Karen Jacot / the blog

All the orders have been placed. I’m now just waiting to get the prints from my lab. I should just manage to get those delivered before we leave here. The movers come in a week and the reality of that hasn’t really hit me yet. At least they are packing for us, so I don’t have that task to deal with, too.

I’ve been working on redesigning my website lately. Just tweaking the existing design, really. But all new colors, so it’ll look pretty different. I hope to reveal that here very soon.

And so this isn’t all text, here’s a photo. Most of you probably know that I have a photoblog where I post a new photo each day (taken that day) of my son. I’ve never missed a day in over 2 years! They’re just snapshots of his day, and as annoyed as he sometimes gets with me for always pointing the camera at him, I hope that some day he appreciates having this collection of photos from each day. Here’s one from last week. (And the whole website can be found at CuriousLyle.)

Today my son turns two. Some days I can’t believe it’s already been two years, and other days I can’t believe it’s been only two years. I just want to say today to my beautiful son: Happy birthday to the most wonderful little boy I could imagine.

A couple weeks ago I rented a superwide angle lens–a 12-24mm f/4–to play with. That’s WIDE. I had been wanting to do some wide angle stuff, but the lenses aren’t cheap, so I figured it’d be best to play with one first before I buy. This lens was awesome. I barely took it off my camera for the entire week I had it.

I had a lot of fun playing with the distortion at the 12mm length. If you get way up close to your subject, you can get all kinds of funny distortion, like giant heads and tiny feet. Like these. I was just a few inches away from the cat, and maybe a foot away from the crying toddler.

This week I went to a fantastic workshop that I’d been looking forward to for a long time–the OneLight Workshop. I can’t remember how I first heard about it, but it’s been a year or so at least since I first discovered it and started hearing amazing things about it. So last fall when I saw San Diego on the list of cities for 2008, I registered as fast as I could. (No time to waste, they always sell out.)

I learned a ton about lighting portraits using only one single light and all the options and choices using a light can give you over just using available light. The workshop lasted from 10 am until a little after 2 am, so it was a looong day, but SO worth it. I am so excited to practice everything we learned.

Here are a few photos I shot at the workshop. The first one shows the subject shot with only natural light, and the second shows (almost) the same composition but lit with a flash off to camera-right. I actually like both of these photos–but what a difference there is! Totally different looks.

And then a few others from the day…all lit by one light off camera. It was uncharacteristically cold that day, so we were all pretty cold when we were shooting at the beach…hence the blanket the subject has wrapped around her!

(She’s a professional archer and was on the U.S. Olympic Archery Team in 2000. Very cool.)