Runner up? I'll take that!

Scott Kelby announced the winner of his "Shoot the sidelines with Scott and Mike" sports photo contest today, and while I didn't win (darn it - it was a damn nice prize) my strobist inspired shot of Ryan, Skaterboy was in the final group of runner ups. To end up in that final group of shots out of the over 800 entries is really quite mindblowing - and it was way cool to see my work on one of the top photobloggers out there.
Sweetness.

Shooting the dogs

Shooting the dogs, originally uploaded by photogeek21.

A couple firsts for me on this recent family portrait shoot with the Green Family. It was my first time setting up remotely. Which is pretty nerve racking because I didn't know how much room I had to work with and the time pressure is there - I didn't want to spend all day setting up and taking test exposures while everybody's waiting. So I kept the lighting pretty simple and adjusted on the fly which did two things - It got the family a bit more comfortable in front of the camera and it gave the impression I knew what I was doing. By the time my exposure was dialed in everybody shook their shyness and we started having fun.
And speaking of fun, after getting a couple shots of this family of 5, they brought in their dogs for some shots - All 5 of them!. Now this was first for me as well - I though getting 5 people comfortable in front of a camera was tough - adding 5 dogs certainly up'ed the excitement...and the difficultly. Needless to say it was a shoot early and shoot often session with the dogs as they don't stay still for very long.