Weekend at the Lake

I was lucky enough to spend the weekend with the family. Memorial Day weekend at the lake is always a great weekend, and the weather was absolutely perfect. I could not stop myself from taking pictures all day, and I thought I would share a few of my favorites. The first one was created in the "kitchen studio" at our small lake cottage. The "kitchen studio" is actually just a 5 foot by 5 foot kitchen, and I had to lay on the ground with my back against the fridge just to squeeze in the shot. You would be surprised by what you can accomplish with a white sheet and a bath towel! The rest of the shots are just part of the laketime fun. Enjoy.

Karma Chameleon

Tonight I stopped by my little cousins house for an impromptu photoshoot. It was a nice day outside, so I couldn't waste the nice weather. Apparently he recently got a pet chameleon, so we decided to take a few pictures of it as well. Chameleons are surprisingly hard to photograph, despite being slow moving, sloth-like lizards. Here are a few of the shots, in all of their badass lizard glory. Oh yeah, and on the last shot the chameleon did not turn white, thats a fake infrared shot :D

Brian Vander Ark - An oldie but a goodie.

I know the idea behind blogs is to update them with things that you have shot recently, but I wanted to throw out an old shoot onto here because I never had a place to really show these publicly outside of my editorial audience. In January I attented a wonderful concert by one of my favorite musicians Brian Vander Ark. Brian is the former singer / songwriter from the popular 90's band "The Verve Pipe". Their most famous song was "The Freshman". Being able to shoot this show was a dream for me. This was a fantastic concert, and despite having extremely difficult lighting I still had alot of fun. It's shows like this that make me wish I could find more gigs shooting concerts, because it truly is inspiring to shoot a musician to his own soundtrack. Much of the proceeds from this concert went to the Toledo Children's Hospital Foundation, which is truly a great cause.


Here are a few of my favorite shots from that show. I hope you enjoy these shots, and feel free to download one of his solo albums as I can testify that he's "still got it". To see him live, he has plenty of shows in the Grand Rapids / Ann Arbor Michigan area.

First Headshot Retouch

Yet again I find myself unable to sleep, and instead of being a victim to my own sleeping habits I decided that I should have some photoshop fun! The great thing about photoshop is that there are thousands of online sources that you can pull information from, and it becomes a constant learning process. I decided tonight that I would try to learn a few professional retouching techniques. I have done ALOT of post-processing in my days, but I have never sat down and extensively tried to "retouch". There are some absolutely fantastic resources out there that will teach you some of the basic retouching tricks, and I knew a few good ones myself. The model wanted a "high fashion" look, and I think I was finally able to achieve it through this type of retouching.

Photo Retouch

Last week a fellow Independent Collegian photographer, Tim Kershner, and I took a trip out to the Toledo Botanical Gardens with a few ladies from Premier Entertainment. Luckily for us the model we were shooting had a fair amount of experience modeling, so it made it easy to pull out some really interesting High-Fashionesque shots. There were a lot of other photographers in the gardens that day, but I am proud to say that I was the only one with a giant softbox on an Alien Bee and my very own Sherpa to carry my gear. I was pretty happy with how alot of these shots came out, despite all of the people playing frisbee in the background. It's entertaining to go through 5 or 6 shots of the same pose just to watch the frisbee players in the background drop every throw. That kept me fairly entertained while post-oping these bad boys! Check em out!

The Blog and Website are live

IT's aliiiiiiiiiiivveee!! I have been working on my website for a good month now to get it to the point where I wanted it, and I am happy to say that it is live. At the beginning of this month I knew nothing about CSS or HTML, but thanks to Smugmug and Digital Grin Photography Forum, I have been able to piece everything together and figure it all out. Also, about an hour ago I decided I needed a blog so I slapped one together and integrated it, and it was much easier than I thought it would be. Joseph Herr Photography has gone live my friends. I have not put my name out there as much as I should have this last year or two, but I really wanted to make sure that my work was not "sub-par". I don't want to go out there and produce pictures that are below a standard that I have set for myself. Welcome to Herrphoto.com, and thank you for checking it out.

Time to Blog

Well, the age of technology has finally dawned on me. It's not that I am not tech savvy, it's just that when it comes to Social Networking I can be a bit lazy. But the days of blogging, microblogging, macroblogging and supermegaloblogging (or whatever odd term we will see next) are here, and they are the wave of the future for businesses. So here we go!