MudEyes

After a grrrrEAT day of shooting Michelle and Cody’s engagement session (entry coming soon) Our friends Andy and nicole Foster “invited” us over for Dinner and chilling time! I brought along the camera stuff because she has been wanting to get a nice camera and I look hooking people on photography =) So I let her play around with it a little before and after dinner. Here is a shot where I am teaching her the effects of a wide angle. (Canon 28mm f/1.8 wide open)

Later on we decided to embark on a late night photo-adventure to downtown Kalamazoo! Holly got these paper balls that you put lights in a hang from IKEA and we thought we might be able to have some fun sticking a 580EXII in there! I am not going to lie I am pretty excited about how great they came out!! Here was the first shot after some flash strength tweaking. I think this was about 1/16th power fired from another 580.

Then Andy had this genius idea to hide behind the bushes to make it look suspended!

He was quite the trooper in those bushes so we could get some great shots!!

After this shot we decided we hadn’t taken a 52 shot with both Holly and I, it was due so this is what we came up with! I call it: Strobist Pokist [11/52]

Then we let Andy have some fun for being such a good sport, and I think it looks great with Canon’s 15mm fisheye. Then we had a little fun with long exposures!

Shot with Canon 100mm f/2.8 @ f/22 for 8 seconds at 50 iso

Long exposure with the help of my iPhone running the “flashlight” app.
Shot with a Canon 28mm f/1.8 at f/11 for 30 seconds and 200 iso.
pilot light triggered 5 times for rear flash.

Remember that cool shot of Holly’s eyeball? We let Nicole borrow them for a bit =)

We had so much fun today, the weather couldn’t have been better, and we have a couple engagement shoots tomorrow so the season is here! I will leave you with ONE of the shots I am really excited about from the engagement, but there is so many good ones to come. Much love all.

Ok! We have been real busy for one trying to get these workshops up and planned. It has taken a lot of emailing and organization which are areas which have been hard for me but everything is working out.

I just wanted to give you some updates since I haven’t put anything on here for a while. Lets start with last weeks 52!

I know hot right? This one is week [9/52] And I call it “Fun w/ Facial Hair / CreepyMcCreeperton” Like it says I am just having some fun before shaving my full beard off from when I was freezing in Grand Haven doing my last construction job, so don’t hide your kids! I am a nice guy under there!! I did shave it off like 5 minutes after i made it that way because we were shooting Brent, and Steph’s wedding that Day!

They were a pretty fun couple as you prolly saw from the slideshow that was up earlier. I took it off because I didn’t know how to keep it from auto playing. Which is annoying every time you open mudeyes.

That week it was beautiful out! So we decided to take a walk down to subway for some lunch! FYI ranch isn’t good on turkey =&. On the way back Holly asked me if I wanted to stop in the apartment office to see if the corner unit above us was vacant. She has been kind of going crazy (as was I) because there just isn’t enough space for what we need it this one bedroom. (For those of you who don’t know we both work from small one bedroom apartment there ya go!)

Anyway, we went in there and told us the end unit in the building about 50 yards from our building just opened up and if we want it, we could move in by the 18th! Sooo we are moving into an end unit in the next building =) This is been a pretty impulsive week.

It might have been that night I was looking on the apple site and I saw what I have been waiting for!!

Ho-ly-crap that thing is awesome. Here’s the tech specs for all the tech geeks like me. I can’t explain the way the new processors work but it’s much faster!! =) We got the 2.26 8(!!!)core “Nehalem”Processors 6GB RAM (awesome) a terabyte HD and the new 24” LCD Cinema Display!

This is Holly’s new workhorse so I had to spoil her a little bit so hopefully she will enjoy editing 25+ weddings and who knows how many seniors and families! I got the hand-me-down this time with a crappy tricked out 24″ iMac. I know life’s not fair. Anyway it arrives this Tuesday when we are the most busy with packing. So I won’t even be able to play with it! Dangit!

