For all my dancers out there I highly recommend this interview with Ashley Bouder. This was a Zoom session I participated in with on Friday. Has I known in advance how much Ashley was going to share, I would have shared the invite with all the dance school and dance teachers that are clients of mine.
Ashley Bouder is a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet and is the founder of the Ashley Bouder Project. She sat down with Pas de Deux on April 17, 2020, to talk about the Coronavirus quarantine and life as a professional dancer. She discusses dealing with injuries and what it’s like to be a principal dancer, and how to conduct yourself at auditions. The video is an hour long.
Video from the Church of the Holy Spirit’s 2020 Palm Sunday service
Regular readers of my photography blog will find the above post a little bit strange. Truth be told, an elderly parishioner at my church couldn’t see the online video from Palm Sunday. I needed a quick way to convert the Facebook Live video into another easy format for her to see it since she doesn’t have a Facebook account. Putting the link in my blog was a quick way to accomplish this! And if you are search for an Episcopal church I highly recommend Church of the Holy SPirit in Lebanon, NJ. http://www.churchholyspirit.org.
Are you cleaning out your closets, basements and other areas? Yeah me too. It’s only natural at times like this. Plus we have all that extra free time. The bonus is it needs to be done and it takes out minds off of the news for a little bit.
I gathered some tips to eliminate clutter and get your living space in order.
Choose Joy
Marie Kondo is a Japanese organizing consultant and author of the best-selling “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” that you need to check out. She also has her own Youtube channel and a series on Netflix!
Kondo transforms the tedious chore of folding laundry into a meditative activity. She urges that, as part of the purging ritual, you hold each belonging as you ask yourself whether it brings you joy. If the answer is no, then it’s time to say thank you and goodbye.
Less Is More
I’m a firm believer of decluttering and purging what you no longer need. If you haven’t used an item in the past 6 or 12 months, chances are you not going to need it going forward. Sometimes I cheat and say “I may need this again.” Then when I go through a purge again in 6 or 12 months and the items is still there, with even more dust on it, out it goes.
One concept of this is one in, one out. Bring in some new socks, there must be some old ones with holes you no longer need. Same concept for clothing and may other items.
Vertical Solutions
When I last cleaned out my closet, I wish I had more room to hang items. Then I realized I only had one horizontal bar in one section of my closet. If I moved up that bar and installed another one lower, I could double my capacity. This works well with shirts and folded pants. Dresses and items that need to hang full length will still need the extra room.
Furniture with the right storage solutions can help an apartment with toys everywhere become a tidy home.
Is a move of your residence in your future? If so this will contribute to improved home organization. Besides you don’t want to move stuff four times that you don’t need (1. put into box 2. load box into car/truck 3. unload box 4. unpack box 😦 )
What Are Your Ideas?
I’d love to hear your tips on this area. Please comment below and send to me and I’ll include!
With everyone working from home and schooling from home I’m sure it is. Mine too. In keeping with the “zoo” theme, here are some things for the family to do while staying safe inside:
Here are a few virtual tours of zoos and aquariums:
The Cincinnati Zoo: Check-in around 3 p.m., because that’s the time the Zoo holds a daily Home Safari on its Facebook Live Feed.
Atlanta Zoo: The Georgia zoo keeps a “Panda Cam” livestream on its website.
Georgia Aquarium: Sea-dwellers like African penguins and Beluga Whales are the stars of this aquarium’s live cam.
Houston Zoo: There are plenty of different animals you can check in on with this zoo’s live cam, but we highly recommend watching the playful elephants.
The Shedd Aquarium: This Chicago aquarium shares some pretty adorable behind-the-scenes footage of their residents on Facebook.
This may seem like a weird post coming from your photographer but I have my reasons. First, with all of us spending more time at home with family, your home WiFi is on overload.
Probably like many of you, my cable modem was located in the basement where my cable connection comes into the house. So naturally, I put my WiFi router down there. And that worked fine for the most part for many years. But now with COVID-19 and my wife working from home, we were having some issues.
