Two weeks ago our wonderful incredible friends Megan and Robert had a beautful little baby girl and we got to meet her this past weekend. As you may have guessed I took a photo...or two. We also went to my brother's baby shower, he and his wife are due later this summer. It's pretty incredible to meet a little person like this, or think about my brothers son who we'll get to meet soon, and know that I will be taking pictures of these people for a very long time. May be that sounds like a silly way to think about it, but that's what it means for me to be a photographer. I can't really separate that part of me from the rest of my life, they're one in the same. It means I'll take their pictures the first time we meet. And it means I'll be there to see them toddling around in diapers, maybe when they're riding their first bike. I might take their senior portraits, get a photo of them at college graduation, maybe even shoot their weddings. I might take photos of each of their first children. Pretty crazy.

I love being a photographer, but I struggle with the business end of it. I don't like the invoices, and the e-mails, and the spreadsheets. Taxes don't necessarily come naturally to me. And really, I could take or leave some of the more mundane marketing photographs that I take. But all those other things pay the bills. They keep lenses in my bag and a camera on the table. And for that I'm grateful. They make it possible for me to be a photographer, and be there with a camera for moments like this. So, they're worth it.

Another little rough cut of footage shot for the nature film. Again, we're still right at the beginning here, but I'm getting more and more excited about this project. Pretty fun. And of course, Marvin had to take a crack at it too. Turns out he's not so great at action footage. But I still see the possibility for some other interesting film snippets with him.

I've been in a big debate with myself about whether I'm ready to announce this or not, but at this point I'm too excited to keep it to myself. So here's a quick sneak peek at a scene from the new nature film centered around the Souix River currently in production at Hired Lens Photography. This is just a rough cut of some recent footage that will be part of one scene. But don't expect to see a final cut any time soon. If this project is a marathon, we're still not even to the first mile marker. There's hours of footage still to be shot and logged, narration to write and record, and, of course, the most tedious bit of all: the editing. Right now, I'm tentatively looking at Spring 2013 for an actual release of the full film, but that could (and probably will) get pushed back even farther. I'm just trying to be honest with myself, these projects take some serious time. Not to mention, I still need to get footage from three more seasons. I'm also looking for a few more sponsors. That's part of why I'm sharing a little preview right now. I have a couple partners/sponsors on this project already, but I'd love to get a couple more. Any one interested? Drop me a line.

 Just a couple of my favorites from a photo shoot I had a couple days ago with little Abigail and her big brother "Batman." This is hands-down the happiest baby I have ever seen. She did nothing, but smile and laugh the whole time. Even when she started getting cold laying in the lawn, she just furrowed her brow a little bit. She never cried, never whined. I wish more of the adults I work with were like that. And look at those eyes. For anyone questioning that blue, these are not touched up. That's true, straight from the camera color.

And where would a little sister be without a big brother, always at the ready to defend her with a stick.

Oh yeah, and Marvin showed up too, just to take a quick crack at baby photos. Not too shabby for his first try. Way to go Marvin.

The good people at Sun Printing in Wausau finished up the final editing on this stop-motion video we started working on together last month. This started as more than 3,000 still frames and got pieced together into this little film. I shot most of the stills and put them together into raw footage and then the creative department at Sun did the heavy lifting of trimming those clips into a great little story. I love it. Well done, team. Well done.

As Hired Lens Photography has grown and expanded into new markets during the first part of 2012, we've found the need to bring on more staff. I'm proud to announce the addition of Tallulah Tarkington to our creative department. Though she brings limited experience to the job, she seems eager to learn. As a first step, I need her to stop trying to piddle on the camera bag, but once that's ironed out, I think we should be good to go. A special thanks to Animal Allies in Duluth, MN for helping us find our new helper.

Here's a little sampling of the first couple film clips out of the new camera, the Canon 5D MkII. To be honest, I've been pretty hesitant to start working in video. It's a whole different animal. Different software, different files, different problems. And frankly, I still have a lot of things I want to try with still photography. But after playing with this feature on the new body with some really good lenses in front of it. I'm starting to see the potential to do some really cool things. No solid plans yet, just inklings of ideas. But watch for more of this stuff coming up soon.

Light matters in photography. Simply put, photography is light. Okay, maybe that's a little uppity sounding, but it's at least a recording of light. Light bouncing off of an object and entering the lens to be recorded in a chemical reaction on film or as a shit-ton of ones and zeros on a memory card. Right, right. You get that. I know. But good photography is about more than just the presence of light, it's also about the quality of light. Light has shape and direction and color. And with out boring the life out of you let me just say that they make a difference. A big difference. So at a certain point good photography is less about cameras and lenses and tripods, and more about learning to control light; making it do what you want.

Recently, my Dad asked me to shoot a photo of coatrack and bench that he built for us. So, first I cleaned up all the shoes and hat and gloves and other crap that's usually in our front hall, and then set about lighting it. I've been meaning to write about this process for a while, but I never seem to save the test shots that I take while setting up a shoot. Why? Because they're bad. And they should be, I use them to see what needs to change and then delete them. But this time I keep my grubby little fingers off the trash button so I could show you lovely people how I build a lighting setup.

So first is a shot of the room with no extra lighting, just an exposure with the ambient light in the room.

Blah. Flat boring light, very two dimensional and it's a little hard to tell what we're looking at. There's no definition in the coat on the rack or the boots on the floor, and the doorway into the other room is completely blacked out.

So next I add a light in the room for "fill." This brings the overall light level in the room up and fills in some of those shadows. Still not great, but better. Right?

Next I add a "key" or main light. This light, positioned outside the window in the front door, gives shape and depth and raises the light level in portions of the image. It also gives the cool shadows on the wall imitating real sunlight streming into the room.

This light gives the photo interest. This photo was a test with out the fill light to see how bright the highlights would be on the wall and how dark the shadows are with out the fill. Kind of an interesting photo, but a little sinister. More importantly we can't see the the coatrack and bench very clearly and they after all are what we're photographing. If this was an art project I might prefer this one and work with it a little more to get the exact look I wanted, but this, people, is product photography. So we add the fill light back in, make a few little adjustments to the angles of the lights and BAM. Done-zo. Dad gets a photo to show off his hand work and no one assumes that I live in a cave. Thanks, additive lighting process!

**Okay, full disclosure the final image is also adjusted for lens distortion (notice how the bench and coatrack are alined with the top and bottom of the frame unlike the other images where one or the other is really crooked, sneaky huh?), which makes a difference in the final image, but I wasn't going to bother doing that with the test shots. They're just frickin' test shots, people. Either way you see what a difference the right kind of lighting can make. Pretty cool.