MudEyes

EVERYTHING MUST GO! SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!! WELL NOT EVERYTHING! WHY AM I STILL YELLING?????

IN ALL SERIOU…Sorry, in all seriousness, we have a buttload of stuff to sell and now we have some more motivation (as if we didn’t have enough)

The Image is Found announced a ‘shootshop’ the day after we arrive in LA this august so we decided we HAVE to go to… They are going over a lot of the stuff we need the most and also we basically want to BE them. They are way creative and awesome. They were kind enough to let me pay for one spot and give me another week to pay for our second spot (since they fill up in like a day)

Soooo here’s some great gear that we would love for you to have… I mean pay for. I am a photoshop novice and didn’t spend hours on this so go easy on me =)

First up are the biggins. I have been holding on to my D700 because I just love it and didn’t feel like giving it up for butt-cheap so here it is now for butt-cheap because I have to =( I am going to be pretty firm at $2,100 for this thing. It is in very nice shape and was used for about 6 months before we made the switch. It IS a US model, there is nothing at all wrong with it. This is the best Nikon option period. You can read my review side by side with my new camera the Canon 5D mark II here but seriously this camera rules… feels so much better in your hands then my camera.

It comes with everything you see… I dont have the screen protector but there is no scratches miraculously enough. I also dont have the strap but if I dont sell the one below and you need one I will throw it in. The battery still reads new. I charged it after every use to keep it happy. The sensor is pretty clean as far as I can see. This thing is spotless.

The fisheye is the last lens I have with it… It’s a DX lens but it still looks really great even with the reduced resolution. Pretty fishy fisheye and it was one of my favorites… it is a great lens. Pretty much flawless as far as I see. Never dropped. I am asking $525 for this one and I don’t have the cap. Lost it at a wedding. Adorama retails it at $700 so I think thats pretty fair. If you want one you can get the cap here. It comes with a soft case that I never took out of the bag.

My last Nikon item is the Battery grip for either a D300 or D700 This is a must with this camera if you are holding it for any amount of time. It feels great and matches up with the build quality of the D700. You can even get 8fps with this grip and the right batteries. It has a little bit of paint rubbed of exposing some metal but otherwise never dropped or anything. You can buy it new for $260 so how about $185.

Another biggin is our basically brand new Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L Telephoto zoom. It is just too expensive for us. We have too much to buy to make it worth it. But if you are in the market for one you know how great this lens is. For a zoom lens the sharpness doesnt get much better then this. The IS works amazingly at 1/20th of a second my shots are consistently sharp even at 200mm. This lens is also flawless and retails for $1,800. So I thought $1,400 would be very fair especially since we have used it about 2 times.

I wouldn’t be selling this if I didn’t have a second, nor would I if I didn’t want a TS-E so bad! So I am selling this amazing lens for $375 as it retails for $500. Again this Sigma is mint. We have used it since early this year and since we had 2 it stayed in the bag most of the time. We had no problem shooting this lens wide open for a whole wedding. I actually prefer this lens to the Canon version. Sharp focus every time unlike the canon. If you have a f/1.8 50, trust me this is worth an upgrade. you would have to shoot at f/3.5 to be as sharp as this lens, and you get a lot more background blur and speed. Check out all my images I have made with this one! flickr w/ 50mm

Since Holly and I bought the same computer right before we met we have always had 2. Now that we have a MacPro, iMac and 2 MacBook Pros, it might be time to trim down. This one is mine.

You can see the stats but it is a 2.16GHz dual with 2 gigs or RAM and 120gb HD. I used it for all my editing until we got the iMac about a year ago. Now if we do use it at all it’s when we travel. It shows signs of wear as you can see but really besides the battery needing to be replaced there’s not much wrong with it. Everything is cosmetic. It does not have any AppleCare and it runs with the Leopard OS. A new battery is like $100 bucks and I am asking $900 for this. Still runs very well and is completely capable (especially if you are upgrading from PC) 😉

Next I have an older surround sound system that I bought a few years ago. I didn’t use it a ton and the speakers sound great and the sub sounds well if you are fairly nice to it. I am not sure of the wattage and don’t have a box but it gets pa-ritty loud and sounds great with action movies and music. I am asking $75 for this.

Last is a few random items.

A neoprene strap $10
A couple Lens pouches you can strap to your belt. $8 (each)
Legal Forms $10
And a Gary Fong Lightsphere Cloud P2 or C2 it fits the bigger 580EX $30 and I will include a stofen or whatever flash diffuser.

