2014-05-06-Alison-197 WebM2A Models Test Shoot Getting started as a model is not easy. It can be very confusing, very frustrating, and very costly. The most important thing to know is that to be successful you’ll need a portfolio that shows you’re experienced (selfies don’t count), you’ll need a network, and you’ll need a fan base.
 

Test shoots and trade shoots (commonly known as TF shoots – TFP, TFCD, etc.) are a great start to accomplishing all the above. As you do test and trade shoots you’ll build experience and the more often you do them the more experienced you’ll become. The photos you get from the shoots will continually improve as your experience level improves and the experience level of the photographers, stylists, artists, designers, etc., you’re working with improves. As the experience level of the teams you collaborate with improves you’ll continually do more creative shoots and it will show in the photos that make up your portfolio. Eventually you will have plenty of experience and a killer portfolio to show it.

Not only will you be building a great portfolio while building the experience you’ll need to get paid work but you will be meeting photographers, hair stylists, makeup artists, designers, wardrobe stylists, and many other individuals in the industry that will be involved in the photo shoots that you take part in. This will be especially true as the shoots become more and more creative. This is a great way to build your network as well as start your fan base. In order to build a network and a fan base it is important as a model to be approachable and likable so always remain professional at photo shoots but also always show you’re passionate about your chosen career and full of energy.
 

Remember, everyone had no experience at some point, even the highest paid individuals in the industry so by the end of the photo shoot your goal is for everyone involved in the shoot to feel like they’d love to work with you again. As the inexperienced people you’re collaborating with in test and trade shoots become experienced professionals in the industry they will need models for their paid assignments and if they like working with you you’ll be at the top of their list for casting calls.

Jackie Photo Shoot Generally speaking trade shoots are collaborations of individuals with similar experience levels. At some point you may decide you want to pay for a photo shoot to work with a more experienced team to reap the benefits of their experience and get on a more fast track pace but if you’re willing to put in the time and effort this won’t be necessary. As your experience level increases more experienced photographers, hair/makeup, designers, etc., will want to work with you. So when you first start out you’ll be working with less experienced photographers in general that will only provide 1 or 2 photos (if any) that are worth adding to your portfolio so you’ll need to be patient.
 

Anyone with a camera these days can say that they’re a photographer also so you’ll need to check their portfolio to be certain they are legitimate photographers but as long as you use your head and do your homework you’ll find test shoots and trade shoots are a great alternative to paying for photo shoots and modeling school. After all, the best part about test and trade shoots is that they’re free but you don’t have to get what you pay for, you can get so much more from these shoots than most beginners realize.

The bottom line is that test and trade shoots are a wonderful way to build the experience, portfolio, and network you’ll need to get hired as a model. If you’re serious about becoming a working model and you understand that it is very difficult to become a successful model (it doesn’t just happen overnight) and it takes lots of hard work and perseverance, then I can help you take your portfolio, experience, and network to the next level.

If you're interested in setting up a test shoot or a trade shoot with MeasMo Photo/Design I would love to share my experience with you and help you to get started as a model - but you have to be willing to put in the time and effort. I may even be able to help you to start getting paid but like I said, you have to be very serious about putting in the time and effort. So if you’re really serious about modeling and you're located in or traveling to the Mount Pocono Pa area, contact me now and let’s discuss setting up a photo shoot. On rare occasion I have some free time in other parts of our service area or while traveling so don't hesitate to contact me if you're anywhere in Northeast Pennsylvania, Northern New Jersey, or Southern New York (including NYC) as well.

Feel free to leave a comment for additional tips. Let me know what questions are on your mind.

That's right, it was snowing in the middle of October. A bit confused, I quickly went to the calendar to check the date.
 

According to the calendar it was only October 18th, just as I thought.
 

Mid October!!! What The???
 

This definitely required a camera, none of my friends living in Southern California and Arizona were going to believe me.
 

So I figured I might as well share the photos here too.
 

I hope you enjoyed them.
 

This was the next morning (October 19, 2015) so it wasn't so bad once I got past the shock.
 

