Day 27 (Tue., Sept. 27)

How do you shoot a nice portrait? Well, lately I have been taught a few things about lighting from the professionals. I got a few tips on the technical part of it. But how do you make your subject feel comfortable w/ the camera?

It is hard to shoot people and portraits because everyone puts on a "face" when a camera is pointed in their direction. Last year in Dallas I came up w/ a trick to make people relax. Whenever I see someone stiff in front of the camera, I tell them to relax. I have them tell me a joke or something odd. When that doesn't work I ask them to take out their tongue. It never fails! People always give great smiles and natural faces seconds after they stick out their tongues. It's some kind of relief to do so. It's been helpful in my portrait photography.

See? It helps out a lot.

There was some down time at the office today. So, I did something that I learned from Todd Bigelow, my professor at CSUN. I typed my name onto search engines to see if anyone is using my photos w/o permission. If you are one of those people that takes photos w/o permission, beware! They are all under copyright protection.

In doing the search, I found out something really cool. A photo that I shot last week in the Florida Keys during my Rita aftermath trip has been floating through web sites all over the country. Wooohooo!!!

My photo has been seen by people all over the country, maybe all over the world, as they visit these legit newspaper web sites. I was happy to know that millions of people have seen my photo and my name next to it. Here are the links to the web sites at newspapers and their respective cities:

New York's Newsday

Chicago Tribune

Baltimore Sun

Orlando Sentinel

Pennsylvania

and, of course: the Sun-Sentinel

Wow!!!! That's a great feeling. Seeing all these web sites have my photo as the lead photo of their Rita coverage gallery makes me proud. If you picked up any of these newspapers in the last week, there might be a chance that the photo ran in their print edition. How cool is that? I guess getting in trouble last week was worth a little something.

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