretty awesome as well. Before ending the tour, Brad took me to the warehouse, where they house all the different books that Kelby Media Group publishes. I was then given amazing books and DVD’s on the house. Special thanks to my new friend Brad Moore and Kelby Media Group for their hospitality and their donation of books and DVD’s to the Geekfest crew as well. If you are a photographer or retoucher or just a casual Adobe/Photoshop user, I’d highly recommend becoming a NAPP user. They are stand-up guys and the benefits are awesome!

The actual events at Geekfest were pretty amazing too. Thursday night we had a huge BBQ and party at Melissa’s house and as people filtered in from their flights, we spent the entire night catching up, reuniting with old friends and meeting new ones. Friday night we had an awesome event at a local coffee shop. Two local spoken word poets joined us and were invited to freestyle as a projected slideshow of images from those present were shown. Some of the amazing prose coming completely unrehearsed from the poets was amazing. They would literally see a photo for the first time and instantly dive into a freestyle piece about the image. Funny, sad, deep, or awkward, the experience was definitely one I look forward to at future Geekfests. It was like combining Def Poetry with a photo critique. Amazing!

Saturday and Sunday were hosted at The St Petersburg Times auditorium and featured an array of awesome speakers from a lighting demo from Atlanta photographer Zach Arias to Todd Heisler, Pulitzer Prize winning photographer from the New York Times. All of the speakers were inspiring and down to earth. Sunday morning my good friends Ariel Zambelich, Ben Fredman and Brandon Kruse met up and spent the better part of the morning hanging out and having fun. We had brunch in Tampa at a lovely Thai temple that featured an amazing outdoor eating experience and great Thai food to boot. After coming back to St Pete, we spent a while at a local pub watching all of the NFL games. It was tough to see my Houston Texans fall to the Cowboys, but at least I was in good company.

Testing out the Leica M9! Me on the left taken by Brad Moore and Brad Moore on the right taken by me!

During the workshop on Saturday and Sunday a Leica representative was on location to loan out various Leicas to the attendees. During the day on Saturday I checked out a Leica M9 digital rangefinder for a few hours. Given the mystical cult status of Leica and the $7000 price tag of the M9′s body alone I honestly expected to be blown away by the camera. To sum it up, I was not. The camera itself is gorgeous, sexy and a Leica, however the focusing is absurd and clumsy (even for a rangefinder), the LCD and menu is less than intuitive and their is considerable noise at even ISO 800. Changing the battery and SD card is not very easy either. The files themselves are nothing to write home about. The color range is impressive, but honestly I will take the 5D mark II over the M9 any day. Either way we had fun testing it out.

Here are a few more iPhone photos from the fun weekend…

Lounging at Hobby Airport prior to my flight to Tampa!

My lovely prime rib sandwich somewhere near Oldsmar, Florida.

Thanks to my homegirl Luanne for putting up Ariel and I!

The beautiful blue sky between St Pete and Tampa!

Scattered shoes at the Thai temple in Tampa (<---sweet alliteration)

Pretty blue sky at the Thai temple in Tampa

Friends Rob Hart and Matt Roth having fun Sunday @ Geekfest.

The beautiful screen saver I made for Luanne before I left!

PS: Sorry if this blog seems rather disjointed. Geekfest took place in late September and I drafted the first portion of this post during the first week of October prior to heading overseas on assignment. Better late than never, right?

As we wrap up the first week of the new year I can’t help but reflect on the past year. There were struggles as there are with anything, but I’d be remised if I didn’t sit back and be thankful for the good things. I met a lot of great people, made a few new clients, learned a ton of great things and made a few decent images along the way.

2009 was the year I was blown away by being accepted as a participant into the Eddie Adams Workshop.
2009 was the year my first major documentary project premiere to a sold out audience of over 250 people.
2009 was the year that documentary project won not 1, but 4 awards including a Gold Remi.
2009 was the year that I owned the copyright for 100% of the images I captured.
2009 was the year that I got to visit 5/7 continents in the span of 4 months.
2009 was a good year.

Here’s to 2010 being even better. The short piece above showcases about 65 of my personal favorites from 2009. They may not have run, they may not have been the best pictures, but they are my special to me in one way or another, so sit back and enjoy.

I have a laundry list of things to do and update and one of the most important things on my “to blog” list is my images from my trip to southern Africa last July. I spent a little over a week exploring various locales from the coastal villages near Cape Town to the border of Mozambique. I worked on an essay on big game hunting near All Days in northern South Africa so stay tuned for a blog about that. In addition to the big game hunting essay I experienced so many species in their natural habitats just wondering about. Sure, we’ve all been to the zoo, but seeing a pride of lion, a huge herd of buffalo and countless elephants free and in the wild is an experience I won’t soon forget. I don’t think I can ever appreciate the zoo after such an experience. I hope that I’ll have another experience in Africa soon as this past trip was absolutely incredible. A gallery of a sampling of my images from the trip is below.