Here remembering 9/11 memorial event 2006

This is one of the first signs I saw in memory of the lost souls when I visited New York City (I believe) in 2006 on September 11 and stumbled across a memorial/tribute/exhibition being thrown to assure those victims of 9/11 will never be forgotten. I don’t know if the memorial is held every year or not but I haven’t been able to get back to NY on September 11 since then.

Here remembering 9/11 memorial event 2006

I’m not going to go into a lot because this is not about me. I remembered I had photos from the memorial and wanted to share some of my favorites with my followers in memory of the lost but never forgotten.

Here remembering 9/11 memorial event 2006

Clicking on any of the photos will take you to the gallery. Please enjoy and share…

Bear_Aug242014_8492

Typically the neighborhood residents go out first thing in the morning on garbage day and find their garbage cans turned over by this night visitor and bags of garbage missing. Bears in this area are most active at dusk and dawn and since these homes are mere feet from state land (Tobyhanna State Park) the bears often stray into the neighborhood this time of year for an easy meal when trying to fatten up for the harsh winter months in Tobyhanna, Pa.

Bear_Aug242014_8493

Black bears typically fear people so they generally try to avoid people but can be attracted to homes when they find food sources that are common in residential areas like garbage, pet food, bird feed, and livestock feed. The problem is once bears find easily accessible food sources they lose their wariness of people and will keep coming back as long as food is available. The way I see it is bears are opportunists so when people put their garbage and bird feeders out with a big ole neon sign that says free meal – can you really blame a bear for taking the bait?

Bear_Aug242014_8495

Black bears spend a lot of time searching for food and eating. As black bears prepare for hibernation during the winter months they consume more than 10000 calories a day (I’ve heard up to 20000 calories) as they actively feed for up to 20 hours a day. A bear’s heart rate and breathing slow during hibernation and its body temperature drops. During hibernation black bears do not eat, drink, defecate, or urinate. Hibernating bears rely on stored fat to make it through the winter months; however a hibernating bear may emerge if it’s disturbed.

Bear_Aug242014_8496

Under a microscope wildlife biologists can tell the age of a bear by counting the rings in a tooth - similar to counting the rings of a tree. The oldest bear I know of was found here in Pennsylvania and determined to be 30 years old. Black bears generally live as long as 25 years in the wild but may live longer in captivity.

Bear_Aug242014_8498

Most people realize bears are very strong but many don’t seem to understand just how fast a bear is. A black bear can climb a tree at six weeks old, are good swimmers, and can run up to 35 miles per hour. The average healthy person runs more like 12-15 miles per hour for short distances and more like 5-8 miles per hour for long distances (not including top performing athletes) so don’t bother trying to outrun any bears in this lifetime (unless your plan is simply to outrun the rest of your group).

Bear_Aug242014_8500C

As intimidating as a bear can be, a person is 180 times more likely to be killed by a bee and 160,000 times more likely to be killed in a car accident.

With the state land behind my house I get wildlife in my backyard regularly ranging in size from hummingbirds to wild turkey and from chipmunks to black bear with the most common wildlife being white-tailed deer but for me and my wife it’s always an added bonus when the bears step out from the dense trails in the woods behind the house that they usually travel so we can marvel their beauty (from the safety of our home)…

2014-05-06-Alison-47

When I started the retouch on this photo I figured it would be a pretty basic retouch. This was a test shoot with M2A Talent Management with Alison modeling for me. Alison is obviously beautiful and has plenty of experience modeling so the photography end and the beauty retouch was a breeze. Alison owns and operates M2A Talent Management and was modeling for me for an update to my portfolio. All Alison wanted from this photo was a basic retouch on a white or grey background.