That Thursday we were at Andy and Nicole’s always fun office party and they just got a new 42″ Philips LCD TV which was great to watch The Office on! We got to talking about it and how I have never had a big TV and how we only had a sweet sweet vintage 25″ that was about 15 years old! They told us the got it from Sam’s club for under 600 bucks!! I was stunned that it was even possible! Soooo you can prolly guess that we went out the next day to Sam’s to see if they had any re-furbs laying around, which oddly enough they did! I told you it has been a impulsive week! But really they are all things we have been thinking about doing for a while and when opportunity knocks, I guess I love to swing the door open!

I love how all the things we would get in normal life is business related and a tax right off! I think I picked the right profession!

(NOTICE!!**NOTICE!!**NOTICE!!**NOTICE!!**NOTICE!!**NOTICE!!**NOTICE!!**NOTICE!!**NOTICE!!**NOTICE!!**

I just wanted to say that by me putting this all on mudeyes, I hope you guys don’t see us as Braggy-McBraggertons. I have to give thanks to the Lord for one that he showed me my talent and put things, jobs, and people in place to be successful, and gave me a wife that I couldn’t do any of this without! I am not really bragging, I am just so excited about how much we are blessed. I haven’t always had a perfect life and God has put both Holly and I through a lot so that we could learn from it and help other people. I just want you guys to be excited with us!! We love you guys and we wouldn’t be were we are without a lot of the people that read this Blog so thanks you for encouraging us enough to be so successful!

Ok how about a sweet random macro shot of Holly’s eye I took with the Canon 100mm macro lens at f/8 handheld at 1600 iso!?

pretty sweet right?

And to end off this Random update entry, I leave you with our 10th week of 52 portraits. If you haven’t seen the movie Coraline, this is what she is going for! I guess the theme for the last couple weeks has been scary and creepy =)

Great right? hope you weren’t about to go to bed! That movie was a lot freakier then I thought it would be. But an awesome visual movie nonetheless!

On one last Random note, The workshops are coming up quick! And I have been setting up a fall workshop tour with a few people Down south before thanksgiving! Good thing I have some contacts that are willing to help me out! It is looking like we will Start out in Columbia, SC on October 24th-25th. Thanks Dan! Next we will be heading to Jacksonville where Dana Goodson will be helping me out, Then down to West Palm Beach thanks to the wonderful and talented soul of Liz Leighton! (big fan of hers) Next is Tampa/Clearwater which is still up in the air where I dont have a for sure contact just yet! The last stop before Thanksgiving would be in Little Rock, AR where Todd Owens is going to be helping me organize! Its going to be awesome!!

We still have spots open in out Dayton workshop this April 4th and 5th! Hit me up for some more info!!

OK! there is one last thing I forgot to mention.
You know how we have been going broke buying everything at once? Well there is one more thing. We decided to sell our last zoom lens, the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L. We got this one right before Christmas along with 10 grand of Canon Equipment with our switch from Nikon. We actually switched to Canon for their Fixed focal length lenses, but thought we needed this Lens for the range. Buut being a prime lover I tried the 135mm f/2L and I am willing to part with this zoom in favor for the 135mm. I dont even like zooms but if you are going to have a zoom this is the one!

You can see more pictures and such here.

I was going to wait until I sold that but with the workshop and and wedding coming up next weekend I went ahead and ordered the Canon 135mm f/2L yesterday!! You may remember when I rented it for the Colorado wedding i had a month ago but I love it!! I mean come ON look at the bokah.

Fageddabodit!

So I really would love to sell that zoom to help out. It is listed for $1699 at most every online retail store so I am asking $1,600 since I only used it a couple times and it is a US lens with existing warranty! Please email me at Ryan@RyanRichardPhoto.com if you are interest!

Until next time, mucho loveo!

