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Citizens for Sound are really sounding good, they’ve got enough original material now that they are playing on Thursday nights at Ocean View Fishing Pier. If you are there, don’t get in the way of the guy with the big camera!

More photos from the other night available here.

Last weekend my good friends Drew Odom and Michele Mills were in town - they both stayed at my place. We just generally hung out and misbehaved and just had a blast. It was good to have them here.

For most of the weekend, I carted my Canon AE-1 (30 year old manual 35mm film camera) and snapped off shot after shot in the 36 exposure roll of film that I swore was in it. I even was responsible with it and brought along two spare rolls of film. I took what I think were great shots at dinner Friday night, on the Virginia Beach oceanfront on Saturday, at a cookout Sunday afternoon and at the craziest Karaoke this world has seen at a place in mcdowntown Virginia Beach (lately I don’t take a ton of pictures when I’m out with a camera, but the ones I take usually count).

Tuesday on my lunchbreak I went to go get the film developed. I went out of my way to Walgreens and after parking I wound the film up. As I did this, it didn’t feel like anything was happening. I opened the camera - there was no film! Talk about stupid. Talk about ruining your day. Now I know that with that camera watch the film rewinder for movement when you advance the film. I could have sworn that I loaded the camera after using it last!

Life goes on. No cool 35mm pics from me. We did manage a (possibly NSFW) photoshoot at around 2am Friday night. That was a fun learning experience for me that is furthering my interest in taking untraditional portraits of people - something more interesting than typical Olan Mills portraits. I reckon it does help to have a pretty lady that is willing to sit in front of my lens. Thanks to Drew for the setup and pointers on framing and to Michele on, well, being Michele. Hopefully we can get some good prints made to send to her.

A really good friend of mine had graduation yesterday - it also happened that his daughter was graduating right along with him! As a gift I offered to do a portrait session. Using a borrowed backdrop kit (Thanks Tom!) and two strobes firing into white umbrellas I got to work with these folks.

All in all, I’m pleased with the results. Some things I would have liked to change would have been separating the folks from the background (as to not see it’s texture), have a soft light on the background, and also the use of Photoshop (don’t have yet on new laptop) to make them “pop” a little more. I’m still happy though with the whole thing - I learned a lot and I think I gave them a great gift - I made several 5×7 and 8×10 prints, along with a CD with all the images from yesterday.

There are a couple more images from yesterday on flickr - here.

I went to a place called RJs in Greenville, NC today. They have soul food like you wouldn’t believe. This was some of the best food I ever had. Aunt Dorothy and my Great Aunt Rachel were visiting from Florida at my parents’ house - so I went down today to visit and we went there for dinner. I highly recommend driving up to six hours away to eat this food - it’s that good.

This plate is the trio - two pieces of fried chicken, a mound of Eastern Carolina Pork Barbeque, and yes that is a half rack of ribs under there. Two sides included - I got macaroni and cheese and collard greens.

Some photos of us are online here - I am not thrilled with my job on those. Taking pictures of people (besides myself) is my worst aspect of being a photographer.