Yes I'm still alive... for now. I may not survive the next 20 hours.

Last weekend I assisted with shooting 2 weddings, Friday and Saturday. Same goes for this weekend. But this one will be a little more rough. Today's wedding starts at 4pm and runs to about midnight. Tomorrows wedding starts at 7:30am... in Rockland county almost 2 hours away. So I have to be on the road by 5:30am. After I only got to the house a 1am.

I have done the marathons before, it doesn't mean I have to like them. I'll check in with a progress report later.

Update: Oct 5th, 2008 1:43pm

I'm ok. No damage done. The shooting the second wedding on only a couple of hours sleep was easier than I thought it would be. I guess I should have expected that. Many nights I go with only a few hours of sleep. When I ran the 28 hour paintball games, going like that wasn't too hard. I effectively slept till noon today, and now it's all good.

I interviewed today, for a photographer needing an assistant. She utterly shocked me when she said she still used 120 film. It was all I could do to keep my jaw from landing in my lap.

I know not everyone is a technophile, some people are even technophobes. But a modern professional photographer still using film, is like a modern fisherman using a row boat and a hand thrown net.

I drove an eighty minute round trip for a five minuet "introductory" style interview. That was a little of a letdown. She had people scheduled back to back every 10 minutes or so. She could have done that over the phone, then taken the top three or five candidates for real interviews.

That said I would still like to get the job. It’s good to know where things came from, and I don’t have as much film experience as I would like to be able to claim. On top of that, the job pays pretty well compared to what I’m getting currently. So I’m hopeful, but not expecting much.

I was contacted Wednesday to make some product photos for a new fragrance company, Alpha Dream. It was a fun job, they have an aesthetic sense similar to mine so we were very much in sync. These are their first images, primarily for the website. In the future they will need more with models, and different settings and styles for each fragrance. So hopefully they will be very good long term clients.

The last week has been busy. I shot two weddings last Friday and Saturday. The second one I booked, first one I shot solo in a year and half. I Think it turned out pretty well.

There were some shots I wish were better. It surprised my when The batteries in my primary flash died, forcing me to cannibalize the batteries out of the secondary. One thing that surprised me was that I had to force my self not to shoot the way Max does.

He has been a kind of tutor for me. I have been assisting him at weddings for about a year. His style of shooting wedding is more traditional than I would like. But after all this time working with him found myself doing exactly what he taught me. Even though I knew I wanted to do something more creative.

But that is normal I think. I put the photos online, sent them an email.. I a little ancious waiting to hear what they think of them.

A couple of nights ago I had a pretty cool dream. It had Spheres the size of VW Beetles that had canons on them. A floor made of 4 foot squares that were long shafts that went all the way through the earth, moved up to meet my feet and down when not needed, at the behest of my mere wishing it. Me and some chick got in a super gun fight al la Wanted. She lived in the mirror alien ruins on the other side of the earth. She noticed when I discovered this place because the floor pieces stopped obeying her, and listened to my mind instead. Yah the floor tiles move in a hole that goes straight through the earth.

It’s weird that I still remember that kind of detail, a couple of days later.

Moving on… This last week I started doing some web work on spec. A local Photographer, Allison, is working on getting this big web service up and running. I recently signed a NDA so I can’t explain much about the business or technical details. But that won’t stop me from talking about vague experiences.

If it takes off, and were talking Digg kind of big. It will set me up with cash for the rest of my life. As if! The chances of that are 1 in 10,000. Unless… I exert some leverage in the policy and decisions. Then I can probably push that to 1 in 100. But that is still a crazy long shot.

At least I am reasonably confident that I will get paid for the time I put in. So my risk is minimal. We’ll see how it goes.

Also the wedding I was at last Saturday, was very cool. They were a great bunch of people, and I got some great shots, even I’m happy with.