Category Archives: Just Stuff

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Looking forward to 2009

November 20, 2008 – 8:32 pm

I always seem to be able to find some “supposed” reason why I can’t take a few minutes to update my blog. In December I’m going to do another Blog-a-Day for the entire month. I did this a few months ago. I wasn’t perfect, I missed a few days, but it was fun and kept things rolling.

At the moment I’m flying back to Tampa from Boston. I had some business there with a client for my consulting business. Boston was COLD this week but then I understand Tampa was too.

I have one wedding remaining this year. I shot 18 weddings this year. These were either my own or shooting second for friends. I also shot a couple of weddings for Bella Pictures. I’m hoping to have about as many weddings in 2009 but I really don’t want any more than that. A goal for ‘09 is to greatly increase the number of high school seniors photographed.

I am in the process of developing my wedding pricing for next year. Instead of focusing on Collections I am going to give brides more options to build photography packages a la carte. I’ll be adding fun new products so check my website in the Info area under Weddings in the coming weeks.

By Jeff | Also posted in Senior Portraits, Wedding Photography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Back in D.C. this week

August 28, 2008 – 11:06 pm

I’m back in Washington this week doing work for HUD.  With the current environment of the housing market HUD is expecting their business volume to explode.  The problems with Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac is driving business to HUD.  This, combined with recent legislation to assist homeowners with troubled mortgages, has raised concerns within the agency that their current business processes will not be able to effectively service the increased volume.  The consulting company that I work for, along with our partner, have been hired to re-engineer some of their critical internal processes.  I am supporting a lady who is facilitating these business changes and a giant in the industry of Lean Business Process.  Lean follows the principals laid down by Toyota and Henry Ford. It’s purpose is to eliminate waste in the form of unnecessary and/or non-value added process steps and focuses on only the essential steps.  As an example, one of the processes that was being re-engineered required 23 review/approval signatures.  After the team analyzed and re-engineered the process only 3 signatures were required!

For 15 years I have been a consultant implementing finance software systems.  One of the most frustrating things about going into a new client’s business to implement a system has been seeing all of the broken BUSINESS processes and not being able to make the smart changes.  We would point out that, “Well, if you changed x or y in the way you do business not only would it benefit the implementation of this $2 million software that you just purchased but guess what, you probably wouldn’t need the software.”  Of course we couldn’t say that exactly but when we did elude to it we were met with, “Oh, we can’t change that, you are here to implement the software, not change the way we do things.”  The Lean process is different.  With Lean we facilitate meetings that help the business process owners see their broken business processes and re-engineer to processes that eliminate wasted, non-value added activities in day to day operations.

This experience has also helped me with my photography business.  Lean focuses on the customer.  By making my own business streamlined and not wasting energy on inefficient tasks I have been able to free time to devote to taking care of my customers.

It was a little grey in D.C. today but after leaving the office I walked by the White House to snap a few pictures.  Here’s one from the front lawn.

By Jeff | Tagged | Comments (1)

Kickball on the Mall

August 20, 2008 – 11:51 pm

It was a beautiful day in the Capital city today.  A cool front came through Tuesday night and the humidity and temp were down so instead of going directly to subway from the office I decided to walk over to the Mall and get a picture of the Capital. The Mall always has something going on and throughout history has always been a gathering place.  Today wasn’t any different.  It seems as though there are coed adult kickball leagues that play there regularly.  it was fun watching these guys and girls play a game that I haven’t played since grade school and from the looks of it, I’m missing out!

By Jeff | Tagged | Comments (2)

In honor of the Summer Olympics…

August 19, 2008 – 8:25 pm

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In D.C. this week

August 18, 2008 – 11:07 pm

This week I’m in Washington working for one of my consulting clients.  I left my wife, and daughter at home in Tampa to ride out hurricane Fay.  Nice guy, huh?  Unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything about it except make sure the house and yard were secure before I left.  Fortunately, it looks like Fay is going to pass to the east of Tampa which will put them on the side that gets the least wind and rain.  For the most part it’s just going to be a rainy couple of days.

I’m staying at a hotel in Rosslyn that is a block away from the Iwo Jima memorial and only a couple of blocks from the Arlington Cemetery.  These are certainly two of our country’s most precious treasures.  Joe Rosenthal took the original picture of Easy Company raising the flag on Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1943.  Easy Company had been fighting for 4 days and had a casualty rate of almost 40% to date.  The picture that Rosenthal captured was actually the second raising of the American flag.  Joe Campbell captured a lesser known picture of the original flag coming down and it being replaced with the flag that Joe Rosenthal’s famous and moving image captured.

“In that moment, Rosenthal’s camera recorded the soul of a nation.” 
. . .Editors of US Camera Magazine. 

“It was like shooting a football game. You never knew what you got on film.” 
. . . Joe Rosenthal, Photographer

The picture inspired sculptor Felix Deweldon, who created a life sized model of the photograph.  It was later cast in bronze and brought to Washington in September 1954 as part of the Marine Corps Memorial designed by Horace  Peaslee.
Here is a picture that I took of the memorial this evening.  I processed the image to give it an aged feel with exaggerated film grain.  
By Jeff | Tagged | Comments (0)

Elisa+Anthony’s engagement session

August 17, 2008 – 12:55 pm

Later today I will be meeting with Elisa and Anthony to take some fun pictures of them before their wedding which will be Oct. 18.  I haven’t had a chance to meet Anthony and it’s been a while since I last met with Elisa so we are going to meet at a coffee shop first and chat for a while.  Check back in a day or so to see the their pictures.

