I haven't fallen off the face of the earth! It's been a crazy few weeks and I have a lot to share. We had our new office grand opening open house, which was fantastically fun. I also had my first ever Mind Meld, which I'll talk about later too. This was amazing and something I hope to continue on a regular basis. Then we went on a family vacation to Rocksprings guest ranch - the same place we hold our Digital Bootcamps™. What a cool place! Lots of horsing around - on horseback. Now, I am getting ready to leave for our trip to Africa until July 17th. I will have a TON of new info to post when I come back - photos from the open house, details on the Mind Meld, new Lightroom 2.0 tips and tricks, Images from some cool sessions I had, and of course images and stories from Africa.

Our Africa trip, as some of you know, is to visit and do service work for an orphanage in Rwanda. I was really inspired by photographer Ben Edwards to target this orphanage out of the many deserving places in Africa. We are also making monetary donations from our own profits as well as with donations from fellow friends and photographers like you. We'd love it if you'd visit our Karma page (on the left navigation links) and share some coffee money too and help us change lives.

If I get access to internet while in Africa, I'll post some images and info, but it is quetionable at this point. I look forward to posting gobs of good stuff as soon as I return!

Live Aloha everyone  

Kevin 

A friend of mine just solved a big problem. Not his problem, but a problem that many photographers have. They don't want to spend so much time chained to the computer. They want their images to look cutting edge - like the best of the best out there, but they also don't have the time or expertise to get them there. Bill Moore, a past Bootcamper and good friend of mine, has grown a very successful boutique photography business, but in doing so he learned something important - the need for outsourcing time consuming work. He and a partner formed Silverback Imaging, a full service "back-end" studio company that will do everything from editing your images to color correction, enhancements (using our Actions, of course!) to posting online to album design. All you have to do is shoot. How refreshing! Check out his site to see what he has to offer: Silverback Imaging

Interestingly, I just finished reading an advance copy of Dane Sanders new book, the Fast Track Photographer. This is a great book that I highly recommend. It is not technical, but instead brilliant in it's wisdom and insight into what it takes to be successful as a pro photographer - no matter what your ultimate skill or goals are. One of Dane's points in the book is to outsource whatever work you don't really need to be doing yourself, so that you can focus on what you do best and makes you the most money. Enter Silverback! Check it out, I think it's invaluable reading: fasttrackphotographer.com

So I've just spent a mind bending few days digging up images for the walls of our new studio. I pretty much had to start from scratch to get things to look right in all the new spaces. We did a combination of canvas prints, metal plate prints, and acrylic prints. I'll post some resources later - once I see the results. Some of these are new vendors, so I'll let you know how it goes. Anyway, it was quite a chore to pick just want we wanted out of so many images - you know what it's like...

One thing that I did enjoy was browsing through images from my past Italy workshops and looking at some of the funny out-takes that won't necessarily make it to the walls, but gave me a chuckle anyway. I thought you might enjoy some of these too! Go to the photo gallery and click on the thumbnail to start viewing all of them. 

Here's one of them. I caught this while driving down the road in Roma. Love the devious look on this guys face as he molests the man(nequin) !

Hey, as Action Heroes we have a responsibilty to save the world, right? So, let's get busy! I've added a new section, Karma Korner. Check it out. Right now, the main project on our plate is a trip to Rwanda, Africa in July to bring assistance to an orphanage. Please read more about it in the Karma Korner. Save the world!!

I just added some images from the workshop I taught last week in Breckenridge, CO. They are in the Photo Gallery section at left. Our first model was the young blonde girl. She was a dancer and full of energy. The class objective was to try a variety of situations and locations and also to experiment with lenses and techniques they weren't normally accustomed to. I used my Lensbaby for many of the images. I really love the feel of that lens. It's always a challenge to make a single person look fun and spontaneous, especially when surrounded by 20+ photographers!

Towards the end of our session with the young lady, another lovely woman walked by and we asked her to model for us. Just ask, right! She was very flattered and really got in to the posing. She's the one with the purple hair and fun and funky body adornments.

We then had a great couple who were actually just married the day before! They were kind enough to forgo their honeymoon just to be with us and let us photograph them all over again. (ok, so they didn't really skip the honeymoon). We almost got in big trouble while working with them as I had an idea to have them riding a bike together - him packing her on the handlebars. We walked past a bike shop, and Clare ran inside to ask about a bike. Nobody was to be found anywhere, so she just grabbed a bike and they rode it around outside the shop. One of the employees eventually came back and was quite surprised to see us on their bike. We asked for forgiveness and he let us finish up with it.

Here's one image from the day, see the others in the gallery: