Blog

Thanks to everyone who's been following along with the Old Hat 15 Days of Christmas tweets. Yesterday I tried to pass along a few things I've learned from traveling the country shooting photos and videos for Old Hat's collegiate and professional clients. Hopefully some of you were listening and found it helpful. You can find me on Twitter here to see my tweets from the day.

Feel free to follow me and ask questions if you didn't get them in on Monday. Please don't be offended if I don't follow you back, I stay busy outside of the Twitter universe so I keep my list extremely short. You can always ask me anything via Twitter and I'll respond as promptly as possible.

You can check out all the Old Hat 15 Days of Christmas tweets by searching for the hashtag #OH15Days.

• The Guardian has put out a gallery featuring lego representations of some of the most newsworthy moments of the past year. Check it out here.

• The Oklahoma City Thunder have finally put up their new Thunder Girls site. Yours truly shot most of the content on it, all of the material you see above and the other posed photos against a white backdrop.

I was really glad to see it up finally. (We shot those pictures back in September.) It's a different realm from the sports stuff I shoot and I enjoy doing the glamour thing on occasion. Really the challenges and payoff are the same as any other photo I shoot though.

I still fuss over the lighting, think about how to interact with the subject and touch up a photo here and there to help guide the viewer to a realization of what it was actually like on set. Once I've done all of that I try to forget about it and move on to the next project. Something about not resting on your laurels I guess.

All that being said, I get more comments about the pretty girl photos than anything else I shoot.

Some are good, "Wow, nice pictues. That must be the biggest party of a shoot ever! Tough job huh?...wink,wink" Of course the reality of a shoot like that is 12 hours straight of kneeling, standing, climbing ladders, moving stands and generally sweating it out to take thousands of pictures that ultimately get narrowed down to a handful of each girl. That'll keep the 'ol ego in check.

Sometimes the comments are bad. These usually pop up on the message boards and local media sites. "Did you see the new pictures of so and so? Ugh..not so great. Is that the best they can do?"

I don't take any of it personally, just like I don't let the positive ones go to my head. Mostly I feel bad for whichever young lady may be criticized, for nothing more than wanting to express the best they have to offer in public. These comments are much less frequent than the positive ones. I think that, so far, the people of OKC aren't quite used to putting people up on a pedestal just to knock them down.

Finally there are the indifferent people. The indifferent ones are actually the only ones that concern me. I'm used to having my work both lauded and slammed. I'd like to get you to at least care one way or the other.

Now, just to clarify, I don't think pretty photos of pretty girls are a polarizing topic. I'm speaking about the goal for my work in general.

Enough with the deep thoughts. Go check out the site!

• I'll see you all back next week. I'm out of the office till then to spend time with loved ones and family. All the best to you and yours.