WNC Fall Ball

Whooo!
That's a lot of pictures to go through!
Well, here's the slideshow I promised - just a day or so late. I'm fairly new at putting slideshows together and I haven't had to deal with such a large number of images. So... this slideshow is only a fifth of what's online to view at Pictage. 
I certainly hope you enjoy the pictures. I know I wasn't able to get my card to everyone at the games so, if you know someone who you think would like to see the pics feel free to send them to www.zacthomas.net so they can check it out for themselves.

Alright, here it come - the catch. Shameless self promotion. If you've watched the baseball slideshows and my mini-portfolio show; why not take me up on the Extreme Hookup! It'll be just like the baseball games. I show up, shoot pics, you'll see a slideshow and get a link to Pictage - you like, you buy - you don't like, you don't buy. The only thing at stake is my livelihood and my ego - both of which I support with photography. So I can't afford to be taking crappy pictures! 

crappy |ˈkrapē|
adjective ( -pier , -piest ) slang
of extremely poor quality

Enough of that, here's the slideshow!



FROM SATURDAY EVENING:
People have started to ask about the WNC Fall Ball pics.
I had a great time shooting both Thursday night and again on Saturday morning. My batteries gave up just after the noon games started on saturday but I got a few shots of those. Between the two days I got a little over twelve hundred pictures. I'm sorting through those at the moment and hopefully should have a slideshow here for you by Sunday night.
I've got a some great shots of some great looking kids, I'm anxious to get them up here as well. If you'd like you can send me your email address and I'll let you know as soon as I have the pictures up.
Enjoy the rest of you weekend!

Direction

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who's contacted me to set up a shoot. I'm excited about the number of people who want to do something outside the norm.
With the recent activity I've had a number of very nice people offer to set me up doing pumpkin, Christmas, team, etc type pictures. I'm very grateful for their insights and assistance in helping my business get off the ground.
Since I'm fairly new to the game in a professional sense, I don't have a body of work with which people are familiar and so I thought I'd take a few minutes to try and verbalize my thoughts on where I see zac|thomas going.

I was emailing a friend earlier and I got on a bit of a rant so I just copy and pasted it here.
"I just like taking pictures that people like. I'm not down with doing school pictures or team pics or shots with Santa. I think they're a dime a dozen and it takes about zero photographic ability to pull it off. That's not to say photographers doing those things don't have ability, I just don't think they're tapping too deeply into it in those situations. I know technically it's making money taking pictures but that's not the photography I want to offer - those bases are covered well. If there's not a "wow" associated with a picture, I don't want to offer it. I want people to want the pictures I take. And not in the way that grandma wants every single picture of little Jimmy - even if they're out of focus :) "

I hope that doesn't come across as snotty. I don't want to lose the beauty of what's possible for the mundane of the practical.

I'd never once considered shooting a kids baseball game before 8 days ago but now I've gone out twice and I've got shots from five different games and I'm going out again in the morning. Why? Because it's beautiful - most guys will stop reading at this point. For you ladies...
I love my two boys, I can't even tell you. If ever there was proof of God, they're sleeping in their beds twenty feet from me. How someone like me ended up with my little Men... those three dots are me sitting here for five minutes trying to come up with words. I'm blessed.
And am I the first parent in history? Have there not been billions? And which of those didn't love to watch their son or daughter lost in a moment of joy, of wonder, of determination? Those are the pieces of life that I want to capture.
So is it just kids I like taking pictures of? Yeah, it is. It's the kid you held all night, sweaty, hot, crying, throwing-up, still too young to understand - now 20, standing proud and fearful as his bride walks the aisle towards him. It's the 45 year old kid who's hugging his daughter as he gives her away wondering what happened to his baby girl who was so chubby he couldn't see her knees. It's the 25 year old daughter expecting and chubby once again, not knowing what to expect. It's the 88 year old kid, who takes an hour and a half to make a salad, calls it dinner, and eats it at 3 in the afternoon - he's sitting in the shade watching his children watch their children take care of their children.

This is life. It's worth living. It's worth remembering. So I take pictures.

If someone else wants to take shots with the Easter bunny in the mall, that's cool. God bless 'em.

The hookup

I'm stoked with the responses that I've been getting for the Extreme Hookup.
I've been sitting at home for a few weeks putting together ideas, blogs, slideshows, etc. Trying to find ways to push-start a new business. And now that I've made the Hookup official I had to go out and buy a day planner book to keep up with everything. It's a cheap one - no calculator, leather, grocery lists, or math formulas. Just the basics.
So a few people have mentioned that there wasn't anyplace to comment on the hookup since it's not technically a post. So this is the related post that you can comment to about the Extreme Hookup. I get an email for each comment so if you've got something to mention that could benefit someone else (shoot ideas, locations, whatever) leave it here so others can see it and I'll see it as well.