2014-05-06-Alison-47-white

So there it was, all done right? This took no time at all to complete as expected - outside of the challenge of extracting Alison from the background because of all that flying hair. Luckily Deke McClelland taught me the best way to extract all this hair but that’s a story for another day. Deke McClelland is an awesome instructor with a wealth of knowledge on pretty much anything you can possibly do with Photoshop. But what about Calvin Hollywood’s advice? I hadn’t forgotten it so I put the image aside and came back to it the next day. Unfortunately, when I looked at this photo the next morning I wasn’t completely happy with it. It’s a great photo but it wasn’t portfolio worthy yet, so back to the drawing board…

2014-05-06-Alison-47-gray

I decided to try the original gray background I took the photo on but it didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t much different from the white background so I didn’t need to walk away from this one to know I wasn’t done yet. Unfortunately I didn’t have any ideas of what direction I wanted to turn to push the envelope and get this photo to where I initially expected it to be. I sent the image to Alison since all she wanted was the white background and told her I was going to go farther with it for my portfolio but I wasn’t certain how far yet. I’d let her know when it was done.

2014-05-06-Alison-47-clouds

Luckily when I started the image I looked up through my skylights and saw this cool cloud formation that was worthy of photographing. I initially thought about using the clouds as a background for the flying hair image but lo and behold I resisted my initial instinct because clouds have been done as backgrounds so often and I wanted something really unique. Just for kicks since I had my subject extracted I figured I would drop the clouds in and see what it looked like. Maybe it would spark another idea. I dropped the clouds in and what do you know? I actually liked the direction this was going in. I retouched the clouds to match the retouch I applied to Alison and it looked pretty good, I really liked it. But what about Calvin Hollywoods advice? I came back to this photo the next morning and what do you know?  Not Portfolio Worthy After All :’-(

I tweaked a few things here and there until I realized the problem I was having with it. The top Alison was wearing needed to be retouched also. If Scott Kelby was in the room with me he would have kicked me in the rear. He’s continuously said retouching the clothes is one of the most important parts of the retouch and often the most forgotten. Once I dove into retouching the garment I realized I wanted it a different color so I added an adjustment layer and here’s the final image…

2014-05-06-Alison-47-black

I just finished retouching this one so let’s see what happens when I sleep on it. I’m really loving this final photo right now so the point here is if I’d stopped when I thought I was done I would have really missed out on something spectacular. I think I’ll be able to show it off to Alison after I take another look at it tomorrow morning so Good Night to All.

M2A Talent Management, Alison Test ShootTest shoot for M2A Talent Management
3 lights for tattoo M2A Talent Management, Alison Test ShootTest shoot for M2A Talent Management
3 lights for tattoo

These 2 photos on the other hand were no brainers for me, I knew the second I was done retouching both of them they were keepers and definitely still felt the same way the next morning, and the next morning, and the next morning…

SONY DSC

GO JACKIE!!! We’re so proud of you and we recognize how hard you studied for the Bar Exam…

New York is the largest market for lawyers and it’s where you’ll find some of the most prestigious law schools in the country. The New York BOLE (Board of Law Examiners) is responsible for administering the bar examination to those seeking to practice law in the state of New York and administers the bar exam twice a year. In 2012 the Board processed over 17000 applications and examined over 15000 applicants. I don’t know how many applicants were examined in February but the results show that the passing rate for all applicants, US domestic educated and foreign educated, as well as first time and repeat takers was only 47%. That’s right only 47%. Great Job Jackie!!!

If you googled the NY Bar Exam and stumbled across this article but you’re actually looking for the results to the NY bar exam,

You can find the private results here:

https://www.nybarapply.org/FEXR/xresults.asp

And the results for the general public here:

http://www.nybarexam.org/EXRF14/Feb2014Results.htm

Hearing how many people fail the NY Bar Exam the first time they take it, Jackie had locked herself away to study after her graduation party (she graduated from New York Law School) because she was so determined to pass her first time out.

Jacqueline Boone's law school graduation party

Here’s a really cool pic we took at Jackie’s graduation party of Alexis, Dominique, and Jackie in the middle.

Jackie and Gerard at Steamtown

Happily, we were able to get Jackie to show her face on occasion while studying like this photo shoot we did in Steamtown.

Once again, if you’re reading this Jackie, your mother and I are so very, very, proud of you…

If you’re interested in the obstacles I ran into then read on, if you’re not interested then just check out the photos below. They’re pretty Awesome!!! (If I do say so myself).