So Holly and I went down to Dayton to visit with her friend Konrad, get her hair did, and while we are down there have a lead meeting with a potential wedding client! Being Valentines day I figured I would check out good ol’ Orbitz to see if there was any fancy hotels for a reasonable price. I found the DoubleTree down in Miamisville down near Dayton. Check out my romantical skillz!

I got in trouble the next day for eating her cooking =( good thing it wasn’t valentines day anymore!

The inside said, oh well spelling is for losers, wanna make out? 😉

While she was getting her hair done I went to the room and unpacked everything and made everything look nice for her arrival.

It was a pretty fancy place we enjoyed it!

That night we went to Cincinnati to meet up with our friends Brent and Katie. Katie designs all our albums and she is great at it. We thought we would show our appreciation but hooking them up with a free Valentines day shoot! It helped that they are a fun good looking couple 😉

Heres a few that i teased them with before we finished them all!

I had to scale a wall and hang off a fence to get this wonderful upshot!

We found some really cool places found earlier by Brent. Client’s suggestions never work out like this.

After some cool industrial shots we headed downtown for some urban/night shots.

We needed a break from the cold and stubbled into this banquet building location that begged for the fisheye!

We actually ended up spending our valentines Dinner with them at Steak N’ Shake and it was a great time !

On Sunday we had lunch with Holly’s friend Konrad from Cedarville, and then called up a couple friends to have a photo adventure in yellow springs! My friend from flickr Thor and Holly’s friend Cameron and his wife came along just to see what we could see and have some fun!

Cameron let me use his Canon 17-40mm f/4 and while I am not a zoom fan, using an ultra wide is fun!

Maybe I should try and make this a texture?

Thor letting me have some fun with the fisheye =)

We found a random washing machine that had a free sign on it… So of course I made Holly model on it for us =)

And finally Holly getting this AWEsome frozen leaf shot.

That night we stayed with Brent and Katie in Cincinnati. That morning we called up Holly’s friend Cornel to do a shoot with us just for fun. It turned out pretty great and we even got Katie to join in on the fun!

Taken by Holly in a fast food sign graveyard!

Playing with the focal length settings on my 580EX II

One of our greatest upshots!

Cornel and her red hot mini cooper.

The location we found turned out great! It was an old water treatment plant. Great colors! [taken by Holly]

Most all these shots taken wide open with the awesome Sigma 50mm f/1.4 HSM.

All in all we had a great time, got some great shots and we even got a big TV that Katie and Brent gave us that they weren’t using after they bought their new TV. But we have an old and busted 25 inch tv since we spend all our money on equipment!

BIG NEWS!

We set the dates for workshops in Kalamazoo[march 28th-29th], and possibility Dayton [April 3-4th]

check out this jackpot location we found in Dayton!

Here is some details.

The workshop is going to be geared toward beginner to Intermediate photographers and we are focusing on using “Prime”, or fixed focal lenses. I am going to be renting a variety of lenses like 35,50 and 85mm. Maybe even a fisheye!

Also we are going to talk about different lenses and what is best for your style. We will also be talking about exposure and some other technical issues new photographers face. We will be doing a good amount of shooting on some various models and talk about how to shoot in manual exposure mode.

The second day will be focused on editing and workflow along with some more shooting!

A DSLR is required and fixed focal length lenses are what we will be using so if you have one of two be sure to bring it! You will also be able to use anything I own and anything I rent for the workshop!

If you are interested I just need a half down deposit to hold your spot as there is only 10 spots available. The cost will be $250 for 2 days. Also please let me know what gear you are working with, and what kind of things you would like to learn about most.

Thanks I hope to see you there!!
ps heres a list of lenses I plan to rent

Canon 135mm f/2L,
Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro,
Canon EF 50mm f/1.4,
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II,
Canon EF 85mm f/1.8,
Canon EF 28mm f/1.8,
Canon 15mm f/2.8 fisheye,
Sigma 50mm f/1.4 HSM x 2,
Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF,
Nikon 85mm f/1.8 AF,
Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AF,
Nikon 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye,
Sigma 30mm f1.4 for Nikon DX,
Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM for Canon.