I’ve been pretty busy lately and have much to catch up on the blog world. I still need to update my blog with my stuff from Africa, Brazil and my story completed at the Eddie Adams Workshop last month, but this post is devoted to a rather interesting trip I took last week to Qatar in the Middle East.

One of my local clients, a hip hop dance academy was chosen to assemble a team and represent the US at a rather large event in Doha, Qatar. I have been on several trips with various different teams and dancers over the years, but this one was different. Usually the trips are only with a few different dancers and usually the dancers that go are from the pro team. The pro team consists of a group of professional hip-hop dancers and break dancers that range in age from their late teens to their mid-20′s. The group I accompanied to Qatar was mostly younger kids some of whom had never previously been out of the country, so their curiosity hopefully translates in some of the images.

Our whole trip, albeit a week, seemed to last only a few days. The itinerary was mapped out weeks in advance and a lot of time was spent in waiting to rehearse in a hotel ballroom, riding in a bus to and from venues, at the hotel buffet and on 17-hour plane rides. Towards the end of the journey my photo wanderlust took hold and I started to feel like I was being robbed of really experiencing Qatar, however during one of the event’s the Amir (head honcho) of Qatar met us and graciously paid for our entire group to tour the desert. After the crew’s final performance we traveled a ways into the desert to the Saudi/Qatar border and went crazy on the sand dunes. The light was magnificent, the sand, the sky, the warm water of the Persian Sea. It was lovely. I wish I had more time to spend out there, but for the time we were there, it was paradise.

On the tired ride home I asked one of our new Qatari friends when the last time it rained was, he replied with, “It has not rained in seven years.”

Wow! After another 17 hours in the air, I arrived home to a rainy Houston. Go figure.

I was a little skeptical about spending a week in the Middle East with a bunch of kiddies, but I had a great time and it will be something I won’t soon forget. This trip marked my 4th continent visited in as many months…now if only someone would hire me to shoot in Australia or Antarctica!

PS. Everyone in Qatar was amazing and amazingly hospitable. I like to travel rather inconspicuously and alone when I shoot abroad, however it was quite the opposite during this trip. We were in a large group of about 18 or 19, mostly kids and parents and all of them were wearing “TEAM USA” apparel. Not once did I feel awkward or out of place in Qatar. The one exception to this is at the international airport in Doha. We went through several security checkpoints as usual, however there was one right before we boarded the plane. Long story, short, it was a complete disaster that lasted about 25 minutes in total and ended up with all my gear all over the place and all my gaffer’s tape and AA batteries thrown away!

Last Wednesday I hopped on a plane and was whisked off to Little Rock, Arkansas. I was helping out another local photographer who shoots a lot of energy and gas industry stuff on a shoot in Blytheville, Arkansas, a little sleepy town in the northeastern corner of the state, just south of the Missouri state line. I always enjoy working with other photographers, especially when it’s on a project out of my realm of work. It was certainly an interesting trip, filled with layers of protective clothing, hard hats, ear plugs, and a sweltering 120F steel mill. We shot most of Thursday and a few hours on Friday morning, but the sweating and lack of sleep was enough to make me appreciate the fact that once I step off that plane back in Houston I can sleep in and enjoy my office A/C. I can’t even imagine what it is like to labor through that type of work for decades. I brought my 5D II on the trip, because well, as a photographer you don’t get on a plane without a decent camera, but I didn’t even fire off a frame during the few days I was gone. I did however manage to take some photos with my Iphone’s built in camera using the Camera Bag app. The app emulates several different famous “looks” such as the Lomo look, Holga, and Fisheye. For the photos I made during the trip I used the “Instant” setting which tweaks the image and makes it look like it was shot with a Polaroid camera, even dropping it into a Polaroid template as well. None of the photos have been altered, they are presented as they were taken, straight from the phone. I took a few initial shots for fun and just continued to snap away during the shoot and during the down time as well as at the airport.

At the airport in Little Rock about a handful of people from TSA agents to Southwest Airlines personnel asked us what we were photographing. (I guess the 5 huge Pelican cases gave it away)

Each time we replied that we were shooting for a client in Blytheville and each time the response was the same,

“There ain’t nothing in Blytheville, I bet you guys were bored.”

On the last leg of our travel day, from Dallas/Love Field to Houston/Hobby, I paired them up and put together this little series entitled, “Arkansas Via Iphone”. The little series is my answer to those curious few at the airport. Blytheville isn’t a metropolitan wonderland, but there is beauty everywhere, you just have to look for it…and when you find it, you don’t even need an expensive camera!

**UPDATE**

Wow! The response has been very positive in regards to the ”Arkansas Via Iphone” piece. I never thought that they would get around as much as they have! I just wanted to take a moment to say that the series was featured on SportsShooter as well as on Never Center’s (the software developer who created the Camera Bag iphone app that I used to create the images) homepage and twitter feed. The creator’s of the app called it “a lovely artistic project”.

