The owner of Cycles Xvelo, Steve, is a friend and co-worker at my day job.  He is big into bikes, like so big into bikes he once owned a bicycling touring company in France, and has now decided to start building his own bikes.  Bike #1 is a steel tube rig and Steve is currently working on making a frame out of Bamboo and Carbon Fiber.  You’ll see that bike on my blog when it’s complete but in the meantime Steve is really good at updating his blog with posts during the build cycle.  Bamboo is a really cool concept for a bike frame and is suppose to be really strong as well.  I can’t wait to see that bike when it is all done.

Steve is working on building a bike stand for future shots so it won’t show up in the images.  This stand makes it look like the bike has training wheels.  Lessons learned!  Setup shots are at the end of the post.

My favorite image from the series.

Technical Ramblings

The shoot was done in my living room on a 9′ wide Savage black seamless paper.  Three AlienBee B800s used with the 2 bees on the sides in large softboxes with grids.  The bee on the boom arm is in a strip box with grid as well.  I used the grids to control the spread of light.  Without the grids then the light goes everywhere and the black background doesn’t go real black. Steve is on the floor to the left helping out.

Another view of the light setup to show how I have the lights to the front of the bike.  I did this to feather the light onto the bike.

–
Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

Photoshop is such a main stay in my business I don’t know what I would do without it.  This is a great interview with John Knoll, one of the co-developers of Photoshop.  More info of the history of Photoshop here.

–
Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

I got the opportunity this past weekend to finish photographing a custom made bedroom set by Robb Helmkamp of Kamp Studios.  Robb’s dad lives in the Lakewood, Colorado and Robb is currently based in Asheville, North Carolina.  His dad had commissioned Robb to build a new bedroom set for his home and it turned out amazing.  Robb’s sense of the use of the elements and form are nothing short of outstanding.  You definitely should check out his website and other woodwork creations.

During the shoot his dad’s two cats, Lewis and Clarke, decided to participate in the shoot and be my grip assistants.  Not sure they knew that climbing in my camera bag and chewing on my battery pack cords was bad grip assistant etiquette.

Originally, I had met Robb in October 2009 via another woodworker, Cliff Whitehouse of Bernwood Custom Design, who is based in Denver, Colorado.  I have photographed some of Cliff’s work and Cliff was renting shop space to Robb while he built his father’s bedroom set.  Robb wasn’t able to finish the end tables while he was in Denver and later shipped them.  The images above are the finished set.  However, I did get to shoot the bed and a bookcase Robb was building in the studio during his October stay in Denver.

Technical Ramblings: For those that like to see how images are created I’ve included a few setup images.  All the in studio furniture shots were done using 3 AlienBee B800s.  Two in large softboxes with grids and one on a boom in a strip box with grid.  I use the grids to make the white seamless background go black as it rolls out.  After the bed shoot I’ve come to discover I need a much wider background as my 9 foot seamless just isn’t wide enough.

Being the new year and reading lots of new year resolutions I thought I’d state my top ten goals for 2010.  Is ‘2010′ pronounced ‘Twenty Ten’ or ‘Two Thousand Ten’?  How did I do at my 2009 goals?

2009 – I only had 4 goals written on my whiteboard

1. Have 400 images in my iStock portfolio.  Failed terribly at this goal.  I started out with 100 images and currently I’m at 151.  What happened?  Lack of time.  Working a full time IT job and trying to create a photography career with only 10-15 hours a week something had to give.  Stock photography really forces me to become a better photographer as getting images accepted at iStock is no easy task.
2. Complete my 2 year art degree program.  This I completed!  It actually took my 4 years to complete but I now have some formal training in art.  Yeah me! (as my daughter would say)
3. Earn enough money to pay for my photography gear.  Well, didn’t get this accomplished either.  Doesn’t help that I switched platforms from Canon to Nikon either.  I will say that I did make enough to pay for my car payments so all the hard work is starting to pay off finally.
4. Update website to get rid of my Adobe Flash based site.  Completed.  I originally had a Adobe Flash based website that was all pretty and such but the more reading I did on the subject the less I liked the idea.  For starters, my website couldn’t be viewed on an iPhone.  Also the old site was a bit restricted in what I could present.  In the end, I switched back to my WordPress engine as my website presence.  The new site is viewable on an iPhone and it easier to update.

2010

1. Grow my photography business revenue by five times.
2. Create a formal business plan to outline my transition to a full-time portrait and event photographer.
3. Create a new logo and branding/marketing campaign.
4. Shoot a couple weddings and determine if this is something I want to add to the business.
5. Grow my iStock portfolio to 250 images.
6. Start exercising again.
7. Find some formal studio space that I can cheaply rent so I’m not using my living room.
8. Participate more in my chamber of commerce leads groups to develop stronger business relationships.
9. Blog more often and with deeper content.
10. Spend more quality time with my kids and wife.

The list could go on and on with things like learn Photoshop better, experiment with different strobe techniques, etc, etc.  But I think this is the top 10 goals for the year.

Been playing around with Animoto for a few months and here’s a video I created for a couple of up and coming models. I really like how Animoto does the transitions between images and fluid motion with the music.

The back of the business card.

Work In Action, originally uploaded by mark.mortensen.

A coworker bought three of my fine art prints and framed them for his office. Frames are through American Frame and the prints I made on my Canon PIXMA 9500 with premium matt paper. Image on the left are the flatirons in Boulder CO.  Middle image is a new pine tree growth in South Dakota.  Image on the right is a fox cub from last spring in my neighborhood.

Yeah me! I’m selling some of my work.

Uploaded by mark.mortensen on 4 Mar 09, 11.32AM MST.

I have officially released my new website for the portrait and event side of my business. Check it out at:

www.markmortensen.com

The new site is a BluDomain Adobe Flash product I purchase about a month ago. Figured it was time to get one of those fancy Flash sites for my photography business instead of just the blog. I will be posting a review of my experience with Blu and their products in the near future.  Overall, Blu’s products are good, however, their customer support and site admin tools could use some work.

What’s the future of the blog, you ask? My plan is to start transforming it into a blog about my photography business.  Essentially a place to share the steps I’ve been taking to startup my business and to eventually go pro.  One thing I like to do is educate others on photography and the business.  I’ve had some ideas for the tag line of the blog:

- From noisy cubicle to digital noise

- From IT to ISO

- From programming to postprocessing: My path to pro

- Path to pro

I’d love to hear what you’d think would be a good tag line.  So drop a comment!  Of course one of the first things I need to figure out is how to stop all the SPAM I get in my blog comments.  Uggh.  Don’t people have better things to do with their time?

In an attempt to broaden the paths in which people can buy my work, I decide to open up an ImageKind and CafePress account.  I’ve had requests via Flickr to purchase some of my photos and these storefronts appear to be an easy way to offer this feature.  I’ve always had my iStockPhoto account but not all of my fine art work is available on iStock.  I’ll have to admit I’ve let iStock slip these past few months as I’ve been focusing on the portrait side of the business.  Portraits have been good to me from a business perspective. But I’m always looking for ways to generate some more revenue and ImageKind and CafePress seem like good tools. So check out my store fronts!

I lead my first photowalk at DaVita a few weeks back.  We had a small but fun gathering of about 5 photographers and walked around the Denver West business park.  The walk was a bit short at only an hour but all of us are really busy with work.  Here’s a few of my images from the walk.