Merci Rae 
Merci RaeSunday, April 20, 2008
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The amazing Sarah Lavelle
Today I had the pleasure of shooting with an amazing new up and coming model, Sarah Lavelle. She is young, but has amazing potential as you can clearly see by these samples from today's shoot. Her hair and makeup was done by the incredible Joy Yana of Faces of Joy. I want to say a major thank you to both of them as they made today's shoot fun and a total success!
Sarah Lavelle
Sarah Lavelle
Sarah Lavelle 
Sarah Lavelle
Sarah Lavelle
Friday, April 18, 2008
Some samples of my work....
If you managed to get through my long, tedious, and boring first post, I thought you deserved a reward! :) These images are a few of my favorites and I feel they represent me well and show examples of the work I am now able to create...
This first image is really significant to me. It represents my first real breakthrough in lighting and was the key to my being able to start learning about how to manage light effectively. Believe it or not, this was taken on a pool table in a bar!
Jade Phoenix
This image is just another example of the amazing range and versatility of Jade. I love the rich colors and the amazing passion that she can exhibit in her images. As a trained actress, she can pull off just about any expression or emotion!
Jade PhoenixThis last image of Jade is another example of what this girl is capable of. She is truly amazing and she has such a wonderful way of drawing the viewer into her images and captivating you.
Jade PhoenixThis next image was actually stumbled on almost by accident. Allie and I were shooting some pinup images when she asked me if I had a mirror she could look at herself in. I handed her this one and let her adjust it so she could see herself. As she was adjusting it, I caught a glimpse of her in the mirror and froze in my tracks! I had her angle it so I could see her face and hair well and then snapped this...
Allie RaeThese next two images are of the incredibly beautiful and sexy Jacquelyn. This girl is simply incredible to work with and has a wonderfully elegant style as well as a playful side that definitely comes out in her images. We have created some amazing images together and I cannot wait to create more!
We shot this one on the fallow corn field behind the studio. I thought Jacquelyn did an incredible job of melding the country girl charm with the sexy side she pulls off so well.
Jacquelyn
This image was taken in the studio and represents how fun and playful Jacquelyn can be. She brought this parasol she had purchased at a flea market and we just started shooting...
Jacquelyn
I hope you enjoy these images and will come back for more in the next post! I would love to hear your opinions and feedback as well if you have something you would like to offer. :)
Adam
Welcome to EA Photographics new Photo Blog!
Ok, so I have taken the plunge and decided to finally start a blog for EA Photographics. These days, everyone and their monkey has a blog so why should I be any different? :)
I guess that the logical place to start things off is with a bit of a biography and history for myself and my company. First off, my name is Adam and I am the principal (and for now ONLY) photographer at EA Photographics. I am originally from Los Angeles, CA and have lived in Northern and Southern CA, New York, Wisconsin, and now I reside in Hershey, PA. Yes, THAT Hershey, PA. :) I live about a mile or so from the Chocolate Plant and Hershey Park and when the wind is right I can smell the chocolate from my house. We refer to Hershey as the sweetest place on earth and I have to agree!
I have always had a love of photography and even as a small child would be known to pick up a camera and shoot anything I could find that I thought was cool. My father tells the story of when I was about three years old, I apparently got hold of the family Kodak and proceeded to shoot an entire roll (36 pictures) of the family cat. None of the images were in focus, properly composed, or worthy of looking at, but I shot them nonetheless. :)
When I was about seven, my mother and I took a trip across the desert southwest through Arizona, California, Utah, Colorodo, and a few other places I do not even remember. I must have shot at least a hundred pictures of the countryside while sitting in the passenger seat of the car as we travelled across the southwest. Again, none of those images were very compelling, but I loved the idea of being able to shoot things that I found interesting and preserve those memories for many years. When we made it to a ghost town in the CA desert named Bodie, I was absolutely fascinated by the sights and the history of the place. It was a booming gold rush town back in the mid-1800's and I was totally consumed with taking pictures of the place.
As I got a bit older, I did the typical tourist-type photography using my beloved Instamatic and, later, a Polaroid Instant camera. I was not what I would consider technically proficient in those days, but I seemed to have a decent eye for things that looked good or were interesting to the people that saw my pictures. At least, that was what my friends and family told me! lol I am sure it was because they did not want to hurt my feelings. :)
I went about my life and had careers in retail, sales, computer programming, etc. without ever really giving any serious thought to the idea of photography or being a professional photographer. As the years went by and camera technology improved and drastically changed, I ended up getting a pretty early Sony point-and-shoot camera and started experimenting with it. I loved the fact that I could instantly see the results of my efforts and started to hone and refine my creative eye. Towards the end of 2001, I was dating a woman that fancied herself a "model" and encouraged me to take pictures of her that she could then post online and use to create a model portfolio. That was the start of what is now my photography company and business, EA Photographics.
