Running a YouTube channel for work

In today's blog post I wanted to write about a big new project that I am working on. A while back when I started working for Peace Camera I pitched the idea of doing a YouTube channel for the store to build up our social media presence and use it to showcase certain items in the store. Once we had finished the move to the new store location I was given the go ahead by the owner to start doing these videos.

For the first video I decided to do an unboxing video as those videos are some of the most popular videos on YouTube. We had just received one of the brand new Sigma 85mm F1.4 Art lenses and I decided to choose this for the first video. I tried to film it while the store was open and even if we were slow enough for me to film there was just too many distractions so I decided to film when the store was closed. 

i spent a few hours editing and making some lower thirds animations and I published the first video to the new channel. 

in the first day we gained 5 subscribers to the channel and a few comments that contained good feedback. The owner loved it as asked me to start doing more videos for the store. We decided that I would film and produce a video once a week to the channel. Now the next big thing to figure out is the content that I want to produce for the store. 

For my next video I decided to talk all about our used gear section as we are always buying and selling used gear. 

I am having a lot of fun filming and editing these videos. It not only forces me to push out a new video every week it also is helping me learn a lot more about video editing and also motion graphics. This week I filmed our latest video which was all about our huge supply of seamless background paper.

Next weeks video I think will be all about our wide selection of film developing supplies as every one of us at the store loves to shoot with film and it is certainly not dead in our eyes.

Now that I am producing these videos on a regular basis I need to start doing more videos for my personal YouTube channel. If you would like to subscribe to either the Peace Camera channel or my channel I will put links to both of them down below. 

Thanks for reading and I will see you in next weeks blog.

Peace Camera's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwLiuDE0QbHVdhksLgayQuw 

My Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdeTbKXbLpcEeRacp2l5J5g 

Another trip around the sun

Thursday January 26 was my 46th birthday. As I look back at the past year it was full of up's and down's. I lost my mom at the very beginning of the year and then I decided to make a career change and leave the world of IT and enter a career in the creative field of photography and videography. This is my passion and it's want I want to do for the rest of my life. 

I have also been dealing with a bunch of medical issues. I have a hiatal hernia and that means I get a lot of acid reflux and pretty much feel like crap most of the time. I am on a very restricted diet and I am unable to eat most of the foods I want and even with the medicine I am on I still get sick at least once a week. On top of that my gastro doc does not take my new insurance and now I have to find a new doctor and start the process all over again.

Back to the good side this year I met the love of my life Jeannie and she has been so good for me. She helps motivate me when i am not feeling motivated. To say that she is the best thing to happen to me would be an understatement. Words can not express how much I love her. 

Knowing how much I like to do light painting photography and how much i like Star Wars she combined them both and got me some toys (I mean tools) for light painting for my birthday.

I am really thinking that this will be the year for me. I am in love and I want to work hard to kill it this year with my business and make my dreams come true. i am going to cut the blog short today as I am tired but i am going to leave you with a video playing with some of the new lights that Jeannie got me and it also shows how i am just a kid at heart. See you next week.

Saying goodbye to an old friend

In today's blog post I want to talk about saying goodbye to an old friend. (well sort of) When I first got into photography many years ago I went to Peace Camera on Peace St. in downtown Raleigh and I purchased my first DSLR a used Nikon D60 with an 18-70mm lens. This purchase ignited the fire in me and I found my passion and love for photography. 

I shopped there for many years. I have traded in my gear to upgrade to better gear and also have made good friendships with most of the people that worked there. I have also taken classes there and I have learned a lot from the staff members. 

A few months ago as my career path was changing I was given an opportunity to work there part time. I loved this idea as I would get to talk photography all day and pass along my knowledge of photography that I have learned over the years to customers who came into the store. Right after I started working there we were told that we would have to move. our location along with all of the other stores in the two to three block radius was going to have to do the same. A new project was going to rebuild the offramp from Capitol Blvd and then bulldoze all the buildings and build a high rise condo complex with a Publix supermarket on the ground floor. 

We had a few months to find a new place and move the shop. As the search for a new place began we knew that we had way too much stuff to move. When you are in a location for over 20 years you accumulate quite a bit of stuff. Every Saturday we would move our clearance items outside and have a moving sale. We sold quite a bit over those weekends and really thinned out what we had. 

We had also found a new location in north Raleigh in the Quail Corners shopping center. The store was much smaller then what we currently had by appx. 1800 square feet but we felt that it would be a good location for us. Plenty of parking and lots of food choices would help draw in a lot of new customers. 

Moving day had come and we had our last moving sale on the Saturday before Thanksgiving and when we closed up that evening we all stayed and started packing the store. Sunday morning we all gathered and loaded the store into the back of a U-Haul and what we could fit into our cars and started the moving process. It was quite a long day as we had to load and unload two full trips with the U-Haul and many other trips with our cars but we got it done. 

