Love Birds Wedding Shower Theme

My wife Jennifer recently designed and arranged the pieces below for a wedding shower. She arranged the flowers herself too. (She's like Martha Stewart, except sexy.) Before the shower I took some photos because, well, that's what I do.

Jennifer on the other hand does all kinds of stuff. She's a talented graphic designer, experienced marketing director, saleswoman powerhouse, event planner, and the art director on many of my shoots. (And to think I only married her for her body.) You can find Jen's designs and many more things at her company, Stunique.

Oh, and the Love Birds invitation is one of her original designs too:

Love Birds Wedding Shower Theme by Stunique

All images are Copyright Terry Smith, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

Photography of the USS Arizona Memorial in Oahu, Hawaii

I recently finished up editing my photography from Oahu including these pictures from the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Hope you enjoy them.

USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii

All images are Copyright Terry Smith, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Book Review of The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes by Joe McNally

Joe McNally's The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes is one of the most in-depth technical how-to books on photography I have ever read.

Simply put, if you shoot with Nikon flashes you MUST buy this book. (Nearly all of it is applicable to other manufacturer's flashes as well.) This book is not a manual. You can not find this material in the manuals. I know. I've read them. As for other books aimed at small flashes, there are a tiny hand-full that are uniformly unenlightening (pun intended).

The double-truck on pages 6 and 7 is a photo of Joe's flash equipment. I count 16 flashes, but I could have missed one or two! I can think of some extremely great photographers who are currently shooting predominately with the Nikon flash system, but I do not know of any photography who has shot as extensively with Nikon flashes and for as many years with them as Joe has (and who has the extraordinary images to prove it). Now, what if someone like Joe were to do a brain dump and spill EVERYTHING he knows about shooting with small flashes? Well, that is what is in the book.

Besides the technical tips and equipment info, one of the things I like most about the Hot Shoe Diaries is that it has reassured me that different things I have been doing, or simply guessed at, are indeed the right choices to make. Since a lot of the information presented in the book simply has not been out there in the past, I have had to guess my way through some things. The popularity of Strobist has made this book possible, which Joe fully acknowledges, by creating the market for it, but even with all of the information on Strobist I still have been left feeling "un-assured". For me, this book has really reinforced my thought process when it comes to lighting setups and how to get from step one to the end goal of pre-visualized image.

As Joe best sums it up himself:

This is not a book of certainties. It is not a manual. It is, as the title states, a diary. It is an ongoing account of adventures and misadventures, of accidents--happy and otherwise--and of successes and failures. It is an irreverent (go figure) brain dump of accumulated knowledge, much of it hard won in the school of hard knocks, bad bonces, lousy exposures, and misguided notions

While I have highlighted the book extensively (hence, the five-highlighter rating at the top of this review), the best nod I can give any book is whether I will spend the time to read it twice. With this book, I will. Then I expect to use it as a reference for awhile and eventually read it cover-to-cover a third time.

Buy it now:


Click the link for a review of Joe's last book, The Moment It Clicks.

Digital Railroad Liquidation

Fellow stock photographers might be interested to know that I just received an email from travel photographer David Sanger who is the ombudsman between SAA and Diablo Management regarding the liquidation of Digital Railroad. He said Diablo is sending out cashier's checks for payments that have been received since November, 2008 but is lacking some photographer's addresses. Mine was one of them. Hey, late money is better than no money at all! I made one sale after the DRR collapse to a buyer who had found the image through DRR before they went belly-up, but I didn't know I had any pending sales with them.

David's email went to five other photographers as well. I'm sure you'll either be getting an email or a check soon if you are one of the lucky ones on the list.

Traveling to Washington D.C.

I'll be traveling to Washington D.C. in a few days and photographing from before sunrise to after sunset for 4 days (and a half excluding a sunset!). I haven't been in D.C. since before 9/11. If anyone has been there recently and has any travel or photo-related advice please email me or comment here. I would love to hear from you.

I've read in a couple of places that no bags thicker than 4" are allowed on the metro. If that is really being enforced, which I doubt, then it would make taking the metro from the airport to my hotel downtown rather difficult (unless I FedEx my luggage), not to mention going anywhere with a camera which is thicker than 4" even without a camera bag!

I've applied for a Congressional Park land photo permit and heard nothing so far. I'll apply for National Park Service permits next week when I can guess at the weather better. Washington! Bureaucratic red tape! I guess we should feel safer that they are protecting us from all those terrorists with cameras walking around everywhere...

The Eternal Flame at the John F Kennedy grave site. Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington, Virginia.

All images are Copyright Terry Smith. All Rights Reserved.

Venice, Italy

I recently updated the Venice, Italy photography gallery on my website. Please go check it out. This image below was created after I had been shooting gondoliers for awhile and wanted to do something beyond just a standard shot in order to capture the motion of the gondoliers and the gondolas. Fortunately, I had found a canal that was a popular gondolier hangout with gondolas passing by every few seconds. Southern Americans might equate this particular canal to their local Sonic Drive-In on a Friday or Saturday night.

One of things I lucked out on was the combination of capturing the motion just as I intended and having a gondolier subject in the frame that was dressed, well, like a gondolier should be. If you've never been to Venice I don't want to spoil your idealized visions of it for you, but the truth is some gondoliers, certainly a minority, look more like teenagers at a Sonic Drive-In than gondoliers. This one though clearly has his gondolier wardrobe altogether.

Gondolier in Venice, Italy

All images are Copyright Terry Smith. All Rights Reserved.