Shoot I did with Sara just before she left for the other side of the continent. Very glad I got to work with her before she left since she’s pretty much awesome. Her idea, my execution. Shot this alongside Laura Marino who helped out with makeup/hair and lent us use of her studio.
So, what has looked like a serious lull in activity at Michael J Huxley Photography Central has actually been a long period of prep work for several shoots that should finally be going down this month. I’m REALLY looking forward to what September has in store and I hope you are too. But first…I have some news to announce:
Starting this week, I will begin a new job assisting at April McClintock Photography!
“But wait,” you say, “why is this a good thing?”. I know, I know, it sounds all backwards – I own my own business, I shouldn’t be assisting. Poppycock, I say! Fact is, my business is still in it’s infancy and is growing slowly but steadily. At the stage I’m at, it’s easy for me to schedule shoots around a normal working schedule. And owning my own business does not make me above learning more. There’s still so much I have to learn about photography – I plan on saying the same thing when I’m 80. I would never give up an opportunity to learn more about my craft, and this is a fantastic way to do it.
“But isn’t April your competition?” Well, no, not really. I mean, I don’t see it that way. April has a very distinct style. My work is very much different from hers. If you feel like some Italian, you don’t go to Red Lobster. You go to Olive Garden (we’ll leave the discussion of Olive Garden’s “Italian-ness” for another time). Olive Garden and Red Lobster aren’t competing – they serve different clients with different needs. Same thing with me and April. April is a good friend and I’m looking forward to starting to work with her.
If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what we’re working on, go friend April on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1749650729
Go ahead and send her friend requests, maybe if we inundate her we can get her to actually make a Page. 
Hey, welcome back, I hope you all had a fantastic 4th of July holiday weekend! I realize, it’s almost a whole other weekend again, but I have an excuse! I was busy editing my most recent live show, which was fantastic. Just a Memory (formerly Augustine) played with Thrifter at Fatboys this past weekend.
Thrifter, a band out of West Monroe, opened the evening. I’m not a music connoisseur nor am I “hip” to music genres exactly, but I would label them as a “College Radio” band and they reminded me a bit of Weezer. I really enjoyed their set – they all seem like really cool guys and they definitely had a “sound” without sounding derivative. I don’t always expect much from opening bands, but Fatboys seems to always deliver some very good talent.
Let me tell you a little about Just a Memory. They rock. ‘Nuff said. Ok, I’ll say more: It was a big holiday weekend and as such the crowd was pretty thin. Just a Memory played as if to a packed house. I didn’t feel like I was getting anything but the best out of this group. I kept squishing myself up against the stage because as I was watching them, it felt like I had a crowd at my back. Most of the time, when shooting bands it’s normal for the lead singer or maybe the lead guitarist to be fairly animated, but the rest of the group will stand stock still and stare down at their instruments as if the answers to the Universe are written on them. Every member of Just a Memory was animated and engaged with the crowd. Every. Member. As such they were both a sheer delight and also a pain in the ass to shoot. Focusing on any one person was difficult and I got a lot of blurry shots, but the ones I DID get were full of energy and passion. It was a challenge, for sure, but I think the same things that made it a challenge, also made the shots that much better.
As an artist, I’m always trying to look ahead, to grow, and evolve in order to become a better artist and to have a deeper understanding of my craft. However I also see a lot of value in looking back on old work for several reasons. For one thing, our style grows and changes at a relatively slow pace, so it’s not always easy to see some of the changes we’re unconsciously making. Looking back gives us that perspective. Also, and on a lighter note, we get to see shameful mistakes we’ve made and see how far we’ve come. But there’s another reason I like going through old work: some images, like cheese and wine, have to “age”.
Some images are your absolute favorite for a few months and then you move on to bigger better things. The very occasional few stick it out much longer. This one of Megan has been my favorite for nearly a year now:
Other images you’re not entirely happy with at first, because you had a vision and the final result didn’t end up like your vision and so there’s some disappointment that clouds your ability to separate your vision from what is a really nice image.That’s what happened with this set, I think:
I went back through these images last night and was pretty impressed with the lighting – especially the light on the cello. I remember that thing being incredibly difficult to light, but man, when you finally got it right it just popped. And the warmth to the color! My favorite part.
If you’re graduating in 2012, now is the time to get your Senior Portraits taken. And to help you get an early start on the process, I’m offering a discount on Senior Portrait sessions. If you book a session between now and July 31, you’ll get a 2 hour portrait session and 1 8×10 for $225.
Forget the stuffy studio shots with the cheesy backgrounds and book a portrait session that’s as customized as you want to make it!
Contact me at: mhuxleyphoto@gmail.com or 315-775-3887 to schedule your session or for more details.
Made a trip out to Avon a few weeks ago for a shoot with a friend of mine, Amanda of A Mandaline’s Makeup. It ended up being a bit more of an adventure than we planned and most of the day was taken up with location scouting. Either through sheer luck, or (more likely) desperation, we did find a suitable location. At first I was non-plussed about it, but after seeing the final results, I think it worked out even better than the original idea. It was on the side of a hill, so there were some shots I wasn’t able to pull off that I had in my head, but I think I pulled off the concept quite well despite that.
