Viva Las Vegas?

As Winter can’t quite make up its mind about when to die this year, Laura and I will be heading out west to Las Vegas, or more precisely Henderson, NV.

I’m going there for a Directory and Identity conference, hoping to learn new things and Laura’s going… well, just to hang out with me! Isn’t that cool?

When I’m not in my conference, we’ll be heading out to the desert for some photo ops and possibly some night light shots of the strip, so it’s doubling as a photography trip.  We might even go back to Red Rock Canyon. And I think I’ve been persuaded to do some indoor skydiving.

This year, unlike last, we’ll be staying in the hotel which is hosting the conference. Last time, I tried to “maximize” our Hilton points, but the hassle just wasn’t worth it, and this hotel looks to be VERY posh.

Is Winter Really Over?

It’s probably not, but it certainly feels like it. After the post below, many of you outside of our area might be thinking it’s still cold up here. Not so! In fact, it’s now 73 and a warm Spring day, even though it’s not really Spring yet. Not only that, we already have our US tax return sitting in the bank!

On that note, Laura and I will be heading out to go shopping! Well, to buy a couple of new lamps for the bedroom. Not that big of a purchase, but something we need.

With Spring knocking on the door, Laura has been moving furniture around and thinking about what our next home improvement project should be. I’ve hijacked that thought and decided that we’re going to wire the living room for surround sound speakers. I finally figured out a way to make it work with a minimum of effort and cost.

—- UPDATE —

I forgot to hit “publish”, but we’ve just gotten back from a nice shopping day. We have a pair of lamps now that look to fit the bill.

Winter Ain’t Left Yet

Last night, some fierce winter storms blew in across the entire eastern part of the country. We had an unseasonably large amount of snow: over 6 inches, maybe more in parts. With quite a lot of snow [for our area anyway] headed our way, it looked like I would be snowed in for the day. Sure enough, I was!

Until I made Laura shovel the driveway!

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Well, I didn’t make her. [Don’t worry, Norma: I’m not a slave driver!] I started it, and she started taking pictures so I offered to take pictures of her doing it. Well, she had fun and I had fun. Did I tell you I love snow? It smelled like a ski resort here today. And we even had hot chocolate in our “lodge”.

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And when I say she had fun, I mean it! Notice the snow flying through the air?

Ah, well. It was like a mini vacation, but I have to go back to work tomorrow. As you can see behind her, the roads are now clear – they sent trucks to scrape all the roads just so I could make it to work.

How kind of them. [Darn]

Taxes And The Waiting Game

I love to be early, and this year is no exception. I have what I think is most if not all of my information entered into TurboTax. This is made possible by the marvels of electronic form delivery. Gotta love that! So, I have to wonder now: “what am I missing?”

I hate that feeling where I think I’m done, but don’t know if it’s really true. Will some other bank send me a form? Have I listed all my deductions? Is there something out there that I forgot? These are the questions that keep me from clicking on “Send to IRS”.

The big question, though, is “How long do I wait before I ‘know’ I have all the forms?”

So, here I sit with TurboTax open and thinking over these questions and trying to remember if there is any other source of income or deduction that I have to put down.

Hopslam!

Yes, it’s that time of year again when Bell’s Hopslam hits the shelves. Actually, it didn’t even hit the shelves, but more like the receiving area and straight into my hands. The entire shipment of this rare, seasonal beer has sold out in one day. Maybe not all, but certainly all of the stock around here. So, I’m pretty excited that I managed to obtain 2 full cases of this rare liquid gold. That means I can have 1 per week if I want it to last an entire year.

I had a good amount last year, but it wasn’t quite two cases. This year, I should be able to make it stretch out further.

I had my first one tonight and it’s as good or better than I remember.

Yum!

What’s In A Name?

After attending so many sessions at the Imaging USA convention, it has be come clear to us, especially since Laura is so key a part of our photographic endeavor, that the name “Jeff Phillips Photography” is an insufficient and incomplete name and that we should find something more appropriate.