Please email me if you are interested! ryan@ryanrichardphoto.com

I already have 6 people interested for the Kalamazoo workshop so let me know soon! Thanks!!

Hey everyone! This is Ryan, and I was just thinking about all the blogs I stalk and how impatient I am when they don’t put new posts on every few days! So I guess I can’t really talk since I am pretty bad at keeping this thing going strong. I have a lot of exposure avenues I use and its just hard to stop and take the time to make this thing look nice.

BUT! I have great news!
So Holly has been working for me full time since, well we got married last June. I, on the other hand, had a second job which I did scale back my hours to 3 days a week. I had planned on breaking ties with Mulder Glass this spring around the end of May when wedding season starts kicking in. But they have been slow and not using me all that much so I thought about it and decided to go full time a little early! So now I will be able to spend more time in Photography mode, and I hope to write in this blog much more frequently.

I have to thank God that he has really blessed our business after one profitable year to be able to have enough work sustain both of us for a whole year! I never thought I would have my own business, let alone one I love so much and can be so excited about! We are looking into all kinds of different avenues, such as hosting workshops, lots of networking and we are hoping to go overseas this fall to start working on the photo-books which have been our ultimate goal from the beginning.

We are also doing a 52 weeks self portrait challenge! All you people on flickr Know what I am talking about, but you basically take an interesting picture of yourself that depicts a common theme, or what you have been doing or feeling that week. Some people do a 365 but that would just be hard for how busy we will be. You can really think about your shots on a weekly basis instead of churn out a new one everyday.

So we are on week 6 of this so I will catch you up. I am hoping to post them every weekend on here, to get me more in the groove of blogging and being more constant.

Before I show you those I thought I would let you know what posts I plan on writing soon!

.New 35mm f/1.8 AF-s release by nikon that focuses with the D40/D60
.Lots of lens reviews! Canon: 28mm f/1.8, 135mm f/2, 70-200mm f/2.8IS, 100mm f/2.8 macro and the Sigma 50mm f/1.4HSM
.Facebook Marketing
.Spring workshop details!
.More technical lessons

Anyway, heres the first few 52’s!

Week [1/52] Off camera flash
We had a little fun getting used to the pair of Canon’s 580EX IIs using off camera flash. There’s a whole set of fun shots on my Facebook

Week [2/52] Big Fattys!
Obviously for my 5D vs D700 review!

Week [3/52] Saucy-Snow lumber-lady
Shot in a fancy hotel I got for like 90 bucks in Cleveland the night before an Engagement shoot
This shot was available light (lightbulb from a lamp shot with a Sigma 50mm @ f/1.4)
She bought the hat because we were shooting outside the next day and it was like 3ºF)

Week [4/52] Pretty Pack-Rat
This is Holly’s Massive jewelry collection all balled up =) Shot on our bed with another lamp

Week [5/52] Facebook Marketing!
Post about this to come… but to sum it up My business wouldn’t be the same without my iPhone and without Facebook!

And finally this week [6/52] We headed to Denver which you can prolly see from the above post and had some fun with an aspiring photographer Erika Jessop She is already and excellent Graphic Designer and an AWEsome artist! But she wanted to buy a big girl camera to upgrade from her kodak super zoom. Sooo I gave her a Canon 5D Mark II with a bunch of prime lenses to play with. We did a little walk around the block and had some fun! She’s actually really good!!

Thanks for reading guys! Please leave a comment so I can know you are there! =)

Pst by: holly

One very important and very interesting thing I learned in college is that when you have a million things to get done, you accomplish so much more than if you have only a few things to get done. Well, at least that seems to be the case with me. I think it is the pressure and the structure that really gets me naturally motivated.

