Why so serious?, originally uploaded by Steve Cherrier.

My 12 year old son, Bryton made up as the Joker for Halloween at school.

Makeup Artist – ME!

Strobist info: SB28 shoot through umbrella camera right, 1/16th power, SB26 reflecting into an umbrella camera left at 1/16th power.

The Executives – John, originally uploaded by vidguy.

Promo shoot at a jam session for “The Executives.” Used in creation and for promotion on their new official site. You can see some more of the images from the set here.

Strobist info: SB25 bouncing off an umbrella up high and behind. SB600 bouncing off homemade foam “bouncer” velcro’d to the top – on a stand and positioned for dramatic cross light. Highly processed entirely in Adobe Lightroom (just PS for the watermark and export).

Yes, I know it’s more Dave Hill-like, but I wanted to try it and the style seemed to fit the theme of the band and its site. I think it’s kinda cool.

Happy Easter, originally uploaded by vidguy.

My nieces, Hailee and Ione after their big haul from the Easter Bunny this morning.

The local Mission City Record weekly newspaper just published an article about my sister who gave up her surgery appointment to help out a friend. I truly believe that she saved her life. I’m just so very proud of her.

If you’d like to read the whole story and find out why I’m so proud, click here – Mission woman receives second chance in life.

So after much research, I realized that I had to cut virtually all the fat out of my diet in order to avoid having extremely painful gallstone attacks. Unfortunately the earliest they could schedule my surgery was for January 22 (yesterday). So in about 6 weeks I lost about 18 pounds (nice to get rid of some of that spare tire!) and had on average one attack per week. Some were mild and others lasted up to 5 or 6 hours. Many people I have spoken to say that the attacks are similar to when a woman goes through hard labour having a baby!

To make matters worse, 2 days before the surgery I had an attack start (Sunday night at 11pm). This attack lasted RIGHT up until I had surgery – more than 36 hours! OMG, it was the worst couple of days of my life. No joking. So I was probably one of the few who went in to surgery absolutely ELATED that I was having my gall bladder removed!

Anyways, it all went well, the surgery had no complications and 15 staples over 5 small incisions, the gall bladder and stone is OUT! The surgeon came into recovery afterwards and said that the stone was about the size of a damn golf ball! He also said that if I waited another day or two it probably would have ruptured my gall bladder or duct. Wow…talk about close!

So I’m recovering well, and just relaxing in bed with the laptop while the incisions heal. Can’t wait to have my body back to normal. Oh yeah…and eat peanut butter!

Bryton – Christmas 2007, originally uploaded by vidguy.

Just took a snapshot of my son in front of the tree for his “Christmas Photo.”

Strobist info – SB600 and SB26 pointing through shoot-through umbrellas — one high camera left and one low camera right. Low aperture to get the DOF effect with the tree in the background.

So $60 later I came out with two 48″ fluorescent work lights and four 6500k daylight bulbs. All I had to do was insert the bulbs, hang the strips vertically on my light stands (with the handy chain supplied with the lights) and position them at 45 degree angles towards my subject. After begging my son to sit in, I snapped a few shots of him in my living room to see how it works. I also snapped a few shots of one of my cats too.

I was surprised to find that it works amazingly well. I’d want to tweak the angle and separation from the backdrop, but these photos were taken with my 50mm lens, ISO 200, f/2.8 and 1/125 shutter speed. Just some slight tweaking in Lightroom, including messing with the white balance (6500k is pretty much the “Cloudy” setting) and voila — studio lights (sorta). I might even mess around with reflecting some of the light back as well.

I’m in the studio again this weekend and it should be fun to give it a try with some models to see how it looks.

There’s something about babies that is indescribable. I like to think of it as innocence. On July 24th, 11 years ago, my son was born. I remember holding him in my arms thinking that this was the best day of my life. I also remember how innocent he looked and how beautiful he was. Exactly 11 years later to the day that my son was born, my nephew arrived in this world. Yesterday, Temperence Lai was born at just over 8 pounds, happy and healthy.

I would have missed his arrival as I had a photoshoot planned, but unfortunately, or fortunately, the poor model got sick and had to cancel. But this left me able to take a few pics on the day he was born. I even got a nice picture of him with his 98 year old great-grandma. Such innocence.