In those early days, my camera of choice was still that Sony P&S camera that had a whopping 2.0 megapixels, a fixed lens, and a 10x optical zoom. It was a relatively modest camera, but did not require that I know anything about things like aperture (F-Stop), Shutter Speed, or ISO sensitivities. I simply pointed the camera at my subject while holding the camera at arms length, composed the shot on the back of the camera's little display screen, and pressed the shutter button. Needless to say, I thought my pictures were amazing and proudly posted my images online to boast and brag and show them off. Imagine my devastation when REAL photographers would see my work and completely destroy them with their feedback, comments, and opinions. Reading through their comments and opinions was one of the most painful experiences I have ever had to endure in my professional life.
After my indignation and rage over what some of these people had said, I calmed down, took a look at the work of some of those that were ripping me a new one, and had to admit that THEIR work WAS amazing and MINE, in comparison, truly sucked... :) It was a hard lesson for me, but I became obsessed with the idea of learning how to elevate my truly terrible images to at least the same universe as that of these people that so clearly KNEW what they were talking about.
I began to scrutinize the work of other people and gradually began to realize that I had a LONG way to go and a LOT to learn before I would ever be able to put my work online and have it be even remotely well-received. I spent the next two or three years finding out about things like composition, exposure, photoshop, etc. and read just about every online resource I could find that had to do with photography. I shot still life, landscape, portraits, and anything else I could get my camera on. My ex-girlfriend was my best and most frequent subject and we both learned a lot about the modeling world. We had many false starts and failed miserably in just about everything we tried at first. After a while, we began to get a bit better and I was starting to learn how to really show a woman to her best potential photographically. She helped me learn a lot about the modeling world as well and that is when I began to get approached by other women that wanted me to take their portfolio images.
In those early days, I shot anyone that was willing to pose for me and I did not charge. I was so thrilled that somebody was willing to pose for me and let me take their pictures as I was learning what the heck I was doing, I was happy to shoot them for free! :) I took some (in hindsight) really horrible images back then, but it gave me a lot of experience and taught me a lot about how to make a model look better. When my ex-girlfriend started to get jealous that there were other attractive models that wanted to work with me, it became a major problem for me. When she gave me the ultimatum that it was either her or my photography, I had no choice but to show my ex-girlfriend the door! :) She would not accept and was apparently unable to comprehend that, simply because I take pictures with a lot of beautiful women, I am NOT romantically OR physically involved with them and I wanted NOTHING more than to capture their beauty in a technically pleasing way. As painful as it was for me, that was the moment that really started me on the path to where I am today...
I eventually reached a point where I knew that, to get better, I needed to finally get a better camera and the tools I thought I needed to be able to elevate the technical quality of my work. At the beginning of 2004, I bit the bullet and took the plunge by purchasing one of the original Canon Digital Rebel SLR cameras. I instantly fell in love with my new toy and shot like mad for a while. My EOS 300D and its pathetic little 18-55 mm Kit Lens shot like mad for a few months. The only problem I faced at that time was that the camera was SO smart and had SO many dials, buttons, settings, etc. that I was incredibly intimidated by it! I knew NOTHING about the three main variables to obtaining a proper exposure (Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO setting) that I literally left the camera in full automatic mode and let the camera make ALL the decisions about what settings to use and how to set itself to get what it THOUGHT were the correct settings for every lighting condition. I shot a whole lot of crap that way since the camera will NEVER be as good as an experienced and knowledgeable human being when it comes to making these choices. Additionally, when shooting in full automatic mode, you are limited in the size and quality of the images you produce as you can only shoot JPEG images that way. I knew my camera had an image format called RAW, but the only was you could create RAW image files was to shoot in MANUAL mode and that made ME responsible for making all the right choices!
I shot and shot and shot and then spent many painful hours in Photoshop desperately trying to make my images look better and, way too often, spent most of my time simply trying to SALVAGE an image that was horribly over or under exposed... If any of you have ever tried to make any kind of major adjustments to a JPEG file, you can appreciate my frustrations and just how difficult, if not impossible, this is. In those days, Photoshop was not so much as a creative tool for me as it was a means to fix the problems that I had created by not knowing how to shoot a decent image in the first place!
