After aging well on the hard drive, this weekend I found them again as I was searching through my offline archive for autumn themed photographs for a client.  This client wanted some seasonal wall art and these pumpkin photos were the perfect match.

Shortly after photographing this scene, I remember thinking that these might work well as a black and white photographs with colorized emphasis on the pumpkins.  After a number of hours of hand colorizing these photographs, I like the end result.  Below are two 16 x 20 framed samples created for the client, the first colorized and the second full color (click through on each photo to view each photo in my online archive).

Autumn Decorating - Colorized

Autumn Decorating - Color

In the end, my client appreciated the colorized alternative but decided to go with the full color version instead.  She appreciates ability to change the wall decorations in her house based upon the season and we are already discussing a colorful photograph printed on canvas to decorate the same location for the rest of the winter.

All photographs from my Photo Archive are available as open edition prints.  Open edition prints are printed on demand with no limit on the print run.  They are reasonably priced to allow the flexibility of alternating your wall decoration at your whim or to coincide with the seasons.  Visit the Autumn Gallery to view the rest of the photographs (color and colorized) that I recently liberated from my offline archive.

The Kitchen Items in question are Clingoffs.  All Star Trek jokes aside, the Clingoffs are a handy little device to keep papertowels or platic wrap off your food as you reheat it in the Microwave or store it in the refridgerator.  You simple stand the Clingoff in your food (it made with food safe plastic) and then wrap the bowl containing the food and Clingoff.  The Clingoff keeps the wrap off your food.

If you have ever cursed the mess left on your plastic wrap or aluminum foil by your leftovers, get yourself a set of Clingoffs.

The Ruby Hill Winery is an impressive location with two large rooms for events, a massive two story tall entrance area, and a wonderful garden. For this event, Micahel Daigian and his staff needed to create floral designs for each of the dinner tables, the stage, lounge tents set up in the garden, and numerous other spots through out the event. A 24 foot long truck full of flowers, four floral designers and about 4 hours of setup were involved in creating the mood for the event. The team is pictured below in front of the 10 foot tall design that was created for the entrance area (featured are: Steve, Jennifer, Jana, and Michael).

One of the thins that you have to keep in mind when shooting an event setup like this, is to try and capture any corporate logos win the photos that may be on display at the event. This becomes a subtle marketing message for the client. As other potential clients of Michael Daigian’s are viewing this work in the future, they will see the logos of other clients he has doen work for; it becomes a silent referral for him and something that a professional photographer will keep an eye out for.

Below is a small sample of some of the images from this event (click on an image to view a larger version):

A while back I had the privilege of taking some head shots for Vlad Kuznetsov, the CEO of rock and roll startup Musigy. Musigy has an online service that allows band members to play together in real-time over the internet, even if the band members are up to 3000 miles apart. At first, you would think that this isn’t that big of a deal. But when you take into account that even the smallest time delay in the audio/video needs to be compensated for so that you are playing the right note at the right time with the rest of the group, you start to appreciate the complexity of their solution.

Consider the nature of his business, I thought a the CEO deserved a head shot that was professional yet provided a bit more of a cutting edge; not quite full rock and roll, but something close. The head shots in this posting are samples of a few of the more non-conventional images that I took. I especially like this one with the blown out background. I achieve this by positioning myself below the subject (who was standing on a bridge) and shooting the sun directly behind the subject. I really like the glowing effect that was created.

What I loved about these two shots are the fact that I could use the background to augment the flower arrangements. With the top one I was able to place the staircase and mural to really draw you into the floral arrangement. The bottom one was placed in front of two windows that looked down a narrow space between the building, so you get this nice effect of infinity. I wasn’t happy with how the light took away from the flowers, but somethings just fall out of your control…

One of the things I find useful is to look at the different floral books that my wife has for inspiration and ideas for new ways of looking at flowers; this is really needed when doing an on location shoot like this. (In case you’re wonder what type of “floral books”, her most recent purchase was Flowers In Love.)