Bye Bye September...

The Blackburn Images crew at Blue Devil Invitational marching band competition.

Photo courtesy of Keith Misegades.

I guess I should re-describe my blogging as “monthly at best”… It just seems that writing a blog entry falls off the radar when I get really busy. I’m trying to better about keeping a presence on Facebook, but getting to this blog just doesn’t happen a lot.

Anyway, September was one of those super busy months for me and photography. I assisted with a wedding over Labor Day week-end, did group and individuals for the Independence High School marching band, and photographed 3 marching band competitions. All that amongst working my day job, and getting Jamie thru rotator cuff surgery for a nagging shoulder injury she has put up with for the past few years. Oh yea, and get a print, from my World Wide Photo Walk shoot in historic downtown Franklin, ready to hang with the “court of honor” at the Williamson County Library.

The wedding was at the historic outside of Gallatin, Tennessee. It was fun to shoot with my friend Donna, but I wondered why people schedule afternoon weddings outdoors in early September? It was hot, the wedding party was “glowing” with all the perspiration, and the guests looked fried. The light was very harsh with either blown-out highlights or dark, dark shadows. Luckily there was enough shadow near the historic home’s porch that the wedding party portraits could be taken in full shade. I know Donna was going to spend a ton of time post-processing in order to try and balance out the light in a lot of the shots we did.

The group and individual portraits for Independence High School band were fun as I shot 70+ band members in a little over an hour. We had to pose the group shots outside in the football stadium and once again, a cloudless sky was my enemy as I had to deal with bright highlights and harsh shadows. I tried bracketing in order to see if I could work some photoshop magic and get nice looking light on the faces!

The marching band competitions were a lot of work, but fun. My brother and sister came from California to help with one and my good friend, Keith Misegades helped me out on the third. We’ve posted about 20,000 performance photos on our on-line photo store (www.blackburnimages.com) and I hope that the sales are decent. We got a lot of good comments about our previous work at the competitions and I hope that translates to sales for this year. One thing I was I could convey to some people is that we don’t really have any control over who we photograph during a performance. We don’t avoid photographing some performers for any reason except that I know the type of photos that work well, have instructed the photographers to focus on those shots, and we do our best. Unfortunately, sometimes we just miss capturing images of some of the performers. I want to tell the parents, jokingly of course, to tell their kids to not wear the “don’t photograph me sticker” next time! Ha!

In all my free time, I decided to buy a new software package to run the on-line photo store and it seems to be working well. As a software developer I know the effort it takes to produce good, reliable software and the folks at PicturePros (www.picturepros.com) have hit it out of the park with their photo cart software.

I’m looking forward to October and getting out to do some fall photography. I’m heading to the Smoky Mountains late in the month and I hope that I’ve timed the peak colors correctly.