…or maybe it’s just jet lag. I haven’t blogged in more than a few days, mainly due to the fact that I haven’t really been shooting much save the lot of cheesy family snapshots with my new Canon G9. I had been meaning to buy a smaller Canon compact camera for some time and the G9 was the perfect (partial) Christmas present to myself. While it may not be as compact as the smaller SD series, it has a lot of familiar control features that allow myself not to be alienated every time I pick it up. I have also been meaning to really start to teach myself video capture and production and it seems I’m using the G9 for mostly its video capture capabilities of late. It shoots with excellent video quality for such a tiny camera. I put a short piece together while on a 12 hour plane ride from Houston to Rio de Janeiro earlier today. I am here visiting my parents who live in Brazil. My goal is to be more proficient behind a camera capturing video frames as well as Final Cut, however this piece was put together entirely in iMovie. Rio is a plethora of photo opportunities so expect more frequent updates for the next two weeks.

Here is a very nice comment I received when I originally posted this on my older blog. Received from “moto” on January 20th, 2008:

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“That little film was absolutely and amazingly good. Very impressive. Can’t wait to see more of your work, (play?)”

Finally a post about my experiences at the The Mountain Workshops! Well last month from the 16th-23rd I was in Danville, Kentucky participating in the wonderful Mountain Workshops put on by Western Kentucky University. It was a lot different from my only other workshop experience thus far, SportsShooter Academy. We picked photo story ideas out of a hat on the first day and had the remaining days to shoot (600 frames max) a full story from beginning to end. My photo coach was Rick Loomis from the LA Times. I actually was hoping I would get to work with him since he actually interned at The Gazette several years ago and is now a Pulitzer-prize winning photographer and doing big things. We had writing coaches and had to complete a written story and captions as well as shoot the photos. I had a great time. There was an awesome faculty and staff and an incredible amount of resources available at our disposal. Danville was a wonderful place to be and we topped it off with a great party the Sunday night after we closed that didn’t end till about 7am Monday morning. I made lots of contacts and a few good friends out of it. I’ll admit my story wasn’t really a loaded situation and proved to be a bit difficult, but I did my best and learned a ton. On Friday, halfway through our stay in Danville, Loomis came up to me and said, “Hey, you’re gonna go up in a plane?” They arranged for someone to go up in an airplane and shoot some aerial shots of the area and I was who they chose. I was excited to say the least. I quickly went back to the hotel and put in my contacts and headed to the tiny airstrip in town. A young pilot introduced me to the tiny two-seater Cessna that we would be flying in, a prop job with high wings and no wiggle room. Paired with one of the windiest days of the year, it would prove to be quite a ride. Within about 5 minutes of shooting my right contact flew out of my eye and I was forced to shoot with my left eye. It was definitely an experience I’ll never forget. I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to conquer more of these workshops soon.

This is Lt. Col. Bill Sheaves Jr. (Ret)….phew, I have got to get used to the proper AP captioning of these military ranks, since Colorado Springs is a big military epicenter. 64 years ago the colonel was shot down flying a B-17 Flying Fortress over Paris, France and spent the next two years in an infamous POW camp called The Stalag-17 (B). Last Thursday was a pretty slow news day and after I was finished with an early assignment (eye acupuncture, ew) I decided to meet up with David Bitton, one of the Gazette’s photographers/videographers, to help him with his profile on the retired WWII pilot. I met the two of them at the municipal airport and was instantly intrigued by Colonel Sheaves and his what seemed to be never ending wealth of war stories. My assignment was to take a few stills of the colonel around an original WWII B-17 Bomber that was flown into the airport for a weekend event for the next day’s paper. In the hangar, members of the local media filled out waivers for a media flight on the aircraft. The pilot asked me to fill one out and to my surprise I was allowed to go on the flight despite not having previously registered. The plane itself was a marvel, completely restored and original, save the avionics which had to be replaced to properly fly such a relic in modern skies. If you have ever seen the movie Memphis Belle, then you know exactly the plane in which we flew, except this was the Liberty Belle. While in-flight we had a chance to climb (and sometimes crawl) to each of the gunnery stations including one of the front ball turret stations which boasted a breathtaking 180-degree spherical view. Keep in mind the aircraft is not pressurized so air was flowing through the plane and the top turret was completely off leaving you open to sticking your head out into the cold, brutal wind. One of the rather petite female FOX anchors had a rather rough time of navigating the vessel. For more information on the actual aircraft check out: http://www.libertyfoundation.org. To view the videos that David produced of the colonel and the plane go here http://www2.gazette.com/interactives/.

Below is a comment I received on April 8th, 2008 from Colonel Sheaves’ granddaughter. Because this comment was received before my migration to WordPress I am posting it here.

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“Hi Todd, Thank you so much for your blog. Lt. Col.(ret) Sheaves is my grandfather. I would love to see some of the stills you have of him, if you are willing to share him. Please email me at adam_brie@msn.com. THank you again, Brianne Sheaves-Williams”