For all our weddings I’ll go scout out the church and reception venues prior to the wedding.  Catherine and Drew’s wedding slated for December 2012 is a bit special as the location of their church is in an isolated location south of Virginia Dale, Colorado.  Virginia Dale is north of Ft. Collins and near the Colorado and Wyoming state line on Hwy 287.  On my last trip north to Idaho I took an alternate route to visit the Virginia Dale Community Church where their ceremony will be held.  The little church has a wood burning stove as a source of heat and a couple of outhouses for bathroom facilities.  I personally wouldn’t recommend using the outhouses unless absolutely necessary.   When I dropped by the preacher’s wife was practicing the piano and we had a nice little chat.  We are looking forward to shooting Catherine and Drew’s wedding in this quaint little church next December!  Catherine and Drew’s engagement session can be found here.

Last week my wife and I went to Idaho for Christmas to visit my kids and parents.  I make the trip from Denver to Idaho Falls, Idaho on a regular basis as that is were my kids reside.  On the drive back to Denver this past Sunday we were traversing across Wyoming on US Highway 191 in the morning where the temperature was a toasty 8 degrees Fahrenheit.  Over night fog formed and at such a cold temperature every tree and wire got coated in snow and ice.   As we passed little Eden Wyoming (population ~388) my wife suggested we should stop and take pictures.  Originally, I wasn’t too thrilled about stopping to take pictures (8 degrees is cold!) and I wanted to get home and didn’t want to stop for anything (such a man thing I’m told).  Somehow my wife convinced me it would be a good idea to stop and this little log church was where we parked.  Thanks honey! It really was a good idea after all even though my face was frozen for a good 30 minutes.

For the technical camera junkies the panoramic of the log church is a hand held 11 image composite.  There was no way was I going to spend time setting up a tripod in that cold.  The image below is after Photoshop has done the merge of the images.  Content Aware Fill in CS5 came in very handy as I had to “create” some sky in the upper left and right plus some fence line in the lower right.  Want to know more on how I did this drop me a comment or email as I’d be happy to give back to the community.

–
Mark Mortensen
Denver Colorado Portrait and Wedding Photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

Every once in a while I need a sanity check in order to slow down my brain in order to focus better.  I find a personal photo walk seems to help in this respect.  My wife and I just finished up showing our booth at the Great Bridal Expo show on Sunday and I’m in a bit of a daze.  Something about seeing around a hundred brides can wear out some neurons.  So today the weather was unseasonably warm in Denver (high in the mid 70s for mid Nov is pretty warm) and I went for a quick photo walk up on a small canal by our house.  For these walks I only put on one lens and it is typically a fix focal length.  This makes me really focus on composing the shot and zooming with the feet instead of the lens.  You should try this sometime as it really does make you slow down and think.  For my walk today I selected my 50mm f/1.4.  Enjoy the images.

–
Mark Mortensen
Denver Colorado Portrait and Wedding Photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

I discovered Moo a few years ago and can’t say enough good stuff about their products.  Moo is an exceptional printer based out of the United Kingdom with a printing lab in the United States as well.  I discovered them while looking for a different way to create my business cards and they provide a way to create cards with up to 50 different images on the back.  I use it as my portfolio in my pocket.  A good friend of mine, Steve of Xvelo Design , had some of their Moo mini-cards created and I was sold on the quality.  Since my first run of business cards I’ve created my fine art greeting card line via Moo as well.  Here is my latest round of cards I had them create.  Check out Moo!

–
Mark Mortensen
Denver Colorado Portrait and Wedding Photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

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.