I had an e-mail invitation to submit a proposal for shooting head-shots, I thought, for a legal firm here in Pittsburgh. The message was well-written, and indicated that the author understood what a legal firm would need for professional-quality headshots done on-site in their offices. I responded, and the woman writing me wrote back with what she called a “brief” describing their needs in detail. The attachment had an “.ISO” extension, but I ignored it and clicked. Big mistake.
To make a long story short, my machine was taken over by ransomware. I bought another machine (I needed it anyway) and set it up as my new photography computer, and successfully removed the ransomware operating system, reinstalled Windows and all my applications. I lost about a week, however, with all the fiddle, including contacting the FBI and local police. I hope they catch the perpetrator. I’m honest, so I’m surprised when other people aren’t. I’m a little wiser now.
Not too long after getting everything back in order, I came down with a gastro bug and Lyme disease. I lost a week to the bug/Lyme, and I’m still recovering from the latter – thank God! I had a couple of little projects that I had shot but not processed. One was of a conference at which I gave a paper. I got a lot of conventional shots of speakers, audiences, people being introduced, and so forth. Questions from the audience were the most interesting.
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As is often the case, I found the informal after-hours reception to be the best opportunity to capture people animated, in conversation, unself-conscious, and engaging. I used my Lensbaby Spark lens to control the centers of interest, and had a blast. As I sometimes say, I love to shoot, and it shows!
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More recently, I took some shots of a model-train hobbyist, a great guy, who is also my daughter’s father-in-law. Again, I got some conventional shots, plus some fun ones with the Spark lens. (Photographers might notice that the images look a bit like something you would get from a tilt-shift lens.)
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There’s one remaining problem that is eating into my time and energy: GoDaddy, which hosts this website, can’t seem get its servers to talk nicely to my computer (the client in the server-client relationship). I spend most of yesterday on the phone with them, or trying to chat. (Chatting is a pain, as the system drops you, and the brainless AI starts the whole process again; then somebody comes on and you have to go through the whole thing again, because they can’t read the chat up above.)
What’s the practical problem? The navigation menu on the mobile version of this site doesn’t work! It’s incredibly frustrating, as most of us use our phones for searching, etc. Well, we’ll see what happens next Monday, when they are supposed to get back to me in response to my detailed e-mail to them today.
I’m looking forward to shooting in the studio again — I always have ideas. I think it will be high-contrast black and white, with a slightly absurdist or whimsical flavor. We’ll see. I hope you enjoyed some of the images above. If you need someone for your event, for your family portrait, or head shots for yourself, give me a call or a text and we can talk.