First, my business cards arrived.  I bought them from vistaprint and got 200 for less than the price of a vodka tonic at happy hour.  They look great.  The only thing I will say is you need to be prepared to get constant email from them afterwards.  They also have so many other good products that you have to stick to your resolve while checking out, or you are liable to buy something from one of the five pages you have to click through to pay.

Also, although I am trying to get away from it, my Canon Vixia HF S21 High Definition video camera arrived.  This is going to allow me to film a couple commercials I am working on.  One is for a national restaurant chain, and the other is for Nokia who was kind enough to send me one of the Nuron phones in order to make this happen.

Also, bury the lead, today I used wix to make my website, photovous.com. I had a photographer friend a few years ago who was asking me if I knew a good place to get templates to display his portfolio.  If this was around then, I would have said start there.  This thing is so easy to use it’s ridiculous.  Bonus, since I need to populate it with content, this website gives me a few good ideas for some themes for future shoots.

I’ve also spent some time just getting reacquainted with all the features on my current Nikon, and lots of time checking out some really good videos on what other fashion and glamour photographers are doing.

That’s all for now (I’m sure that’s not the first time a blogger has ever ended a post that way).

However, the only contact information I’ve been able to give them is my business card from my day job.  Really not that impressive.  So I decided to order my own business cards.

In the struggle to decide what it should look like, I felt like that scene in American Psycho , and if you haven’t seen it in a while you really should click the link and have a look.

Anyway, for the beginning fashion photographer without a vast resume, my choice boiled down to two conflicting factors.  Pick a card with an image I created, but had nothing to do with the type of work I’d like to do.  Or pick a card that projects what I would like to do, but with a photo I didn’t take.

Here were the choices:

I think looking at it now, this was sort of a no-brainer.  I waited a couple days and when I revisited it, the fashion model was the obvious choice. But I do find it interesting how, when caught up in the moment, I was able to jump back and forth justifying each one, and so torn as to what direction I should go in.

I guess I relate this story to say sometimes we need to remove ourselves from the situation for a little while in order to come back and see what the clear choice is.  And that may be just as true for picking a business card, as it is for life in general.

So if a box is good enough to get 21-million YouTube hits, it’s good enough for me to use at home instead of spending $80-$300 at the store.

I spent this last weekend following directions from this really good tutorial for a DIY light tent.  Essentially you are cutting out the sides out of a box, using a piece of Bristol board as a hard cyc, and then covering it with muslin.

Of course mine doesn’t look as professional as something being mass produced, but the sense of satisfaction I have and the ability to recreate this (semi) quickly and cheaply in different sizes is worth its weight in…well, not gold because that is so expensive right now…but definitely worth its weight in Diet Cokes.

I will say I had the hardest time trying to find a box.  I scoured the strip malls of town looking in dumpsters and eventually settled on a Miller Lite box, but it was odd sized.  So I bit the bullet and went to Office Depot where I found a perfectly new 14″x14″ box for less than $2.

Here is what my “light tent” looks like:

And, just to show you a quick snapshot of what you can get out of this, here is a picture of some tomatoes.  I’m not particularly proud of this picture, but I think it’s good to put up just so people can say to themselves, “I can do better than that!”  Plus, it  finishes off this post nicely.  I will be taking more product photos in the coming days, so we’ll be able to see how well this thing works.

Who is this guy?  That is the natural response after I say hello, so I was expecting you’d ask yourself that.

I am a guy who has a passion for pictures.  Despite that, I’ve spent the last 15 years dealing with video.  So, as they say (whoever “they” are) it’s never too late.  We’ll see about that.  And you, my new friend, due to the wonder that is WordPress, can now follow along.