The camera body I used (the Sony A850) only shot 3 fps (frames per second) so it was a real challenge catching the peak moments of the soccer games. You really want to shoot sports photography at no less than 7 or 8 fps. That challenge was remarkably intensified by the fact that the Sony A850 I was using didn’t have a separate autofocus button on the back so I had to depend heavily on the autofocus using the shutter release button which turned out to be a tremendous struggle. Needless to say focusing got pretty messy at times causing me to miss quite a few shots at the peak moment. By the time the A850 decided it was focused and ready to shoot the play was over and the ball was half way downfield (mocking me). Ok I’m exaggerating but the ball really was too far from the player for a decent final shot far more times then I cared for.

Then there were the lenses. On one camera body (an Olympus Evolt) I had a 70-300mm lens with a 2x teleconverter giving me the equivalent of a 140-600mm lens. The problem with this was I lost way to much light with the 2x teleconverter on and the camera body was an older body that didn’t handle a high ISO very well so I couldn’t get a fast enough shutter speed to get sharp photos without being ridiculously grainy. If I had a 1.4x teleconverter with me that would have probably worked better as I would have only lost one stop of light with the 1.4x teleconverter and still got a 40 percent increase in magnification.

The first camera body I mentioned (the Sony A850) turned out to be the go to camera since it was a newer body (at least more recent than the Olympus Evolt) that could handle the higher ISO pretty well. By increasing my ISO to 1600 I was able to shoot between 1/2000 and 1/8000 sec freezing the motion quite nicely. The problem I had now was the lens I had on the A850 wasn’t wide enough for the depth of field I wanted. The lens was an f/4.5 - 5.6 which had to do since I didn’t have an f/2.8 on me. Ideally you really want to shoot sports at f/2.8 or faster to separate the subject from the background with a nice shallow depth of field, especially if that background happens to be other players just standing around. Of course f/2.8 or faster is a lot less important if you’re not shooting sports indoors or at night. Because I shot these soccer photos outdoors on a sunny day the direction of the sun was much more of a problem than the f-stop. So I locked in the widest aperture possible in Aperture Priority mode, fixed my ISO to 1600, and let the camera adjust for the shutter speed. Check out some of the photos I got, they came out pretty good but the next time I have this equipment on me I think I’ll try locking in my shutter speed and aperture in manual mode and let the camera adjust the ISO instead to compensate.

Palmer vs Slate Belt in Wilson, Pa.

This is my favorite shot of the day.

Palmer Soccer Club vs Slate Belt Soccer Club at the Avona Field in Wilson, Pa on Sunday April 06, 2014.

OLPH vs Northern Lehigh in Wilson, Pa.

This is my second favorite shot of the day.

OLPH (Our Lady of Perpetual Help) Soccer Club vs Northern Lehigh Soccer Club at the Avona Field in Wilson, Pa on Sunday April 06, 2014.

OLPH vs Northern Lehigh in Wilson, Pa.

This is my third favorite shot of the day.

OLPH Soccer Club vs Northern Lehigh Soccer Club at the Avona Field in Wilson, Pa on Sunday April 06, 2014.

OLPH vs Northern Lehigh in Wilson, Pa.

This is my fourth favorite shot of the day.

OLPH Soccer Club vs Northern Lehigh Soccer Club at the Avona Field in Wilson, Pa on Sunday April 06, 2014.

OLPH vs Northern Lehigh in Wilson, Pa.

And finally, this completes my top 5 favorite shots of the day.

OLPH Soccer Club vs Northern Lehigh Soccer Club at the Avona Field in Wilson, Pa on Sunday April 06, 2014.

The key to the great sports photos I ended up with came down to knowing and understanding the game. That knowledge is your best friend when shooting sports photography, no matter what equipment you’re using…

Anyway, I was so excited to see all the cool accessories that came in the kit I couldn’t wait to shoot something to try out my new toys. Included in the kit is a barndoor, reflector, honeycomb, snoot, and more. This kit is designed to fit my Sony speedlights and Yongnuo speedlights. I was pleasantly surprised to get more than I bargained for when I pulled all the parts out of the box. I totally was not expecting a lot of little things like the conical snoot coming with two different sized honeycombs (that gave me a total of three honeycombs when I was only expecting one), or the reflector to come with three inner diffusers (like a beauty dish). There were plenty of other awesome surprises but I won’t bore you with all the details. The bottom line is everything fits my flashes great and works fantastic allowing me to get super creative with my lighting now.

