Beautiful Albums....

I've started offering albums to my clients and the first one came in this week and it looks great! The printing is nice and is printed on 100# paper. The black and white images are neutral with a slight warm tone which works great for portraits.





The most fun (and time consuming part) was creating the layouts. I try to tell a story with juxtaposition of the images. Each page is suppose to speak to each other, either as a continuation of a theme or as a counterpoint to the previous image...

Andy St. and a minor tragedy....

Well, I had a good and bad day...mostly bad, I suppose. I was out on assignment shooting a rough little neighborhood in North Long Beach. I was with the reporter and the story was about a street in Long Beach that was riddled with violence and drugs, but managed to turn itself around with community effort.

Andy St. was rampant with gangsters and drug dealers. The SWAT team made weekly visits there. At one point, the US Postal Service refused to deliver mail to the individual apartments and instead put up a group of mailboxes at the end of the street. So, to say the least, it was a little rough around the edges.

I met some families that pulled together to get rid of the troublesome residents, plant trees, paint a mural and more or less revitalize the neighborhood. I got some great shots of the families on the street.

When I was photographing some kids playing on the street, my wallet of memory cards fell out of my back pocket and someone either walked off with it or it grew wings and flew away. We scoured the street for a good forty minutes with no luck. I'm more upset with the lost images than I am with the cards, since I got some great stuff that I can't shoot again. Fortunately, I had enough variety in the final card that was in my camera to hopefully cover the story.

C'est la vie.