Dancing in the Light of Life

I have been inspired by Chase Jarvis's "giving back" motto. Its something many people over look, but in the past two weeks I have been the center of people showing how big their hearts are. In a fairly desperate time, friends have shown that "giving back" spirit, and now is my chance to do a little of it myself.

I dont have much but two years ago a good friend of mine gave me my first DSLR, he knew how much I would appreciate it, and I did. Increadibly. It was the stepping stone to where I am today. And although he knows how thankful I am, I dont think he will ever know to the extent that I truly am.

So I have sitting here a well used.. and a well loved Canon 300d, complete with 18-55, manuals, battery, cables ect. I would like it to go to a good home, one that will take care of it, and appreciate it as much as it has been here. It does not have Auto Focus anymore, so whoever is the new owner will have the fantastic challenge (one that I took on with a passion) of shooting with Manual focus. So let patience be your virtue.

So.. do you know someone that will love the oprtunity to break into the DSLR world and perhanps cant afford it, or someone with a passion for photography that would love the opportunity?

Leave a comment below and i'll have a think about who I think could most use this opportunity. Cause im sure there are a few out there!

and heres a link to what inspired me, hes so cool...

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2009/11/thanks-and-giving.html

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Friday, November 27, 2009 1 comments  

Labels: camera, canon 300d, dancing light photography, giving back, life with auto focus, Portraits, wedding photographer

A while back I had the privileged of photographing a little boy that has been through the wars. When I photographed him, he had just been released from hospital after a 4 week stay following a collapsed lung! Despite the families trying times, they all were in good spirits, and I managed to get some lovely photos of them all together.

Thank you for the opportunity to do this for you.

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Tuesday, November 17, 2009 0 comments  

Labels: dancing light photography, natural light, photography, Portraits, portraits for at risk children

A few weekends ago I had the pleasure of helping Paul Green of Matador Photo with a wedding, now i must say it wasnt the best organised wedding shoot (sorry paul) but the day dawned not too bad, and the rain stayed away, however with the cloud cover and the fact we were shooting under a thick canopy of trees meant pushing the camera and the 2.8 to its limits whilst keeping iso as low as possible and shutter speed high enough to avoid camera shake! I was shooting from the wings during the ceromony and was focused on Rebeccas reactions throughout the ceremony, a (flock?) of doves flew into the trees above and provided a nice oportunity.

Thanks Paul for having me along, and to Rebecca and Keith, All my best wishes to your families future together.

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Saturday, October 03, 2009 0 comments  

Labels: dancing light photography, photography, Settlers Country Lodge, wedding, wedding photographer

I completely forgot in all the hype and angst that led up to the completion of my website.. that I needed to blog about it!!

Well the website is up, its done, and doing its job nicely!! Few minor things to work on like a decent contact page, but since me being stubborn has a picture of how I want it to look, then it will take me some time to figure out just how to do it!

Anyway here it is folks.

and a wee preview

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Wednesday, September 02, 2009 0 comments  

Labels: dancing light photography, gallery, life with auto focus, photography, website

I had the opportunity on Saturday to join my friend Nykie on a shoot that she had organised with a friend of hers the lovely Kiri and her beautiful 3yr old daughter Zoe. I wont go into too much detail, but I will say this, Zoe is an amazing little girl who is going through something no little girl should ever have to go through. As a mum its something I fear, truly fear and hope my own little blossoms never have to face. Zoe you are as Nykie said "a true super star".

Shoot wise, I'm happy with the results, I was able to use Bryan's 70-200 2.8, which I almost solely used, apart from a brief stint with the wide angle, note to self: incredibly hard to pull off portraits with wide angle, must practice lots more!!

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Wednesday, September 02, 2009 1 comments  

Labels: dancing light photography, life with auto focus, photography, Portraits, Zoe

Well since my first post on the subject I have be plugging away at the site, making minor adjustments here and huge overhauls there. The mission for the past 5 days has been my gallery of portfolio images. I wanted to integrate a flash gallery that I could create in Lightroom into my existing HTML page design. Easier said than done.

Well I knew my layout and where I wanted to put it, so I made a few adjustments to the PNG to create "space" for the gallery.. looking good.. export to .htm all good there to. Now's where I was entering the unknown. How to embed the flash gallery previously created in Lightroom. A little help from my friend Nykie and we had it.

But one problem.. the once white background my gallery was sitting in was now a large box of grey! Do you think I could find the code in anything to change the damn colour of that bloody background? Numerous forums, tutorials, questions, hair pulling, tears shed, computers thrown through windows later.. I finally found a piece of information in the Airtight Interactive website www.airtightinteractive.com pertaining to the code and integrating it into Dreamweaver, apparently its not a simple case of inserting the viewer into the document as that causes a "broken code" you actually have to copy and paste the code where you want the flash gallery to sit. AH HA!! a simple scan of the rest of the code and there it was the #hex number for the background a simple #ffffff later and it was white!!! So simple, yet its had me confounded for days!

Am so proud of myself :)

a few more tweeks and it should be ready.. now for the hard part, choosing which images are gong to go in there!!!