So the first thing I did was figure out where the WiFi router should be for the best coverage in my home. Your basement doesn’t work unless everyone spends a lot of their time down there. I have a basement, a first floor, and a second floor. Moving the WiFi router to the first floor seemed like a good plan. I would have it in a central location so it can still be used in the basement and upstairs.
The easiest plan of action for me was to move it to the first floor right above where it was in the basement. For me, this worked out good as my photography studio is right there. Your situation might be different. I needed to drill a hole from the first floor to the basement and put 2 ethernet cables through the hole. One was from my cable modem (which stayed downstairs – I didn’t want to turn my studio into a data center! lol). The other was to go back downstairs and hook into a switch I have down there that feeds other “hard-wired” devices I have at my house (long story but I still do have non-wireless devices).
In the end, I’m so glad I did this. WiFi performance is now great on the first floor. The second-floor performance increased as well. Basement WiFi access is still acceptable. So now that you have some extra time on your hands <grin> give it a go. Just make sure you do it when there’s no one else using the internet 🙂
Thinking about doing the same and have some questions? Shoot me an email. Before going full time as a professional photographer, I spent 32 years in IT so I may be able to help 🙂
With everything going on in the world right now, I wanted to share a little theater joy. I’m not quite sure what will be happening with the 2020 Freddy Awards, but I know a lot of school’s productions have been postponed until the quarantine is lifted. So I wanted to share some of my best photographs from the 2018 Freddy Awards. These were on display in the Easton Hospital Gallery in the State Theatre last year. I will post my 2019 Freddy Award photographs soon.
Composites are a wonderful option if you are in love with several photographs. I can take several and blend them together to make a single treasured memory. The number of photographs that look good in a composite depends on the size of the composite. Generally up to 5 looks good on 8×10 and 11×14. Up to 7 or more can work for 16 x 20 and larger
Composite from SKIT’s “Mary Poppins”
I create all of my composites on either single weight matboard or in the case of 5×30’s, double weight. These make the final product more durable and strong. In fact you could even display them as is or they fit perfectly in a frame.
These composites can have a show name on the top (as pictured) or for dance, a popular dance quote. I have several to choose from or we can use your own! On the bottom can have the name – year, just the name or nothing at all. It’s customized just for you!
5 x 30 composite from SKIT’s “Frozen Jr”
Here is an example of a 5×30 composite. These are individual prints printed on a double-weight mat board. These can contain 5, 6 or 7 photos. This product can be horizontal (as pictured) or even vertical. These are great for unique spaces in a room like above a doorway or on top of other pictures. It’s durable enough to be displayed as-is. If you prefer a frame, they are available on Amazon. If you can’t find them, let me know and I’ll send you the link.
I have the ability to show you an online proof of what your composite will look like before it’s created.
Dabour Photography Show Photography from SKIT’s “Frozen Jr”
Theatrical show photographs of SKIT’s current production of “Frozen Jr.” Shows run weekends thru February 1, 2020. More details and tickets at http://www.showkids.org
Additional show photographs are available for viewing and purchase at:
Sorry for the lack of posts recently. My fall schedule was intense, to say the least. I was blessed to be working practically 7 days a week from mid-October until Christmas.
It’s common to have a year in review for photographers. Its a fun yet challenging task for an active professional photographer. My Lightroom catalog recorded slightly over 106,000 photos that I created. The sad thing is that is not all of them. Many sports assignments and a few others are kept on a different computer (laptop). For the sake of my sanity, I didn’t look at them.
The 300 images above do not represent everything I’ve photographed either in 2019. I know there are a few clients I realized after creating this I left off, not on purpose.
You can tell from above that I love to create dance and theater photographs. There are also plenty of others too including events, fire, photo booth (not even included above!), headshots and family portraits.
In closing, I’d like to thank all of my clients, past, present, and future for a great 2019. I look forward to 2020 to be even better. I plan on rebalancing some of the types of photographs I create and events I cover so it will be interesting to see how this works out!
