So I neeed a shot of the convention center. Ideally, a nice wide shot.

It’s simple enough to get a shot of some portion or other of the cenvention center. It’s trying to get all of it, without the buildings that it’s nestled in between.

So after visiting the roof of Southern Market, the roof level of the King Street Garage I noticed this church steeple. Why not I thought?

The wonderful people at Trinity Lutheran allowed me to scale the their steeple (with guidance from Trinity Sexton, Geoff Herr). To say the least it was an amazing experience. Ignoring the view from the steeple, the church itself is a work of art. It’s like going back in time. And all of it, everything, is immaculate. They’ve just finished an eight year long restoration. The church is this beautiful combination of brand new and antique. It is like going back in time.

Here are few shots from the Trinity gallery.

This is shot from inside the steeple where 200 years of painters, carpenters and other service people have left their names.

Light is the photographer’s best friend. So most of us welcome just about any time we can get more of it. With the days getting longer it means more opportunities to grab some of that light.

Here is a wonderful bowl of vaseline glass skulls at Gallery 141.

Here is a slightly larger bowl of African cobalt bottle glass beads.

And finally, a more traditional representation of spring, a tree at F&M about to bloom.

It should be a busy weekend and the pace won’t slow through the end of this month. Look for lots of new images from all over place.

A few shots of the Streetscape meeting in the City Council Chamber this week.

I’ve just finished some for work LPW Racing shooting one of their parts lines. Some samples from that shoot are below and without wallowing (too much) in self-congratulatory blather, I’m really happy with them. I love doing product work. As much as I enjoy event work, it’s really nice to be able to inhabit my own little world and have the pleasure of the extra time to craft images that really pop. Obviously the background on these are dropped in as is the shadow. I could certainly shoot these with a blue background and create a shadow but the sort of hyper-surreality of the pure background and Photoshop shadowing is much stronger.

Enjoy.

I say it a lot and it’s true, it’s the people that I get to work with that make my job so rewarding. The diversity of the organizations is stimulating. And because so many of the companies I shoot for are creative ones, it’s a group of people that challenge me to do interesting work.

I’m lucky, to say the least.

Yesterday was April First Friday. I ran across my friend Rod Shumaker of Shumaker PDT holding a special event on Queen Street. Shumaker is a fantastic company. They worked with the city putting together last year’s dome party and do a number of high profile events as well a plethora of corporate and private events. Rod’s work is always exciting and a cut above. It’s why calling him an “event planner” is accurate but really a rather pedestrian term when applied to him and his company. Here are a couple of shots from his wedding oriented event.

I try to make it a point to visit galleries I haven’t spent time in yet. Lancaster is blessed with a lot of great galleries. This month I went to Gallery 141 and met its owner, Alana Maubury Hunter and one of their artists, Kristie-Lou Brigham. Gallery 141 is a collective of artists that use the space to show their work. But it’s more than that. Gallery 141 is an event space. It’s also a creative space. Gallery 141 is right behind and under Gallery Row so I wonder if it doesn’t get as much foot traffic as the others. Which, if true, would be a shame. There’s a amazing variety of artists showing there at any one time and it’s a wonderful space. Gallery 141 is on Water Street between Orange and Chestnut. Seek it out. Your efforts will be rewarded. Here are some shots of the gallery and of Alana and Kristie-Lou.

Shooting the Obama rally was “stressful” to say the least. I hope, for his sake, that his campaign is better run and staffed than what I saw. It was a wonderful opportunity to shoot a presidential candidate’s rally and really brought home how needlessly difficult my job can be sometimes. I’ll stick to the local folks thank you.

So what was the “bad and ugly” part. The good part, my long-time friend Michael Manring was in Reading playing his almost annual gig at the Berks County Jazz Festival last night. Seeing Michael is always wonderful and hearing him play, always inspiring. For more notes on this show visit the set page here:

In the meantime, here are some of my favorites…

Soundcheck

So the local Reading television station visited the soundcheck to do the weather over the top of Michael and David playing and pump the show (and the festival) a bit. Here’s a couple of views of that.

Michael at rest.

More soundcheck.

Now that’s the rock god I’ve known for so long.

Dialing it in.

As I said, go check out the whole set.