Sooo hopefully you guys wanna give us all your moneys so we can go and learn how to get even better so that we can feed the fever for the Gaupers =)

Please email me at ryan@GAUPERphoto.com or call me at 269.929.8777

All items will have shipping tacked on if you arent local so we can work that out when you contact me. Thanks guys!!

post by: Holly

It has been a while since I have posted anything since i’ve been in an editing wonderland and will be until…oh..october 🙂 but this felt worthy of my time to write about.

Kalamazoo had its first MWEP meeting last night. I wasn’t sure what time it was earlier in the day so I was searching around for a website to fill me in and I just started reading through some of the things on their site and came across the greatest little article they had re-posted from Seth Godin’s Blog. Now, it has made it’s way here. 🙂 I have personally never heard of Seth Godin but after reading this I have bookmarked his blog in hopes to find things more like this.

………………………………………………
How to be remarkable

1. Understand the urgency of the situation. Half-measures simply won’t do. The only way to grow is to abandon your strategy of doing what you did yesterday, but better. Commit.

2. Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.

3. Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much. It’s easy to pull off a stunt, but not useful.

4. Extremism in the pursuit of remarkability is no sin. In fact, it’s practically a requirement. People in first place, those considered the best in the world, these are the folks that get what they want. Rock stars have groupies because they’re stars, not because they’re good looking.

5. Remarkability lies in the edges. The biggest, fastest, slowest, richest, easiest, most difficult. It doesn’t always matter which edge, more that you’re at (or beyond) the edge.

6. Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable. In fact, most people don’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway. Your goal isn’t to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up, spread the word, buy new things or hire the talented.

7. If it’s in a manual, if it’s the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It’s boring, not remarkable. Part of what it takes to do something remarkable is to do something first and best. Roger Bannister was remarkable. The next guy, the guy who broke Bannister’s record wasn’t. He was just faster … but it doesn’t matter.

8. It’s not really as frightening as it seems. They keep the masses in line by threatening them (us) with all manner of horrible outcomes if we dare to step out of line. But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that’s for sure.

9. If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it? No use being remarkable at something that people don’t care about. Not ALL people, mind you, just a few. A few people insanely focused on what you do is far far better than thousands of people who might be mildly interested, right?

10. What’s fashionable soon becomes unfashionable. While you might be remarkable for a time, if you don’t reinvest and reinvent, you won’t be for long. Instead of resting on your laurels, you must commit to being remarkable again quite soon.
………………………………………………

I feel this way but I am never able to put it into words as well as he has. I have a way of looking at life as kind of a series of things I commit to. If I have committed to something, It just has every part of me and letting up will never be an option….thats just the way it is. With time, I feel like things in this life will naturally lose their excitement and we fall into a rut but being committed to something really keeps me pushing forward.

“Being noticed is not being remarkable”, gosh what a great way to put that. I want people to know us because we try to be quality people doing quality work to the best of our ability. I think Ryan would agree with me that we are just not the kind of people to run down the street naked, to flow with his analogy. 🙂

I love pushing to be different and edgy. Average isn’t enough for me and it never really has been. In college I didn’t have as much downtime or fun as most probably do, but working my butt off to do quality, interesting work was always worth it. Looking back, I am proud to know that I made it through. I struggled a lot in college because I don’t pick things up or learn like most people do so to have conquered that I think gives me confidence to get through everything else for the rest of my life.

Pushing to be remarkable is often harder than being content with where you are…but isn’t it worth it? It is hard to stay on top of daily tasks while trying to amp up creativity and discover new things but I have found its harder for me personally to be content where I am because I know there is always more interesting things out there we could be doing…and I want our little business to be a part of that. I think being remarkable also means being organized.

I truly believe God made Ryan and I to do this. Out of all the things we have done in our lives and struggled with along the way, photography pops up and within a couple years, it’s changed us. We view the world and life differently and its integrated into pretty much everything we do and a lot of what we think about. So if this is the one big thing God gifted us to do, then I want to live up to that gift and never stop pushing boundaries to be remarkable. To be an extremist. To be a little weird but always relatable.