Model: Queenie Lafeenie
Makeup Artist: A Mandaline’s Makeup
This is a shoot I had had in my head or a while – mostly just as a concept – the transformation from one form into another. It’s a very personal concept for me as it touches upon things happening in my life both professionally and personally. I’m really proud of this series, as I think it’s the one series I’ve done so far that “reads” well and is open-ended enough to have different meanings to different people. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one…
Just a quick post with some shots I did this week with Megan. Always fun shooting her. I always know I’m going to come away with something fantastic and trying to choose just a few out of the whole shoot is going to strain every creative bone in my body. “Why can’t I just post them all!” one side of my brain will protest in an indignent childish voice. Took a little while to find a hay field we could use. Not for lack of fields in West Monroe; where the land is used for two things: golf course and farming. Even found a field with an old rusty thresher in it. Couldn’t shoot there since the owners didn’t want us trampling the hay. Oh well, gotta respect that. Finally did find one. Never would have thought standing in a field would cause one to sweat so much – it was insanely humid that day – for a spring day in NY, anyway. Felt bad when I asked Megan to put on the head scarf – but we sacrifice for the shot, right?
Thanks for looking! I’ll be posting about another shoot I did earlier last week within the next few day – need a little more mental energy for that one…
Later!
I want to start this post off by thanking everyone for the awesome feedback I’ve been getting about this shoot. I posted the Behind the Scenes video of this shoot the other day and got a record number of hits to the site. The people have spoken loud and clear – I’ll try to post more videos from my shoots in the future. Actually, you can look forward to some BTS video for a shoot I’ll be doing this Sunday at a haunted mansion.
When Melissa and I first started talking about this project, I literally approached her with the words “I want to shoot dance pictures”. I had shot with Melissa last summer, but had no idea that she had been a dancer for most of her life until I saw some pictures a friend shot of her that simply blew me away. I knew I had to shoot some sort of dance images with her, but didn’t really have a direction beyond the typical shots that you see of dancers and I knew I didn’t want to do that; I wanted something different, something with a story. Melissa had already begun research and sent me some videos for inspiration and shortly thereafter sent me a story about a women, having lost her identity in domesticity, attempts to break free from her life with dance. I loved this concept immediately and the story was such a strong one, that I had the look of the images in my head almost right away. I wanted a very “on-stage” as if her character were in the middle of a play and stepped forward on stage for a solo – the background dimming and the spotlight focusing on her.
A few days previous, I had seen some images that Von Wong posted on Flickr that ended up being very inspirational for what I wanted to do. Having seen his use of flour in his dance series, I knew I wanted to incorporate that element into my shoot as well. We also knew we wanted to shoot in a kitchen, so the incorporation of flour flying around the kitchen added an another layer of depth to these images. We got lucky when a friend offered us the use of her kitchen – even after explaining the “minor” detail of throwing flour around said kitchen.
I knew I wanted light that was very harsh and focused to give the feel of stage lighting so my first thought was my beauty dish – although I knew I was going to need a grid on it since it’s not as focused as I would need the light to be. So I headed to Lowe’s (my favorite lighting store) and bought some plastic grid material that’s normally used to cover fluorescent lights. It worked out quite well, though I do feel a true grid would have worked better. In addition, on several shots I switched to a straight grid over my flash with the beauty dish for subtle fill. Why didn’t I use this from the start? I felt that using a straight grid would focus the light a bit too much, losing a lot of detail of her actual motions. So the straight grid setup was mostly used for still shots, not actual dance shots.
Ok, ok, I’m done writing here’s the final images:
I’d love to hear some feedback, comments, or critique. Did we achieve our goal? Did the story come through clearly? Is there something missing?
Finally, I’d like to thank April for letting us trash her kitchen, the debt I owe to her from this one is almost frightening. And of course to the amazing Melissa for the fantastic idea and her ability to speak volumes without saying a word.
Images and a discussion of this shoot later this week.
I really enjoyed being able to get some behind the scenes video – I’d love to know if you’d like to see more of this kind of stuff in the future.
What is the one thing that terrifies you? For me it’s always been public speaking in any way shape or form. In college I had to take a Public Speaking class and hated every minute of it. Our final project was to teach the class something – anything – but it had to be an 8 minute speech and we could not use notecards. Mine clocked in at just over 3 minutes and to this day I can’t remember what I even talked about. I nearly failed that class.
Fast forward to last week. I was challenged by a friend of mine to get up on stage at a Karaoke bar and sing Spoonman by Soundgarden. I couldn’t do it the first time we went, so this time was my chance for redemption. I succeeded. I got up on stage and I sang. Was it the best version ever? No, it probably fell on the OTHER end of that scale – but the point is, I did something that terrified me and you know what? It wasn’t so bad. I even went back up on stage for another song. I lived – I embarrassed myself – but I lived.
Why is this relavent? Well, that fear of public speaking crosses over into business portions of my life. I can’t stand calling strangers on the phone and asking for work – but it’s a part of my job and I have to learn to control that fear to be a successful business person. By making the conscious choice to put my fear aside and do something that terrifies me, I’m growing not only as a business owner, but as a whole person as well. Suddenly, picking up the phone and talking to strangers doesn’t seem so bad after making a fool of yourself on stage in front of dozens of people.
So…what have you done that’s terrified you?