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Monday, July 27, 2009 0 comments  

Labels: code, dancing light photography, gallery, website

I watched this movie last night, it was such a touching movie, it left me feeling inspired.
The pursuit of happiness, along with the road of life, are the two ever destined to become entwined? I don't want for much, in general I'm mostly happy with what life has dealt me. Yet there are certain aspects of my life I would wish improved. Some I have control over and others control me. So I guess I look at the things I have control over for now and hope by some small miracle the rest follows.

So what can I control? I can control me. There's a good start. I can control how much I put into my business, which will determine how successful I am. And that I believe is where my happiness will start.

I'm reading Anne Geddes - A Labour of Love and a defining moment that ultimately sculptured where she is now was one New Years eve saying out loud to her friends, and she doesn't even know what prompted this to come out was " I am going to be the best known baby photographer in the world" Well She's done it. I wonder what her goal is now?

So here it is folks, my goal out loud.. and yes I'm going to say this out loud for real, because I think I need to hear myself say it to believe it and to feel it.

I am going to be a great, no, a fantastic portrait and wedding photographer. I will be a success.

I am confident, I am creative, I have good ideas and no one is going to tell me I can't do this. Something my parents have always believed in me is I can do anything I put my mind to. So I am putting my mind to it. So this is it, my pursuit of happiness starts here, and starts now.

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Sunday, July 05, 2009 2 comments  

Labels: dancing light photography, life with auto focus, photography

Less and less often am i rushing home after a shoot, be it for client or otherwise and immediately uploading my images into lightroom for a good perve at the pics. It used to be that they would be on my computer before I had fully got in the door. Now they can sometime sit in the camera for days before they even make it as far as the CF reader. And less and less often am I finding the motivation to do anything with them beyond a quick preset in LR before being published. LAZY. UNMOTIVATED. I use lack of time for a pretty good excuse lately. Im less and less believin that myself since i find plenty of time for trawling mindless pages in flickr, writing blogs about jack sh*t, and just generally wasting precious moments that before used to be spent enjoying looking and editting photos.

So where has it gone? Where does the passion go to and how to get it back? Some say start a project. Well to be honest I cant be arsed. So.. why force the issue. Ill take photos when I feel like it. Unfortunately, that's not always going to be possible right. I have shoots for clients that need to be taken care of. So how do you muster the passion and motivation for this if when you wake up in the morning and you don't feel like it. Bryan? Maybe you can answer this one for me, I'm sure its happened on more than one occasion for you.

I think I need to do some soul searching in the next few and really decide what it is I want and how the fack I'm going to get it, because right now I'm just floating around in this negative space without any direction.

Its funny, this picture of a complete stranger inspired me more than photos of either Logan or Andrew today. It was my moment it clicked.

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Thursday, July 02, 2009 1 comments  

I literally have millions of ideas running through my head at any one time. Seems it never stops. Sometimes.. they are great ideas! More often than not, these idea when they get the chance to play out actually turn out to be fairly bad ideas.. or ideas I have no idea how to execute...

Take this morning for example.. in the shower (as you do) an idea pops into my head... what if I could get my website up by the end of today so I can put the gallery from the kids school rehearsal up on it and advertise the images for sale. (I was previously going to print the images and sell the on the musical nights in the foyer.. but that idea i didn't feel was feasible enough for the effort..).

Ok so here I am sitting at my computer this morning thinking.. right.. now where do I start? I had no idea. This interweb thingee is all just so foreign to me and just doesn't make any SENSE. I think about things fairly logically most of the time, and logic just doesn't seem to matter in this web world.

So I put out the yell for HELP, and who should come running but my knight in shining armor :)

So we sit down and talk, and skype and chat and after much fiddling and uploading and re-editing and re-uploading, I have a website. Not a complete website, there is much thinking and musing to be done before that happens, but the bones are there and even some skin. And I am happy. I don't know where i'd be without you Bryan! You are truly a one of a kind.

www.dancinglightphoto.co.nz

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Tuesday, June 30, 2009 0 comments  

As someone relatively new to the photography business, its hard to define my worth to myself and justify it to others. In my eyes, I'm a n00b, so who am I to say my work is justifiably worth the money I say it is? And how do I establish those numbers? What is my time and creativity worth when I still question that myself? What defines me as a photographer? Why me over someone else?

So how do I begin? where is the starting point? At the moment I feel as if i should be giving my time away! Its hard to say to a prospective client I charge this much for the session and any prints will cost this much. I feel I should be paying them to take my work! I am not a salesperson, never have been and never will be, yet here I am in a position where I have to sell myself!

I have the confidence in my abilities, and my skill, when does the confidence in selling my work come in? I just assumed they would come hand in hand yet here I am, the bar seems a long long way away. *sigh*

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Sunday, June 28, 2009 1 comments  

Labels: dancing light photography, life with auto focus, photography

Well, I know i'm a bit late to the party, and I can't guarantee that everything or indeed anything I write and post will be largely profound or interesting. But I thought I might make a start and see how this progresses. Largely going to be a blog for my musings and perhaps a place to showcase some of my work.

Posted by Life_with_auto_focus at Sunday, June 28, 2009 0 comments  

Labels: dancing light photography, life with auto focus, photography