During the summer of 2004, I accompanied a model I did a lot of work with at that time to a shoot with another photographer that had a great studio and all the lights, props, etc. She and I had done a shoot before heading over to the studio, so I had all my stuff with me and did not want to leave my camera bag in the car while she did a shoot with the other photographer. I was totally amazed at all the gadgets and gizmos that this guy had and his equipment was mesmerizing to me. I watched every move like a kid standing at the window of a candy store... :)
In between sets, the photographer asked me if I wanted to shoot a few frames with his studio lights while he changed a few set props and background. After a delay of about 0.00000001 nanoseconds, I said YES!!!!!!! :) He then unplugged the sync cord from his camra and offered it to me. I took the end of the cord from him and just stood there looking at it. He sensed I was clueless (it did NOT take a degree in photography for someone to realize this at that time!) and told me to plug it into my hot shoe adapter. I looked at him blankly and asked "hot shoe what?" He then asked me if I knew what a hot shoe was as he pointed to it on the top of his camera and asked me if my camera had a hot shoe. I looked at my camera and realized that it did, indeed, have one. He then removed the adapter from his camera and showed me how to attach it to mine. :)
Next thing I knew, he was taking light meter readings and calling out the settings to me. I must have still looked pretty befuddled so he repeated the settings that I should set the camera to. When I was STILL looking befuddled, he said "put your camera to manual mode and change the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO to these settings." I almost dropped the damn cable when he said MANUAL mode as I had still never shot in manual mode at that time. He literally had to show me how to set my own camera to manual and then modify each of the required settings and how to shoot in RAW mode. That shoot represented the best work I had ever done to that point, in spite of the fact that they STILL sucked pretty bad due to my inexperience in shooting in manual mode and being responsible for setting EVERYTHING myself instead of relying on the camera's artificial intelligence.
That was the turning point in my learning process and my career. I took those initial RAW files and learned how to get them into Photoshop, tweak them a little bit, and then create a JPEG file AFTER having done some decent retouching to the images. By early the next year, I was getting a lot better at getting the settings pretty close to where they needed to be to create decent images and produce good work. I then had to purchase some studio lights and I have spent the last 3 or 4 years learning about studio lighting!
So, after a long and tortuous path, here I am now. I still truly love what I do, have never stopped pushing myself to learn and grow with every shoot, and have been blessed to be able to meet and work with some wonderful people in and around this area. I love working with models of all experience levels to create beautiful images that showcase them well and will help position their portfolio to be able to makrket them well to whatever their target market is. I also enjoy being able to share in a family's special times and capturing life memories in the form of family portraits, school portraits, and weddings.
I take my work very seriously and work very closely with models, families, business clients, and anyone that would like to make use of my experiences and creative vision to capture compelling images that suit your needs. This is not about me as much as it is about what YOU want to capture and how YOU want to remember and preserve the people, places, and events that are important to you!
If you managed to read all (or even a fair part) of this long tome, I hope I have been able to offer a little bit of insight into my background and experience, as well as a little bit of my personality and sense of humor. I truly believe that it is my approach and laid back way of going about my work that helps me put people at ease and make them comfortable enough to allow me to capture their true personalities in my images in ways that help me to create wonderful images that you will treasure for many years to come! Thanks for taking the time to stop by my blog and I hope you will return on a regular basis to see what I am up to as well as samples of my work. I would be even more grateful if you would take the time to post your thoughts and input relative to what I write and the images I post here. I want this to become a place where I can get to really know those that like and want to view my work and learn more about me as well as a way for me to offer some insight into what makes me tick as well... :)
Look for another post later this evening after I decide just which images I want to post first. :)
Adam
http://www.eaphotographics.com/
I guess that the logical place to start things off is with a bit of a biography and history for myself and my company. First off, my name is Adam and I am the principal (and for now ONLY) photographer at EA Photographics. I am originally from Los Angeles, CA and have lived in Northern and Southern CA, New York, Wisconsin, and now I reside in Hershey, PA. Yes, THAT Hershey, PA. :) I live about a mile or so from the Chocolate Plant and Hershey Park and when the wind is right I can smell the chocolate from my house. We refer to Hershey as the sweetest place on earth and I have to agree!
I have always had a love of photography and even as a small child would be known to pick up a camera and shoot anything I could find that I thought was cool. My father tells the story of when I was about three years old, I apparently got hold of the family Kodak and proceeded to shoot an entire roll (36 pictures) of the family cat. None of the images were in focus, properly composed, or worthy of looking at, but I shot them nonetheless. :)
When I was about seven, my mother and I took a trip across the desert southwest through Arizona, California, Utah, Colorodo, and a few other places I do not even remember. I must have shot at least a hundred pictures of the countryside while sitting in the passenger seat of the car as we travelled across the southwest. Again, none of those images were very compelling, but I loved the idea of being able to shoot things that I found interesting and preserve those memories for many years. When we made it to a ghost town in the CA desert named Bodie, I was absolutely fascinated by the sights and the history of the place. It was a booming gold rush town back in the mid-1800's and I was totally consumed with taking pictures of the place.
