On Thursday, I covered the Take Your Child To Work Day for DaVita. This is the 3rd year I have covered the event and it is always fun to see some familiar faces and new ones as well. Our former CIO Harlan showed up with his horse Buddy.  This is a scene you don’t see everyday in the Denver West business park.

The kids got to sit on Buddy and so did some adults.

Check-in for the 40+ kids for this year’s event.

The day was filled with events such as creating your own business.

The West Metro Fire Department showed up again during lunch.

A little entertainment to end the day with a skit put on by DaVita teammates demonstrating how to create an ice cream sundae (or mess).

Finally, the day is over and everyone is heading home.

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

Have no idea what to get your Mom for mother’s day? How about a picture of the kids, grandkids, daughter, son, etc?

Mark Mortensen Photography is offering a Limited Edition Mother’s Day Photography Session. The Limited Edition special is a 20 minute mini session at my studio in south Denver. Cost is $150 and includes 1 – 8×10, 8 wallets and a facebook image (1 pose).

Hurry as availability is limited and time is running out!

studio: 1801 S. Pearl St, Denver, CO 80210
phone: 720.260.0695
web: www.markmortensen.com

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

Big announcement! After several years of building my photography business from scratch I now have some official studio space!  Up until now I’ve been shooting portraits on location or in the living room of my house.  I still will be doing on location photography, however, any client meetings and studio sessions will mainly be done at my new retail location.  The building is an established photography studio of close to 30 years on the historic S. Pearl St in Denver Colorado. This past November I joined the West Chamber of Commerce in Jefferson County where in one of my business leads group I met a bookkeeper.  After a presentation of my photography to the leads group I mentioned I was looking for studio space to lease.  Turns out this bookkeeper works for another photographer, Sara Frances, who was looking to lease out her studio on Old South Pearl St..  One thing led to another and now I have the space.  I’m sharing the space with Sara, however, she wants to take her photography towards the non-profit documentary crowd and I’ll be focusing on family portraiture and events including weddings.

If you are in the Denver area swing by the studio sometime.  Right now I have the studio doors open on the weekends only and if you see my sidewalk sign out I’m there.  There will be an official opening at some point in the future.

Mark Mortensen Photography
1801 S. Pearl St.
Denver, CO 80210
720.260.0695

Studio front

Welcome to the lobby

The camera room with a work room in the back through the double doors.

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

Another pretty flower in my yard, originally uploaded by mark.mortensen.

Yet another one of those flower things that looks so nice in the spring.

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

Pretty flowers in my yard, originally uploaded by mark.mortensen.

Grabbed this image in my front yard this evening. These little guys are only about an inch in height total. I believe I’m almost a 1:1 ratio with my 105mm macro lens.

Technical Ramblings: This is completely processed using the Adobe Lightroom 3 beta 2 using the new beta camera profiles for the Nikon D700. I think Adobe has finally hit the mark with the camera profiles as all my nasty artifacts I would get with their other profiles are now gone. The new Lightroom 3 beta 2 is really nice as well and would recommend a download to anyone looking for a decent photo management tool.

Yet another step of the rebranding effort this year was to create a new set of business cards.  I’ve been using business cards from moo in the past and absolutely love the quality of their cards.  Plus with moo cards you can have a variety of different images on the back side of the card.  They are not the cheapest cards available but the quality of the card is top notch and having a mini portfolio in my pocket is worth the extra expense in my opinion.  For this round of cards I’m using my new logo on the front

with these images for the back to focus on my family portraiture side of the business.

Part of the business development plan this year is to rebrand the business.  One of the first steps for me was to create a new logo.  The current logo I personally created over a weekend  and didn’t give it a ton of thought.  The new logo has been a work in progress for well over a couple of months.  I also involved the help of a graphic artist Sandy Rafferty Vivian of Evolution Design.  Sandy and I have known each other since the mid 90′s and I helped her with maintaining her computers when she started her own small business well over 10 years ago.  With this project it felt like we had come up with hundreds of iterations on different logo designs.  When I would start narrowing down on an idea I would show some of my friends and colleagues and get a different response from every one of them.  Turns out it is really hard to create a new logo and brand.  Creating this logo was as difficult as naming my two kids because it is something I’m going to have to live with for a while.  In my kids example they have to be happy with the name that we gave them.  Funny thing when you name you kid.  Ever wonder why you have the name you have? The next step in the business development is a secret, however, with any luck will be revealed within the next couple of weeks.

Comments: none

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

My iStockPhoto collection has been a tiny little side of the business.  I’ve been adding to my stock portfolio as I have time and have finally reached the 250 downloads and 50% or greater acceptance rating required for exclusivity.  I’m actually at 70% acceptance and iStock has definitely made me a better shooter in terms of composition and quality.  Today I got this email:

Dear Mark:

Congratulations! The iStockphoto administrators have approved your exclusivity

application. We are pleased to begin this new, mutually beneficial and

professional relationship with you.

Thank you for your time and effort.

Best Regards,

iStockphoto LP

Yeah me! So what does this mean?  Well instead of the nickel I make off of a sale of an image I make 5 pennies.  :)  Actually, my royalties do start going up as I start selling more images since I’m exclusive with iStock and their Getty partner sites.  You can check out my stock portfolio here.

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

Finally got a new toy in today.  I had ordered this 86″ Paul C. Buff Parabolic Light Modification System (PLM System) what seems like a couple months ago.  They had been on back order forever but it finally showed up today via the brown santa clause (aka UPS).  Thanks to my friend Steve for that phrase. Whenever I get a new light modifier in I take some test shots to see the quality of light.  This is by far the largest modifier I have in my arsenal to date.  The intent was to get a hugh softbox to give the feeling of window light in a studio setup.  The PLM isn’t very deep either so it works well in limited space setups.  Plus to boot it’s actually quite affordable at only around a hundred bucks for the reflector and diffusion material. Wouldn’t want to use this outside as it would act like a hugh sail and fly away like our Colorado balloon boy.

This first image shows how the light fills the room.  As you can see it fills the room with a nice soft quality of light which I really dig.

This next image was shot to see the hot spots of the reflector.  It appears like a ring light in the reflector which again I personally like.  The two lines on the diffusion material are seams.

Finally, some images with a model.  Please note that the model isn’t necessary that good looking but he was hard up for some work.  I really like the ring light type of catch light in the eyes.

Overall, the PLM is great.  The only downside I’ve seen so far is putting on the diffusion material.  As you get one side hooked up the other side slides off.  I ended up using some binder clips to hold the diffusion material onto the reflector till I got all edges hooked.

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