The Asheville Ad Club Addy's

Saturday night I received a gold Addy award for the book that I shot for  Lark Books called Keeping Chickens - part of the Homemade Living series. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this book with my "teammates" author Ashley English, art director and stylist Chris Bryant and editor Nicole McConville. The gold means I go on to the regional Addy's, if I understand it correctly! I have made some good friends and business contacts through the Asheville Ad Club, so I'm certainly glad I joined. Below are some of the photos from the book that I submitted:

Digital Photography Coaching

I had my first day of one on one photography training yesterday with the delightful Corrie Woods. Corrie and her husband, Jay Lichty, are in business together selling the beautiful hand made guitars that Jay crafts - their business is Lichty Guitars. Corrie photographs the making of each guitar in Jay's studio, the final products as well as the various musicians that come to try out his soon to be famous guitars, so Corrie needed a few tips on getting the specific type of shots she needed. We talked about lighting, composition, depth of field and working with people. We also discussed naming and archiving files, choosing what type of file to shoot (jpg, raw, tif)  and different types of imaging software. Corrie already has some experience so she grasped what we talked about instantly - I can't wait to see what she does next. I loved the experience! I'm available for this kind of work, so if you or anyone you know is interested, feel free to contact me.

Lightroom Makes It Easy

I have been working on a fun personal project this week - a book documenting my third wonderful year with my boyfriend, Steve. It started out with a simple idea - I would just make a card featuring photos from some our experiences from the past year, but then before I knew it I was designing a cover for a custom made box I recently discovered that you can order from WHCC. Once I had that "shipped" online, I started tinkering with the idea of creating a book. Nothing big, just a simple book. However, in the process of reviewing the hundreds, maybe thousands of photos I've taken, I realized that if I was going to put this much time just editing the photos, I needed a bigger story, and thus, a bigger book. So, two days later, after working at a frantic pace, I finished printing a sweet little collection of images from our past year together - with the goal of doing one every year in the future. Of course, the book was designed to fit inside the box I had ordered.

What made the entire project less overwhelming was the wonderful product made by Adobe called Lightroom. I had just upgraded to version 3, and what a worthy upgrade purchase that was. I was able to create collections that I could quickly drag selected photos to, and I could easily move them around to put them in the right order. The new print module made it very easy to lay out the pages, and I was able to print two pages on each sheet of paper which were centered so that it just required a few chops on the paper cutter to make the pages the same size and correctly lined up. Finally, I took my book to Will at Henco in downtown Asheville, and he quickly punched the holes to make a spiral binding. Voila! Done.

I've already created a new folder called "Year Four" so that I can just drag images there to eliminate the hours of editing next year. Maybe next time I'll spring for one of the WHCC beautiful bound books.