As I got a bit older, I did the typical tourist-type photography using my beloved Instamatic and, later, a Polaroid Instant camera. I was not what I would consider technically proficient in those days, but I seemed to have a decent eye for things that looked good or were interesting to the people that saw my pictures. At least, that was what my friends and family told me! lol I am sure it was because they did not want to hurt my feelings. :)
I went about my life and had careers in retail, sales, computer programming, etc. without ever really giving any serious thought to the idea of photography or being a professional photographer. As the years went by and camera technology improved and drastically changed, I ended up getting a pretty early Sony point-and-shoot camera and started experimenting with it. I loved the fact that I could instantly see the results of my efforts and started to hone and refine my creative eye. Towards the end of 2001, I was dating a woman that fancied herself a "model" and encouraged me to take pictures of her that she could then post online and use to create a model portfolio. That was the start of what is now my photography company and business, EA Photographics.
In those early days, my camera of choice was still that Sony P&S camera that had a whopping 2.0 megapixels, a fixed lens, and a 10x optical zoom. It was a relatively modest camera, but did not require that I know anything about things like aperture (F-Stop), Shutter Speed, or ISO sensitivities. I simply pointed the camera at my subject while holding the camera at arms length, composed the shot on the back of the camera's little display screen, and pressed the shutter button. Needless to say, I thought my pictures were amazing and proudly posted my images online to boast and brag and show them off. Imagine my devastation when REAL photographers would see my work and completely destroy them with their feedback, comments, and opinions. Reading through their comments and opinions was one of the most painful experiences I have ever had to endure in my professional life.
After my indignation and rage over what some of these people had said, I calmed down, took a look at the work of some of those that were ripping me a new one, and had to admit that THEIR work WAS amazing and MINE, in comparison, truly sucked... :) It was a hard lesson for me, but I became obsessed with the idea of learning how to elevate my truly terrible images to at least the same universe as that of these people that so clearly KNEW what they were talking about.
I began to scrutinize the work of other people and gradually began to realize that I had a LONG way to go and a LOT to learn before I would ever be able to put my work online and have it be even remotely well-received. I spent the next two or three years finding out about things like composition, exposure, photoshop, etc. and read just about every online resource I could find that had to do with photography. I shot still life, landscape, portraits, and anything else I could get my camera on. My ex-girlfriend was my best and most frequent subject and we both learned a lot about the modeling world. We had many false starts and failed miserably in just about everything we tried at first. After a while, we began to get a bit better and I was starting to learn how to really show a woman to her best potential photographically. She helped me learn a lot about the modeling world as well and that is when I began to get approached by other women that wanted me to take their portfolio images.
In those early days, I shot anyone that was willing to pose for me and I did not charge. I was so thrilled that somebody was willing to pose for me and let me take their pictures as I was learning what the heck I was doing, I was happy to shoot them for free! :) I took some (in hindsight) really horrible images back then, but it gave me a lot of experience and taught me a lot about how to make a model look better. When my ex-girlfriend started to get jealous that there were other attractive models that wanted to work with me, it became a major problem for me. When she gave me the ultimatum that it was either her or my photography, I had no choice but to show my ex-girlfriend the door! :) She would not accept and was apparently unable to comprehend that, simply because I take pictures with a lot of beautiful women, I am NOT romantically OR physically involved with them and I wanted NOTHING more than to capture their beauty in a technically pleasing way. As painful as it was for me, that was the moment that really started me on the path to where I am today...
I eventually reached a point where I knew that, to get better, I needed to finally get a better camera and the tools I thought I needed to be able to elevate the technical quality of my work. At the beginning of 2004, I bit the bullet and took the plunge by purchasing one of the original Canon Digital Rebel SLR cameras. I instantly fell in love with my new toy and shot like mad for a while. My EOS 300D and its pathetic little 18-55 mm Kit Lens shot like mad for a few months. The only problem I faced at that time was that the camera was SO smart and had SO many dials, buttons, settings, etc. that I was incredibly intimidated by it! I knew NOTHING about the three main variables to obtaining a proper exposure (Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO setting) that I literally left the camera in full automatic mode and let the camera make ALL the decisions about what settings to use and how to set itself to get what it THOUGHT were the correct settings for every lighting condition. I shot a whole lot of crap that way since the camera will NEVER be as good as an experienced and knowledgeable human being when it comes to making these choices. Additionally, when shooting in full automatic mode, you are limited in the size and quality of the images you produce as you can only shoot JPEG images that way. I knew my camera had an image format called RAW, but the only was you could create RAW image files was to shoot in MANUAL mode and that made ME responsible for making all the right choices!