Rock on.

Switched up

I spent a few hours today messing with the blog.
I needed to figure out how to:
- link to my webpage
- link to my email
- include bigger slideshows
- include text that stays at the top of the blog
- allow anyone to make comments
- fix the time stamp that made it appear I kept normal hours
and it all had to look sweet when it was done - I'm not sure I've arrived there just yet.

I also played with the slideshows for quite a while.
You'll notice I have controls at the bottom now.
- a link to Pictage to order prints - I'll upload those tomorrow
- an email link to send the slideshow to someone
- a link to John Fogerty's website

Well, it's better I think. But it's pushing three in the morning which is late even for me. I'll re-evaluate tomorrow.

Swing batter, batter!

Alrighty! My first slideshow!

I heard some noise the other day coming from down the road at the Enka High School. I figured there was a football game going so I grabbed my camera bag and headed over. Well, as you can tell it wasn't much of a football game but, they did have some kids taking some mean swings at a few baseballs. I rolled in kinda' late so these shots are from a few different games going on at the same time.  I'm not sure what age the girls teams were but the couple I met told me the boys were 5-8 year olds. I thought that was a pretty big spread since some of the guys knew what they were doing and others, well...  not so much  :)

I had a great time watching these kids play! I didn't know anybody and I got a few stares (which tends to happen when a strange guy pulls out a huge camera around children) but here's the pictures - to alleviate any fears :)

I only got one email address while I was there and I tried looking online for someone who might be in charge of the league. So hopefully this link will trickle down to the parents of the kids so they can check it out for themselves. If you're just such a parent - I hope you like the pictures. Let me know what you think. 

Drive-by Dan

Yesterday was another drive-by visit by Dan Johanson. 

Dan and I went to high school together out in California and then we both went off to automotive school in Phoenix. We never hung out in high school but neither of us knew anyone in Phoenix either so we took a trip to the Grand Canyon for a day, shot some pictures, and drove back. I'm in the high tops and calculator watch. 

 That day, back in '93, we learned we both liked photography. Well, it's been fourteen years since then so let's' recap: We both graduated and became mechanics, Dan went back to California and I moved to Utah. I married Jolene in '95 and Dan flew out and was a groomsman in our wedding. I didn't like being a mechanic so I joined the Air Force in '96 and ended up back in California trying to learn Korean. We met up with Dan again there for a few days .

 I switched to the medical field and we moved to Texas and Dan (who didn't want to be a mechanic anymore either) became a missionary and moved to the Philippines. Insert a few years here. Dan was on a trip through the US back in '99 and was able to stop and see us for a day in Texas. Insert a few more years. We moved to Germany and Dan is now ministering in Kyrgyzstan. We almost had the chance to meet up in Germany but Dan's trip fell through. Another year or two. Jolene and I are now in North Carolina and Dan is back in California to be near his father who is wrestling with cancer. However...  Dan's taking a little trip through the US again visiting with people who have been supporting his ministry all these years and so, after seven and a half years, Dan stopped by - for about 18 hours. 

Interestingly, Dan and I have both pursued photography throughout the years and now I'm investing myself in that full time and Dan is also shooting weddings to supplement his income while he's back in the States. www.johansonphoto.com   So, Jolene let us be nerds for a while and talk cameras and we went out in the driveway and took pictures till 2am. Here's a few of the shots we came away with. 

Your a good friend Dan. See you soon. Well... probably not. 

A Lens, baby

Actually it's a lensbaby from lensbabies.com - that's what showed up today in the mail. Finally. I picked it up on eBay at a decent discount but didn't realize that it was coming from Toronto, so it took a couple of weeks for it to show up. Still, pretty cool. It's a lens that you can flex around and get some cool shots like a tilt/shift lens or an old bellows system. Something fun to play with that's cheaper than most digital photo toys. 

Oh, I also wanted to throw out a little tidbit for anyone thinking of building a website or printing business cards. Do the website first. It's monumentally uncool to spend a few days designing a business card and then send off an order for 2500 of them and then find out the web address you listed is already taken. LAME.   zacthomas.com:(     zacthomas.net:)

What happens after you receive your super cool looking business cards is you go to Walmart and buy some adhesive name badges, you make up a page in Word that just repeats ".net" about six thousand times and then you use a hole punch to punch out each ".net" and then spend a number of hours trying to peal the back off this sticker (that's now the size of  a pencil eraser) and then stick the .net over the .com on hundreds of your super cool business cards. 

Just to recap - webpage, then business card. 

And no, the webpage still isn't up. Hopefully by the weekend. 

two posts in a day - it's crazy!

My wife and my Men. 