After college, life has not been all that structured and even though we had a crazy summer, it has been more relaxing than school ever was which has been a nice break. 2009 is going to be nuts for us. Ryan is going full time with me in June and we are just about non stop until October. We are already starting to plan out how we will schedule our days and I am looking forward to it. I feel very ready to be structured again and am SO excited for him to be full time photography with me! It will be great for him to just be in “photography land” and not have to think about construction anymore. With both of us full time I think my workload will be much less stressful. We work well together so it is gonna be awesome.

I have been on a journey to get in shape and the goal is to be feeling good by June. I have never really committed to exercising…ever…but then again I never felt like I needed to which I realize is ridiculous.
It is about weight, but then again its not. I am not overweight for my height, but I just don’t feel good in this body and I know I am not as healthy as I know I could be. I want to run without getting winded in a few minutes and I just don’t want my body to limit me from certain things in life. It is always best to catch things before they get really bad and I want to be in the best shape of my life for this years wedding season. I believe that if you feel good about yourself everything else in life gets a little easier. So that is really what is keeping me motivated.

I am almost done with the Talarczyk wedding and will hopefully be starting the Gruss wedding tomorrow. See…that really isn’t a ton to get done but If I really push and get them done soon then I get to do other fun things! I have really been hoping to get this blog looking awesome lately and I found the perfect guy to build it for us for a price we can afford, so that is next on my list. I have big hopes for this blog this year. I promise to be better about posting for 2009. That is certainly one of my goals. I love looking at other photographers blogs so I realize this is really an important part of the business. I love learning about other people and their lives so I assume perhaps people would enjoy getting to know us too. 🙂

Ok…seriously…gonna get back to work…AFTER I do a preview post from the Talarczyk wedding. 🙂

————————————————-
note: I did in fact copy and paste their last name every time I referred to it, haha. I have no idea how to pronounce it, I tried to listen for people saying it at the wedding but that didn’t happen. Most challenging name yet and I thought people had a hard time with Gauper… 🙂

Post by: Holly

It’s official, I am all caught up! I just mailed out our last fall wedding to the couple yesterday. It is such a good feeling to be free and not worrying about getting caught up every moment of my life. Noah and Alex were the last couple and I am just in love with their love. 🙂 It was such a joy to have their photos as the last on my catch up list. We rented another D700 (for me!) for their day as we thought it would be really dark being an October wedding. Full frame really does make such a difference when editing. Noah and Alex have the love and it completely shows in the photos which is also such a great thing to look at all day.

We have one wedding left this year, it is actually next weekend, the 27th. So it will cut our Christmas weekend a little short, but that is ok, we LOVE shooting weddings. I have one wedding left to edit before our last one to shoot so my goal is to get that thing done TODAY! Is that ambitious? Why yes, yes it is. I recently gave up caffine as well. My drug of choice is Dr. Pepper but that stuff is murdering my kidneys so it had to go. So the lack of the Dr. makes this even more ambitious. Thus, I look to netflix.

We just got nexflix like a month ago and recently found out they got their “instant” view working with macs! Thus, I can choose from tons of movies and watch them right on my computer. I really love it. I need noise throughout the day so I don’t go crazy and watching the same shows on TV everyday is getting so boring. I can’t handle 5 hours a day of home improvement and NCIS for much longer. The great thing about netflix is there are a lot of “sub-par” movies on the instant play list. My criteria is that it is not so stupid that I can’t stand it, but also not so interesting that I won’t get any work done and in that area, there are a lot to choose from.

If I can manage to get this actually done today, that means I get until Christmas to goof off! I have BIG plans for my goof off days. I have some paintings I have just been dying to do, I would LOVE to clean our apartment up really nice and most of all, get used to the new Camera. I am the kind of person that seemingly only learns by doing so I am going to have to play around with the new Canon for a while to get used to it. Everything is backwards, it’s like I’m in some alternate Canon universe.