I was so psyched I had to take a photo of something so I took a self Portrait, here’s the photo I took.

This is how I take a selfie:

Sax PlayerSax player under blue concert lights

Everhart MuseumKatelynn, Kristina, and Hanna at Everhart Museum in Scranton Pa.

I snapped off a few shots outside just so the girls would have something to look back at later. The girls did buy some glow in the dark eggs from the gift shop before we left but how long will they last? The photos will be there for a lifetime so as the girls grow up the photos will always serve as a reminder of the fun times and great memories they had as kids and a lesson of all the fun things they can do as adults with their families.

Everhart MuseumKatelynn, Kristina, and Hanna at Everhart Museum in Scranton Pa.

I think photos are the best ways to always remember the people in our lives, the places we’ve been, and the fun we’ve had.

Everhart MuseumKatelynn, Kristina, and Hanna at Everhart Museum in Scranton Pa.

Of course since it was still raining only myself and the youngest – Katelynn (and best friend Hanna) were into it so the group shots weren’t happening – everyone else ran back to the car. Oh well, maybe next time…

Everhart MuseumKatelynn, Kristina, and Hanna at Everhart Museum in Scranton Pa.

Fortunately, 5 years later I felt confident I could do this, like the little engine that could. I accepted the challenge and took the 26 earrings to my bat cave (sorry, I got carried away), to my studio and setup the basketball earrings with the black pieces first. I was expecting it to take a little while but I summoned up all my years of experience and to my surprise it only took about 5 minutes to get the shot right. A few minutes editing in Photoshop to make minor edits like removing the fishing line I used to hang them and the whole shot took under 10 minutes. Yay Me!!!

B-Ball Earrings on Black Backgroundbasketball earrings

This article is not meant to be a how to but for those interested in how the lighting was setup I initially set this up with 2 soft boxes but I didn’t like the way it looked so I turned off one light and slid the light on the left (from camera view) slightly behind the earrings facing toward camera just enough not to spill on the background and used a flag (just a black piece of paper I had sitting nearby) because I was getting a little flair in camera. For the lighting on the other side, since I didn’t want lights on the other side I used a mirror to kick some light back into the earring. It looked good but I wanted a little more separation higher up on the earrings so I grabbed a long narrow box out of the recyclables and wrapped some silver aluminum foil around it and put it slightly behind the earrings on the opposite side of the soft box to create a rim light. This created the separation from the background that I was looking for.

Thanks for visiting my blog, until the next time…

When we heard the rumors recently that Niagara Falls had frozen over and saw on the news how everyone was excitedly making their way to Niagara Falls to see the remarkable and unbelievable phenomena we had to investigate this further to see if it was true. Of course we discovered that the photos taken were taken in a manner that made it appear that the falls were completely frozen from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls but they only appeared to be frozen and if you look closely in the background of those photos on the internet and in the news you can see the actual falls still flowing with the usual immensity and fierceness that Niagara Falls always flows with.

That being said, we decided that even just a portion of Niagara Falls being frozen over was still a huge deal and may still be a once in a lifetime phenomenon. The only time I know of that Niagara Falls has actually completely frozen over (excluding images where the authenticity has been questioned) was in 1848 due to upriver damning but this was still an adventure that neither my wife nor I could resist so off we set to do the 5 hour drive to Niagara Falls for the weekend. Actually, now I’m exaggerating, that Saturday happened to be our anniversary so we actually had plans to stay at Niagara Falls for the weekend but honestly if it wasn’t our anniversary we would have had to take the drive to see this wondrous phenomena anyway before it warmed up.