So thanks Seth Godin, this was really inspiring for me today. 🙂 I hope this finds some other people needing some inspiration to keep pushing today. Our culture always wants to tell everyone we are the greatest to inspire us, but perhaps that just breeds mediocrity? How will we ever know what our best really is if we think we are already there?…

A while ago Jarrett emailed me about doing a shoot with him and his girlfriend with their two dogs for her birthday. We normally haven’t done things like that in the past but it sounded really fun! I know pets can be difficult to capture sometimes so i just had to shoot shoot shoot! It ended up working out really well and we had a great time doing it.

Not to mention they are a great looking couple

The fisheye worked really well when I was lucky enough to get close

I like to think these dogs had a lot of fun too =)

We could let this glorious light go by without some good couple shots

We have been having some good luck with nature but it has to be in the exact right time of day… but hey, when it’s good, it’s great!

This was one of our very favorite weddings and I don’t have a ton of time to spend on a long blog post because we still have 2 weddings to edit before the serious wedding season roles around THIS weekend! So here is a few new shots of this wedding… I dont have a password on their full preview that you can see here

Amazing couple… Had the love for SURE

Super fun bride =)

Super fun DAY!

It happens to the best of us.

We are hoping to get this wedding done real soon and I will let everyone know, because it’s a good one!!

As you may have noticed for some reason I have kinda been on a cars and bikes kick lately. I have always been a serious motor-head at heart and I always love looking at the mags. with their awesome images of all these sweet cars!

So one of my buddies was telling me about getting a new Kawi 636 and I thought that would be really awesome to do some cool photos with that. So I did! I am thinking about starting to offer motor sessions but I am still feeling out the session prices and what would be good to offer so any feedback would be appreciated!

Here is some of my favorite images I have gotten to date:

And now that we have all the equipment we “need” (not want) We could finally afford to get a nice reliable car that would help us to look somewhat reputable when we have clients follow us to locations. Not to mention something that would get us to all these out of state weddings! So here she is our new[to us] Honda Accord LX! up to 35mpg on the highway and I have yet to get under 29 even all city driving. So we are very pleased =)

Of course I had to take a couple fancy shots today after a bath.

Hope you enjoyed them! Please let me know if you know of anyone that would be interested in this sort of thing, I can’t wait to do more!

Gauper out.

My next blog was going to be about our wedding in NY but I wanted to wait have have Holly edit a few fresh images that no one has seen so that gives me the chance to show you guys what I did last night! It was raining and I have been wanting to do some raindrop-on window bokah shots… But since Jay-Eads just showed me how to make a tilt-shift out of any lens, I thought I would try it out and see how it works!

It… was.. AWESOME!I have never ever seen Bokah shots like this so I am pretty pumped about them!!! So for all of these I am using a non-tilt/shift lens. just my trusty 28mm f/1.8 twisted off the mount

These shots are difficult to achieve because you have to manually focus while holding the lens off the mount, and it gives you a headache after too long but its so worth it!

It was a great light show moving about in my viewfinder, so I shot until my arms were tired from the task of twisting the lens around and holding it up to catch the light just right.

This one looks like the sun with flames exuding from it! amazing

You can see how the focus plain goes from front to back to top to bottom

It was great fun I am for sure going to have one enlarged! Which one do you like best?

BIG news on the business front!

When Holly and I met she was looking for someone to teach her more about photography and trying to find out if she should go to school again for that instead of sticking with graphic design which is what she graduated with.

At this time, I was looking for someone to design me a logo and website. That’s the premiss of how we met essentially for those of you who didn’t know. So she was looking for a photographer to show her the ropes…We technically have to say we met on-line… Which is kind of embarrassing for us =) She always makes me tell the story when people ask because I can tell it in a way that doesn’t spotlight that fact but doesn’t lie about how we met either!

My point is that at first Holly was with me shooting weddings because I could use a hand being pretty inexperienced, and because she wanted some more practice. We quickly became a great team and have actually been together since my first paying wedding!

So the whole point of this story is that Holly has been more in the background where I got most of the credit for her amazing editing, and a lot of her shots that no-one knew were hers! You can’t say we are just Ryan Richard Photography anymore. It’s not just me, it’s us! She has improved by leaps and bounds and there is no way I could produce what I promise without her. So to celebrate and recognize the goodness she brings to the table, we are now GAUPERPHOTO!

What do ya think? I struggled for a while about changing it to my last name because no one can seem to say it right! If you actually look at it and sound it out, it’s not that hard. Gaw-per. Not Galper, Glopper, Grooper,Goopie,Golper,Gumper,groper or Galapanokis.