We spent the first few days getting it all set up and we had our grand reopening on black Friday. There were quite a few more trips made to the old store over the next few weeks to bring over as much as we could to the new location and I have to say I am really happy with how the new store turned out. 

Friday the 20th of January was the last day that we had the opportunity to get anything at the old location and have the keys so I decided that I wanted to go down there and take some pictures and video. 

I had mentioned to the others that in my previous stops over the last couple of weeks to the old store that it really looked like one of the old abandoned buildings that I love to explore and that I was going to photograph the store in that style. 

Looking towards the new equipment counter and the book section.

Behind the used equipment counter 

Lot's of old manuals for old camera's

obsolete camera parts

I also shot some video as well and I will leave that below for your enjoyment. While I say goodbye to the old store I say hello to the new one and hope to enjoy it for many years to come. If you would like to come see the new store we are located at 5039 Falls of Neuse Rd in Raleigh. until next week.

A Little Throwback

So for this weeks blog post I was trying to figure out what to write about. I haven't shot anything this week but I will be going out shooting tonight so I will have something cool for next week but I had nothing to share for this week. My wonderful and amazing girlfriend suggested to me that I do a throwback to some of my older work. So because she is so smart I decided to take her up on her idea and do a throwback blog post today.

So what to write about? I decided to write about one of the many abandoned locations that I love to visit and photograph. One of my recent favorites is an abandoned school that my friend Sterling told me about and we decided to visit it on one of the coldest days of the year.

The lone Red chair

It was 18 degrees that day and for me I love the cold weather but even I was freezing as we explored the school. The first place I went was the auditorium and I found this scene. I loved how the red chair was sitting there all along facing the rest of the chairs. I also found a piano and organ in there and got a shot of that.

My next stop was one of the classrooms and I saw all of the chairs stacked up and I thought it would make a great black and white image.

Nowhere to Sit

Then I wandered down to the library and when I saw this scene I was in awe. I always am amazed when places are abandoned why they leave everything behind. This library was full of books and a red leather couch. This was my favorite image of the day.

Overdue

Finally I decided to check out the upstairs which required walking up a very narrow staircase and the top floor of the school was a little dangerous to walk around as the floor was a little weak but I was able to get this image of one of the classrooms.

We got out of there after that to avoid being noticed by the neighbors. I did also shoot a video of the school and I will have the video below for you to watch and enjoy. I promise to have some new content for you next week.

Time to get creative again

Over the last couple of months I hardly ever pulled the camera out of my bag to do a shoot for myself. I have been shooting but for clients and not for myself and I fell that I hit a creative wall. I was not inspired to shoot and last month I decided that it was time to change that.

I found out that behind my apartment complex in the woods that there was a horse cemetery. I found this out a few years ago when I always used to see cars park at the end of the road and go into the woods. I stopped one of them and asked and they told me that they were geocachers and there was a cache at the cemetery.  It is only really accessible during the fall and winter months as it os overgrown in the spring and summer and not to mention tons of bugs and ticks.

So I asked my friend Kristen if she would like to do a shoot with me and she had a couple of really cool outfits. So we met at my place and walked into the woods. When I got the the cemetery it was not as grand as I had remembered it when I first visited a few years earlier but the recent hurricane had knocked down a lot of trees and I knew I could make some cool poses with it. 

I had also brought by infrared camera with me and decided to try to take some portraits with it. I did this with my friend Emily in the past and I loved how it turned her brown hair blue. Since Kristen has blue hair I was curious to see what it would do. To my surprise it turned her hair white. I am thinking about doing a whole series of portraits with the IR camera. 

Well thats going to wrap up this weeks blog post. Until next week.

2017 New Year New look

2016 has finally come to an end. As I referenced in my last blog post it's been a up and down kind of year and I was ready for it to end. For the past couple of weeks I decided that I wanted to redo my website for 2017. I have been using Smugmug for my website for the past few years but I wasn't happy with it and wanted to see how I could make it better. 

After talking with a lot of my fellow photographers most of them recommended trying Squarespace. After doing some research I signed up for the two week free trial and started building my site.

I went through most of the templates and decided on the template that I am currently using. It's clean and simple. I also decided that I wanted to redo my logo as well. My friend Stephen designed my logo for me a few years ago but it was time for a change. While going though design ideas my girlfriend Jeannie was over and said that I was overthinking it and that I needed to look at what other photographers that I admired were doing with there logos and all of the ones I looked at were just very simple. So i went back and played around with different fonts and colors and came up with what you see below.

Both jeannie and i really liked it and I decided to keep it as my new logo. I have spent a lot of time working on this to get it to a point that I can make it public as I am today but I know that there is a lot more work that needs to be done on this. I am considering contacting a web designer to take the template i am using and work with it to make it better.