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Maya, Erica+T

August 16, 2008 – 9:40 pm

Today I had family session with T and his family.  They drove over to Tampa from the Florida east coast and I’m honored that they would come that far to have family pictures made by me.  Maya is a real cutie.  She is one smart little girl, knows the alphabet, colors, numbers and her address by heart.  On top of that she has wonderful manners; Erica and T are excellent parents!  The session was a lot of fun, we took our time and let Maya get used to the studio.  Between taking the pictures and then going through almost 350 images to make their selections, we spent about 4 hours together.  Here are a couple from the selections they made.

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A post a day-two weeks later

August 15, 2008 – 12:39 pm

I have to admit, I haven’t been 100% perfect, I missed a couple of days but I tried to make up for them by making multiple entries on a few days.  Is that cheating?  I’m kinda getting into the groove of this and finding it’s a lot of fun.  Time and everything else going on is the challenge.  Like shooting a wedding all day and not getting home until 12:30 a.m. makes it a little hard to get an entry in that day.  Travel and consulting work also makes it difficult.

Thanks to technology, my iPhone, and a really sick App for it, I can now create blogs when away from my home office right on my phone!  Next week I will be D.C. for the entire week and will be trying it out.  I can’t guarantee that the typing will be perfect but I’ll be able to make entries and even upload pictures from my phone! Should be interesting.  Stay tuned.

By Jeff | Tagged | Comments (0)

Make-up tips when being photographed

August 13, 2008 – 5:22 pm

I get asked a lot by the girls if their make-up is ok when they come in for their senior pictures.  Most of the time they look great, other times, well, let’s just say I should have posted this earlier.  

 

[caption id="attachment_214" align="alignnone" width="900" caption="courtesy of senior portrait artists (spa)"]courtesy of senior portrait artists (spa)[/caption]
By Jeff | Also posted in Senior Portraits | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

A post a day - one week into it

August 7, 2008 – 11:54 pm

I knew this was going to be a challenge for me and the first week proved to be difficult.  I guess technically I failed since I didn’t post on Tuesday or Wednesday but I’m am intent on making it up and posting regularly.  Therefore, I posted 3 entries today to get caught up! :-).  As you saw below, I was in Philadelphia the first part of the week for a meeting.  Tuesday night I was up until 3 a.m. preparing for a very important meeting on Wednesday.  Wednesday I had to hit the airport directly from the meeting and after 3 hours sleep the night before, I was in no shape to blog when I got home.  Especially after being delayed from leaving Philly for 2 hours.

Over the past 15 years I’ve spent A LOT of time on planes and in airports and it’s something that I’ve come to NOT enjoy much.  It’s becoming even less enjoyable to fly these days with fuel prices so high and the airlines doing everything they can to stop the bleeding.  It’s come to the point now on US Air that you have to pay $2 just to get a soda on the flight and I’m sure they are not the only airline that is doing this.

An airline that I do enjoy is JetBlue.  I was working regularly in Manhattan for 5 years and flew them every week from Tampa to JFK.  It was all one class of seats but they were reasonably priced, provided friendly service, had all leather seats with TONS of leg room in EVERY row, and had a TV and XM radio in every seat.  Not a bad way to fly really.  Let me give you an example of their customer service.  I used to take the last flight of the day out of JFK to home and during the winter months it wasn’t unusual for them to delay the last flight so that connectors coming from buffalo or some other place that was having bad weather could make the connection to sunny Florida.  Well, this one particular night JetBlue delayed us for well over an hour so that the connecting folks would make the flight.  That in itself was good customer service, if you ask me.  I’d sure be happy knowing a plane waited.  Anyway, we were delayed over an hour and the captain went into the terminal and came back with a stack of huge boxes of Dunkin Doughnuts and walked down the aisle himself handing out napkins and doughnuts to all of us sitting there waiting for the other plane to come in.  How many airlines have you heard of that happening on?

By Jeff | Also posted in Travel | Tagged | Comments (0)

Philadelphia

August 4, 2008 – 11:19 pm

This week I’m in the city of Brotherly Love, Philipelphia.  I’ve been consulting for the past 15 years in cities up and down the east coast but have never been in downtown Philly.  I spent some time at a client out in Valley Forge but that’s as close as I came.  This is a neat city with a lot of museums, city fountians, and historic sites.  Many of the streets are very narrow reflecting the original urban layout.  Here are a few pictures taken with my point and shoot camera.

By Jeff | Also posted in Travel | Tagged | Comments (0)

A blog a day for the entire month of August!

August 1, 2008 – 5:59 pm

I’m going to make every effort possible to post an entry every day this month.  I’ve seen other people do this to get themselves in the habit.  Well, I’m terrible at regularly posting so maybe this will help.  Part of my problem is that I try to hard to come up with something cool or clever to write about.  Those that know me know that I am neither of these so I’m just going to “let it flow”.  This is going to be a busy month.  We have landed a sizable contract with a government agency for some extensive business process work so I’m going to be traveling quite a bit.  I have a wedding, a family portrait, and an engagement shoot scheduled and I need to get caught up with processing of past shoots.

If I can make an entry every day THIS month, keeping up with it in the future is going to be a breeze!

My daughter was leaving the house and she phoned back telling me to get my camera that there was a hawk sitting on the fence next to the garage.  

Sure enough…

By Jeff | Tagged | Comments (0)