GAUPER … I have gone through a lot of frustration, but I am putting my trust into mankind one more so please don’t let me down! Even with Ryan Richard people would always call me Richard for some reason, or say Ryan Richards…So I am counting on you guys to get it right… got it? =)

So anyway, we have a bridal show coming up where we are the only photography vendors. The Radisson is putting on a non-traditional show that is going to be really great! Unfortunately, we have a wedding in Long Island the same day. I have been super pumped to do that wedding but we are bummed to not be able to do the show but we figured a big NY wedding and a big bridal show would be the perfect time to unveil a new logo and name!

Part of the deal of having a free booth and being a preferred vendor all year for the fanciest hotel in town was that I had to shoot the bridal show. Since I obviously couldn’t I asked if I could hire someone out to do that so I could still have the booth. I had someone great in mind and they accepted! My favorite new wedding photographer is Diana Vermeulen of Moxie Photography. I have been referring people to her left and right because she does great work for the price so if we are booked on your date or are a little out of our range, be sure to look her up!

Since we are getting an all new identity, we needed a few fresh new images of us to display at the Bridal show we will be doing a full session soon, with another one of my new favorite photographers we have been hanging out with, Melissa Gregersen

But since we didn’t have time to do a full session we went out for a few shots with my brother in law Dave who we are thinking about hiring on as an intern this summer.

He graduated from Western with a marketing degree and we think he has a lot of potential not only on the business side but possibly behind the camera with some practice! These are a few shots he took for us. Thanks Dave!

Pretty nice for his first time wielding a nice camera right?

We wanted to do a giant overhaul with a new website and blog but that just wasn’t going to happen by the NY trip and we really wanted to do it for the show and the wedding. Be on the lookout for at least a new blog by the beginning of the summer because a nice blog is LONG overdue and we know that. The new one will be much more enjoyable to visit!

But anyways, that’s the big news! I hope you guys like it. I feel like we have more of our own style and the old logo only portrayed our traditional and classic side but had nothing to do with the rustic and industrial side. I think it suits us much better and is much more modern. Let us know what you think!!

Gauper out =)

So Holly seems to have found a niche and I want to show everyone some goodness! We are actually thinking about offering a ring shot session which would consist of going around and “macroizing” someone’s wedding ring in several cool environments in lots of interesting and unique ways. We have only had a few minutes to get these shots on engagement shoots or during downtime at weddings, so I think we could really get some amazing shots if we had like a half hour! so without further adue enjoy some of her ring shots!

We will be doing ring shot sessions for $75 with a $50 print credit. email me for Availability : ryan@ryanrichardphoto.com

So I had to buy a pro account for my second flickr account because thats the images I use to plug into this blog. I try and keep my personal flickr more quality then quantity, and we upload some random stuff for this blog that I wouldn’t want on there.

Anyway my point is that when you click on images on this blog it will bring you to that image on my secondary flickr. I just wanted to let you guys know there is a better one with better descriptions, and technical info about each shot. I spend a lot more time making that look good.

Also I just set up a new set, 75 of my favorite photos from the past year. So go HERE and see the one!

This weekend was AWESOME!! Who’s with me? We had to take advantage of it so we took care of 3 engagement sessions and they all went so well I just couldn’t believe how smooth the session was and how well the images turned out!I have a lot to post but I am going to split them up starting with our session today of Dan and Laura. Holly actually edited them mostly, but then I couldn’t sleep tonight so I stayed up tweaking her edits and obsessing over every detail. Needless to say I am pretty excited about them! Lets not save the best for last. Check out Laura’s Serious face. Nailed it!

Holly took this next one, and one of our friends posted on her flickr saying it was better then anything I posted for the weekend. I was like ouch! =) But she is pretty sweet I’m not gonna lie!

It seems to be the weekend of flair this weekend since I have been using the 28mm f/1.8 a LOT this is why.

Here’s another good one with the 28, wide open.

great couple =)

I really tried to perfect this one with all lightroom had!

How do you guys feel about the new wide up-shots?

They knew how to have fun too so we had a good time!

not much you can say about this =)

So if you feel like boosting my editing ego I wouldn’t stop ya =) Holly has always whooped me. Keep in mind that most of those are mostly edited by Holly but I just tried to obsess over the details… So I dunno… just leave a comment will ya?!? More to come very very soon!