Jolene, Vahn and Gryphyn.

I started out in photography doing landscapes. I used to look at posters in the big poster stores in the mall of places like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon and I'd like what I saw but I didn't want to buy somebody else's picture. I thought, "Anybody can just go to these places and take a picture, so I'll do it myself". Well, I found out I was just anybody and you don't get the good pictures by just being there and pushing a button. I went through a lot of years, books, film (remember that?), magazines, cameras and cash chasing after those poster images I could have bought for $20. I was after the beauty and the art but I found it in the technical and the details. I began to really enjoy the technical side of photography and knowing what all the buttons did and how the film was made and how lenses worked because it opened so many more opportunities for making good pictures. It's really cool to plan out a good picture instead of getting your prints back from Walgreens and saying, "Oh wow, this one turned out great! I don't know what I did but it looks good."

 It wasn't until my boys were born that I really started to appreciate children's photography (or children at all :) and I've come to really enjoy getting pictures of kids. I notice with kids that most of the time they're very open to having their picture taken or they just don't care either way - and that makes for great pictures - when the subject is just being themselves. 

I've mainly been focused on getting the wedding side of my business put together but, as we head into fall people have started to ask me about doing family pictures for the holidays and I'm certainly open to that as well. I have a great time getting together with people and getting some neat images that really capture who their family is. So hook up with me about that if you interested in getting some cool family stuff this year.

Alright, it's past midnight - I can stop writing now :)

A little more bloggin

Howdy,

It's been over a week so I suppose I should write something - keep in the habit 'ya know. 

I ditched BluDomain - the company I was trying to get a website through. They blew me off for a week after I signed up with no communication or responses to my emails. Pretty odd considering companies usually only blow you off after they get money out of you. Perhaps they should rework their business plan. 

So anyway, I went with big folio which I only found out about after I'd signed up with BluDomain. They appear more up-n-up, cool. They integrate with Pictage better too, so that's a bonus. The downside on the frontside is that they're working some kinks out of the design I signed up for which is brand new, so it'll still be a week before I can start getting my site put together. LAME. 

So I'm playing with my blog, making it übercool.

And  übercool it is. I had to use that again - it took me about ten freakin' minutes to figure out how to put those two dots over the "u". 

And while I was searching around for a cool smily face I came across the Korean fonts. It took me longer than the "u" but I figured out how to spell my name and rank from eleven years ago, when I was training to be a linguist in the Air Force. 멍차리 일병  I washed out and went medical, that's why it took so long☻

Now that's a cool smily face.

Alrighty, movin on. 

I want to try and put some video up here and see how it turns out. I'm gonna be doing that alot so we'll give it a shot now before it's critical. 

How 'bout this one called truck hit. While I was living in Germany I had an idea for a little short movie. I had this stunt/special effect I needed to pull off so I worked that first to make sure it was possible and then I never got around to making the movie. Danny (the stuntman) was fine, he went on to father children. 

Cool, that seems to work. 

I got a little caught up with Photo Booth on my iMac. Maybe I'll go stick one of those on my profile. 

It's 1:30 am - I'm out.

Movin' along

I'm not really sure why I'm writing this since nobody even knows this blog is out here. Getting into the blogging habit I suppose.

I've looked at about six thousand websites in the last few days trying to figure out what I want to incorporate into mine. I tell Jolene it's work - I think she believes me  :)

I decided on a website design and I'm corresponding with that company. Hopefully that'll be online (is that a pun?) pretty soon. 

I spent a number of hours today in Aperture and Photoshop deciding on what to put on my business cards and then actually designing them. In hindsight I can definitely see the benefits of a template but they're so LAME! I'm sure everyone will dig my exhaustively nit picked, clean design. Those have been ordered - I made sure I got about 300 for everyone I know. 

I keep meaning to put up a picture for my profile. It'd be easy right now to just use my iSight camera and snap one but I'm sitting here in an ancestral t-shirt with afro-puff hair and I haven't shaved my legs in 30 years, so I'm gonna have to hunt through some pics and find something decent.  

I've shot a number of weddings with my pretty average gear but, since my clients will be expecting the best when they book me, I went shopping online last night and made sure I'd be bringing the best tools of the trade to their weddings. Pretty much replaced everything I own as it relates to photography. That was kinda fun - getting stuff I could normally never justify in the wee hours without the wife looking over my shoulder. Of course, she was the one who took the call today from the credit card company who was checking to make sure everything was kosher :)   If no one ends up hiring me I'm pretty sure I can get a good price for one of my sons on eBay. So, no worries - I've got a financial plan all worked out. I wonder how that would work for shipping? Overnight... I guess. 

Well, once again it's turned into tomorrow as I sit here in front of the iMac. I hear Vahn waking up - I'm off.