I hope that everyone that reads this blog takes the time to look through my site and let me know what you think about it. I am always open to constructive criticism. I am going to cut the blog post off here. I will see you next week 

2016 A rollercoaster year in review

2016 was certainly a rollercoaster year for me. My year started out with a phone call from my dad on New Years eve saying that my mom fell while getting out of the car and broke her hip and would need surgery to fix it. While i was very concerned and knew that it was major surgery and the recovery process would be long I felt that she would get through it ok. The next morning my dad called me saying that things did not go well and that I need to fly down to Florida as soon as possible. I hopped the next flight and met my sister who was flying in from Ohio at the airport and we drive up to the hospital. We spent the next few hours with my mom who was on a breathing machine and not awake, after a while we were kicked out as visiting hours were over and we were told that we could come back the next morning. We went back to my dads place and tried to get some sleep. We got a call from the hospital at around 4 in the morning saying that we need to get back right away as she took a turn for the worse. Her brain had swelled and was on full life support. We had to make the hardest decision’s of our lives and that was to pull the plug and take her off life support as we did not want to see her suffer any more and the chances of recovery was very slim. 

The next few days were spent getting the funeral arrangements in order and the funeral. These days were very stressful for me and also going through my own medical issues I did not feel good the entire time. 

One the bright side this gave me a chance to reconnect with my sister who I really did not talk too that much over the past years. We never had a fight but we both had our separate lives. This reconnection helped me through the initial grieving process. After a few more days I needed to return home and get back to work.

Something I had been thinking about for a long time was that I needed a change. I was working a high stress job that I hated and I was burned out being in the IT industry. I had started looking for other opportunities and after getting back from Florida I decided that life is too short and I wanted to do something I that want to do for the rest of my life and not what someone else wants me to do. I went to my boss and turned in my notice. Everything started out really well as I had a bunch of jobs come my way and was working from home editing videos and getting the opportunity to work on the set of some short films doing behind the scenes photography all while learning a ton about filmmaking. 

Things then got slow as the client I was working for decided to go another direction. I was able to get a few more gigs to get by but it was time to look for something else to help supplement my income and I was able to start working part time at the local camera shop I always shopped at. 

I worked there 3 days a week and then when one of the other full timers turned in their two week notice I was able to jump up to full time. This is a fun job as I get to talk photography and videography all day long. I am also going to be doing a YouTube channel for the store and get to be more creative.

The best thing to happen to me this year was meeting my girlfriend Jeannie. In the middle of May the Raleigh Photo Group had a meet up at the Eno River State Park. I spent the morning walking around the park and taking pictures and toward the end of the meet up I ran into Jeannie and we explored an abandoned cabin together and we started chatting with each other until it was time to go home. 

The next day I got a facebook message from her and we started chatting online. We then met for lunch one day and takes about doing a shoot together and I got to take her to my favors spot and she modeled for me. We kept chatting online with each other and one day we decided to meet up and go for a hike and I decided that I was going to ask her out.I knew that she had moved here from Oregon to get away from her marriage and go though the divorce process and I did not want to be insensitive and ask her out while she was going through this but I said to myself it was now or never. We kicked for a few miles through the park and as we were almost at the car I asked and she immediately said yes. This made my whole year. We have been together ever since and as of the writing of this blog we are about to hit our 7 month anniversary. She has been the best thing to ever happen to me and I fall in love with her more and more every day. We just spent our first holidays together and and I could have not asked for a better Christmas.

So what is store for me for 2017? I have a bunch of projects that I am starting to put into effect. First is to market myself better to get more jobs and the first part of that is a complete website redesign. I have been working on it for about two weeks and I hope to launch it by New Years Eve. 

I also decided that I want to start blogging. So this post is the first of what will be a weekly blog. I will be blogging about what is going on in my life and project updates. Speaking of projects I am starting to put the wheels in motion on a project that I have been thinking about for the past two years and I decided that it was time to get going on it. 

I have been wanting to shoot a documentary film about my love of abandoned places. I want to meet up with other urban explorers and tell a story of why we love abandonment so much. I am still trying to figure out the title of it and I know this will take about two years to shoot and edit but I am excited to get the project off the ground. I hope to film a trailer for it in the next couple of weeks and then try to get some support for the film through one of the crowdfunding campaigns. 

So to end this blog I decided that I would show you my top pictures of 2016. While I did not get out and shoot for myself nearly as much as i wanted to this year I still think I got some amazing images and I hope you all enjoy them. 

Until next week. 

This was my submission for the Wedding and Portrait Society annual contest. I did't win but was quite happy with the image.

Found and abandoned bus graveyard. We came back again at a later date with some models.

Got myself an Infrared camera this year and I really enjoyed the results it gives.

I decided to see how the infrared camera handled portraits. I loved how it turned Emily's brown hair blue.

Back at the bus graveyard this time with a model.

Johnny and I wanted to light paint at this bridge for a while. PacMan anyone?

Shooting for my #shapesandshit series. 

Finally to end out the year I went to the NCMA to shoot the Art Deco car exhibit.