I shot and shot and shot and then spent many painful hours in Photoshop desperately trying to make my images look better and, way too often, spent most of my time simply trying to SALVAGE an image that was horribly over or under exposed... If any of you have ever tried to make any kind of major adjustments to a JPEG file, you can appreciate my frustrations and just how difficult, if not impossible, this is. In those days, Photoshop was not so much as a creative tool for me as it was a means to fix the problems that I had created by not knowing how to shoot a decent image in the first place!
During the summer of 2004, I accompanied a model I did a lot of work with at that time to a shoot with another photographer that had a great studio and all the lights, props, etc. She and I had done a shoot before heading over to the studio, so I had all my stuff with me and did not want to leave my camera bag in the car while she did a shoot with the other photographer. I was totally amazed at all the gadgets and gizmos that this guy had and his equipment was mesmerizing to me. I watched every move like a kid standing at the window of a candy store... :)
In between sets, the photographer asked me if I wanted to shoot a few frames with his studio lights while he changed a few set props and background. After a delay of about 0.00000001 nanoseconds, I said YES!!!!!!! :) He then unplugged the sync cord from his camra and offered it to me. I took the end of the cord from him and just stood there looking at it. He sensed I was clueless (it did NOT take a degree in photography for someone to realize this at that time!) and told me to plug it into my hot shoe adapter. I looked at him blankly and asked "hot shoe what?" He then asked me if I knew what a hot shoe was as he pointed to it on the top of his camera and asked me if my camera had a hot shoe. I looked at my camera and realized that it did, indeed, have one. He then removed the adapter from his camera and showed me how to attach it to mine. :)
Next thing I knew, he was taking light meter readings and calling out the settings to me. I must have still looked pretty befuddled so he repeated the settings that I should set the camera to. When I was STILL looking befuddled, he said "put your camera to manual mode and change the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO to these settings." I almost dropped the damn cable when he said MANUAL mode as I had still never shot in manual mode at that time. He literally had to show me how to set my own camera to manual and then modify each of the required settings and how to shoot in RAW mode. That shoot represented the best work I had ever done to that point, in spite of the fact that they STILL sucked pretty bad due to my inexperience in shooting in manual mode and being responsible for setting EVERYTHING myself instead of relying on the camera's artificial intelligence.
That was the turning point in my learning process and my career. I took those initial RAW files and learned how to get them into Photoshop, tweak them a little bit, and then create a JPEG file AFTER having done some decent retouching to the images. By early the next year, I was getting a lot better at getting the settings pretty close to where they needed to be to create decent images and produce good work. I then had to purchase some studio lights and I have spent the last 3 or 4 years learning about studio lighting!
So, after a long and tortuous path, here I am now. I still truly love what I do, have never stopped pushing myself to learn and grow with every shoot, and have been blessed to be able to meet and work with some wonderful people in and around this area. I love working with models of all experience levels to create beautiful images that showcase them well and will help position their portfolio to be able to makrket them well to whatever their target market is. I also enjoy being able to share in a family's special times and capturing life memories in the form of family portraits, school portraits, and weddings.
I take my work very seriously and work very closely with models, families, business clients, and anyone that would like to make use of my experiences and creative vision to capture compelling images that suit your needs. This is not about me as much as it is about what YOU want to capture and how YOU want to remember and preserve the people, places, and events that are important to you!
If you managed to read all (or even a fair part) of this long tome, I hope I have been able to offer a little bit of insight into my background and experience, as well as a little bit of my personality and sense of humor. I truly believe that it is my approach and laid back way of going about my work that helps me put people at ease and make them comfortable enough to allow me to capture their true personalities in my images in ways that help me to create wonderful images that you will treasure for many years to come! Thanks for taking the time to stop by my blog and I hope you will return on a regular basis to see what I am up to as well as samples of my work. I would be even more grateful if you would take the time to post your thoughts and input relative to what I write and the images I post here. I want this to become a place where I can get to really know those that like and want to view my work and learn more about me as well as a way for me to offer some insight into what makes me tick as well... :)
Look for another post later this evening after I decide just which images I want to post first. :)
Adam
http://www.eaphotographics.com/
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