Anyways…not getting my editing done procrastinating on this blog now am I? ….but I figured if I wrote it down somewhere that I’m trying to bust it out in a day than I would have a little more accountability to push through it. 🙂

post by: holly

I have been editing like a crazy woman lately trying to catch up on weddings. I been getting sick so much lately that everything just got away from me. I am finally feeling better again and back at it. After a couple hundred photos, I needed a break and my usual tv shows were all old episodes so I went looking for some new music to help me get through the day.

Featured on itunes was Katie Costello. I won’t lie, I only clicked on it because the tiny album icon had stripes and it caught my eye. I had never heard of her and listened to a few clips and I really loved her voice. It is different and spunky, and that is what I like.

You should check her out. Isn’t it lovely is a…well…it’s a lovely song. 🙂

post by: Ryan

Its been a crazy couple years on flickr! I started my flickr account coming back from hawaii and Cambodia discovering the world of DSLRs. I spend the winter reading and researching because I thought i did pretty good with my first camera, a Canon a520 point and shoot. I first saw photos from my friends Nikon D70 and was amazed that stuff like that was possible! I decided on a Nikon D80 that I was hoping to get by Feb of 2007. When I went to the camera store I held the D200 next to the D80 and I had to have the D200!

I started photography loving candid kids shots and planning to try to do it professionally… until I shot my first wedding in May. I was in love. There was just so much going on all day and so much to shoot! I did a few more free weddings and by this time I met my now wife Holly, and shot our first paid wedding in December of ’07. It was very difficult with the pressure of being paid. We have gotten so much better the more weddings we shoot together. I invite you to scan through our earlier photos and see the difference! So much better in editing, and style. We have since done 17 weddings, 31 seniors and spent over $10,000 on equipment! We now have 17 weddings and counting booked for next year, and I will be joining Holly, going full time working in photography!

I never could have done all this so quick without Flickr and the people on it! Flickr has been part of our life and we see flickr as a collaborative person. We are always checking to see if Flickr loves us! It seems flickr enjoys us a little bit. We have surpassed 50,000 photo stream views, and a quarter million individual image views! We have 151 contacts that I love to check up on, and over 400 people that call us a contact! Can you tell I love stats? I wish I knew how many shots I have taken since then. Last time I checked there was 62,000 images in my computer’s hard drive. Minus all the copies in there, but then I am sure we deleted an equal amount!

We are constantly evolving and our style has become more and more our own! Thank you so much to everyone that has ever given us comments of encouragement and letters full of kind words! Thanks again everyone. I must also thanks the Lord for giving Holly and I the talent to do something we love for a living! I can’t wait to use my talent for him overseas!!

post by: holly

Christmas is coming up so fast this year and I am so excited! I am really enjoying making ornaments for our tree and to finally have a tree of our own. My mom has a much more elegant and “fancy” style than me so our tree for the past few years has been all gold and crystal. It is a beautiful tree, but there is just something about decorating one that is yours, if that makes any sense. We are going to have a Dr. Suess-ish Christmas. 🙂

This is the first ornament I painted and I love it. 🙂 I have a few more but this is my favorite. I am hanging them all with polka dot ribbon too!

I love having the heat on, and all the lights, and the colors, and the shopping…and I think I am going to decorate Christmas cookies this year!

So…that is all. Just wanted to proclaim my love for the Holiday. I think I like winter up until the New Year and then I am certainly over it. So for now…I am happy and totally in the Christmas mood!

post by: holly

We got the “anniversary edition” of the game of life for one of our wedding gifts and we decided to break it open on Sunday.
Ryan took the road of no college, and I took the road of college (just like real life!) and I totally kicked his butt!

The funny thing is, In real life…I work with him so we are the same, what are the odds? haha so much for school, right. But in the game of life, I win by 1 million dollars!!

I only had one son, and he was bad so we put him in the back of the car.

RYAN…however…had 5 KIDS! He could not even fit them all in the car, he had to put the last one on top of everyone else. Sheeeeesh he better not expect that from me in real life, hah.

I like this game, but I think it would be even more fun with more people. Anyone up for some life?