When we do drives like this we like to stay off the highways and as our 7 year old granddaughter likes to say “go exploring”. We like to experience new communities and enjoy places and events going on that we wouldn’t normally experience sticking to the highways such as tourist attractions like restaurants, state parks, beaches, etc. as well as local places and events that only the locals may know about such as wildlife observation areas. We’ve found some marvelous locations where we can get close to bald eagle nests and experience them in all their glory for example.

I’m not going to go into the drive in this article since there was nothing as unique as Niagara Falls freezing over from the extreme cold weather we’ve been experiencing this year along our route but in future articles I’ll go into our drives like when we drove to Virginia and we found the Army Heritage on our drive home where I got some awesome photos or when we drove to Maine and found Fort Knox along the way (once again on our drive home) where I had a wonderful time taking photos and getting more awesome shots.

Ok enough talk, let’s get to some photos:

Niagara Falls Frozen HDRNiagara Falls frozen HDR

It started snowing (just flurries) about 40 or so miles out from Niagara Falls so I decided to jump back onto the major roads to get to our destination. As a result, we ended up getting there while there was still a little daylight left. This photo was taken hand held a little before the sun went down from the U.S. side of Niagara Falls facing the Canadian side. For those interested in settings (I personally don’t put much stock in sharing settings because every situation is going to be different so minutes later these same settings may have given me completely different results but I know there are those that enjoy knowing settings so for those - enjoy) my settings were f/5.0 at 1/125 of a second and an ISO of 200 with a focal length of 75mm. I took 5 bracketed shots to really try to capture the mist rising from the force of the falls and created this HDR image. I created the HDR image in Nik HDR Efex Pro then did a little tweaking and added a vignette in Photoshop.

Niagara Falls_Mar082014_1009Niagara Falls frozen lightshow.

Out of all the images I took, these were the photos I had the most fun with. We left the falls to go for dinner and come back after dark. We came back after dark (to the location I picked out earlier in the light) there were quite a few people still there trying to take photos of the light show they have at Niagara Falls every night from the Canadian side. You get a cleaner, easier view from the Canadian side to see the falls and photograph them too but I really liked this spot I found on the U.S. side and expected it not to be as crowded. It turned out I had to wait a while to get to the spot I wanted to setup for the people to give up with their cell phones but eventually it got so cold (now that the sun was down) that the crowds finally dispersed for good and my spot completely cleared out so I could have room to setup my tripod and not have anyone bumping the tripod or walking in front of the camera. I setup my tripod and used a long exposure to capture this image which is my favorite from the trip. Again, for those interested in settings I shot this at f/11 for 30 seconds on a tripod. The ISO was 100 and the focal length was 20mm. You can see the falls in the background but the lightshow on the frozen parts of Niagara Falls were absolutely phenomenal. A wondrous beauty I’m so glad we didn’t miss out on.

Niagara Falls_Mar092014_1134-1145 PanoNiagara Falls Frozen panoramic

From one more location from the U.S. side I took this image the next morning after breakfast before we headed out for the long drive back home to the Poconos. I didn’t use the tripod for this panoramic image, instead I shot this handheld using the same technique I use for panning which worked pretty good for a clean steady follow through allowing me to take 12 images and combine them into this panoramic of Niagara Falls. Once again, for those interested in settings my settings were f/8 at 1/500 sec with an ISO of 100 and a focal length of 28mm. Like I said, I took 12 images handheld and then I combined them in Photoshop. Instead of cropping out the edges, I built them back in using the content aware feature in Photoshop which works so wonderfully it simply didn’t make any sense to crop out any of this beautiful scene.

I hope everyone enjoyed my first blog article, feel free to register and leave comments or questions.

For now I’m going to share photos in my blog of articles from past clients, self-assignments, and my own personal photos of family and friends. As I go through old photos I’ll decide which ones I want to make available on the new site so it may take a little while for me to get a large image collection together for the new site. I don’t want to just add every photo I ever took to this site like I did on the past site, I want to be more selective so I’ll add photos gradually until I get through them all. Of course I’ll add photos from current projects also so please be patient as I go through past images, since I’ve been shooting full time since 2009 I have a lot of them to go through.

Ok, enough small talk let’s get to my first article:

Niagara Falls Frozen