Our dilemma, though, is that we are having trouble putting a label to what we do. We’re having trouble because of several things. First, we are not just “me” now, but “us”. Second, we don’t really have a specific niche, so the name has to be flexible enough to use regardless of the kind of photography we do [for example, to say “Phillips Portraits” may be incomplete if we do more, and we do]. Third, we want the name to be reflective of our style – which we haven’t defined yet. We want our name to be high-end, yet not out of reach; stylish, but not snooty; artistic, but not pretentious [well, not TOO pretentious…] and elegantly simple. We also want it to be something we can grow into. You can see how hard this is. It’s especially hard for us since we are very new to this realm.

If anyone has a suggestion, we’d be glad to hear it.

Imaging USA: Days 2 & 3

Okay, so I’m not going to blog about them separately since the days are a week past and they all run together, but I did want to mention some of the great things that I learned.

First of all, we met some great people and learned a lot from them. One of our favorites was actually part of the Microsoft featured speaker booth in the Expo: Angela Carson-Post who owns a studio up near Detroit. Angela was great to listen to and extremely informative on the business of running a studio – which was exactly what we needed to hear. I think I took the most notes of the conference at her sessions. She did three sessions, one each day at the EXPO.

Another favorite, possibly because they were first and from Texas, were the guys of TriCoast Photography. What I came out of that session with was that I needed to learn more about lighting and using the tools that we already have, like both the big lights and the camera strobes. They taught me a few techniques that I’m anxious to try out [I’ll have to wait until the snow stops, though!] for outside lighting. They also raved on the native wireless communications abilities of the Canon flashes and how they use them to create modern lighting for their portraits as well as save lots of room when they travel.

Also on my favorite list is a photographer from Chicago named Bob Davis. Bob was very encouraging, since as a high-end photographer, he has photographed many famous people and has a passion for what he does. He told us to get back to the basics of photography and “practice, practice, practice!” which we certainly need to do.

Overall, there were many sessions which gave us inspiration and motivation and we hope to continue that and bring excellence, consistency, and passion to our work as photographers. It will take time and work, but I feel we can do it.

Brr!

It’s rather cold today. Temperature outside is currently 17 degrees. Wow!

I’ve been recuperating from our trip to Phoenix where I picked up some kind of bug. I’m convalescing today and hope that I will be good tomorrow, since I have to go to work anyway – even if I feel bad.

I did learn quite a bit at Imaging USA and I will post more when I can get around to thinking about it. But for right now, I’m just glad to be home and a little rested.

Imaging USA: Day 0

It hasn’t started yet, but we’re here in Phoenix and have done some early reconnaissance to find out where we should go, where to park, and how to get there. It looks like we will have to really push getting up early – the convention starts at 7AM. Luckily for us, that’s 7AM Arizona time – 2 hours earlier than where we come from [that’s actually 9AM “our” time].

We first found some things to eat [which of course is VERY important] and then headed to the downtown convention center. We walked around getting our bearings and then made a few more stops for groceries to keep in the room. We’re going to have to get up so early, that most breakfast places won’t be open, so we had to get our own to keep in our tiny little fridge.

I’ll try to post as the days go on about interesting things that may happen here – or I may collapse with exhaustion and not type a single additional word until we leave. I hope to get some great perspectives on running a photography business as well as some additional technical education on both photography and the tools associated with it.

None of this blogging or email would be possible without the help of my mother-in-law Norma. So, Thank You Norma! for staying up late and obtaining for me the decryption key for my laptop which failed to boot up properly on the first night here. She painstakingly read out the 400 digit code [not really, but it SEEMED like 400 digits] to unlock the machine so that I could boot into Vista. I have since turned off Bitlocker for the duration of the trip. I needed to anyway since I’m going to upgrade to Windows 7 Beta soon. I hear it’s much faster… 🙂

And I have to try out CS4 and Lightroom 2 on the next version of Windows!