Oh, hello there influx of new eyeballs! Mel probably brought you here.
I’m Rory. This is me pretending to be caught in a candid moment:
About: I am a dailies coloristbynight and a videographer by day. I live and work in Los Angeles (but I also work everywhere I can travel). This blog is mostly about why I keep pursuing making videos, why I think color scienceis so cool, what sort of MacGuyver contraption I set up to produce something I didn’t have a budget for, and adventures contributing to the complicated reasons I love this redonkulous, silly, overpriced city.
I am married to a storyboard artist (James) who is the best ever, and sometimes I end up recording reference footage of how a chicken would dance because animators are weird:
(Please don’t watch all two minutes of that).
I suspect I am a good addition to your Google reader if you: are wondering how anyone has a “normal” job in Hollywood, like to read behind the scenes antics, enjoy watching short videos about entrepreneurs, enjoy bad jokes, or want to follow the not-so-epic tale of how I’ve gone from a Williams-Sonoma chef to paying my bills via makin’ pictures look pretty.
Bienvenue! It isn’t much, but you’re welcome to stick around.
Bienvenue to new readers coming from A Practical Wedding! I am a Los Angeles based photographer and cinematographer, who travels worldwide. I’m really, really pumped, jazzed, and titillated to be a sponsor. So, if my current readers (both of you) will humor me, here are some links if you’d like to poke around and see some of my favorite posts:
It’s been a bang-up week here at Casa Obscura! Between the fanatical editing of several excellent upcoming shoots, to my scrambling to remember the php and css knowledge lodged in the bowels of my brain.* But the end is in sight!
Do you know what tonight is? The night I finish my website upgrades!
Peruse the new and improved homepage, with a lovely non-flash gallery for your viewing pleasure!
*Actually not exactly medically accurate.
And here, you will find some wonderfully direct information about weddings! Looking for pricing? Bam, dig no further. It’s all on one page!
And the small business photo essays I’m so enthusiastically creating now have a home.
I know it’s kind of silly, but I get really excited about the internet. I remember coding my first website at 12, making really, really terrible Javascript filled monstrosities and being so jazzed something I made was out there for the entire world to see.
I had a page full of funny quotes my friend and I curated, and we thought we were so cool. We had a website! We were real!
But this time the business has a tax ID, and boring stuff like insurance, and there’s really people looking at it, and it is real. My photos are in your home. Both of you (ba dmm cshh). And I’m not nearly cool enough to pretend that doesn’t make me outlandishly excited every time I think about it.
I promise, no bandwidth hogging applets of lakes reflecting sparkling stars this time.
In addition to photographing the Inland Empire small business mixer, I also was also an exhibitor (not the scandalous kind, don’t worry). I was really excited to try it out, primarily because I’m a teeny tiny business and a lot of my work days involve sitting in my very quiet living room office and not talking to humans. It’s funny, shooting is an intensely social activity, especially events… trying to stay out of the way, read people’s minds, and yet be a pleasant addition to the environment. However any photographer will tell you, shooting makes up the smallest fraction of what makes a freelance career. I do a lot of huddling over my computer so I really enjoyed the chance to see other businesses operating.
I’m in the staggeringly broke inventive and resourceful stage of my career, so I knew I needed to be very careful about what I got printed up for the event.
I focused on selling my small business photoessays. One of my absolute favorite things to shoot is a small business in action. It brings together my love for shooting people in their workplace, styling products, and telling a story.
So I devised a plan to do just that: I charge a day rate, and come on location to a small business to shoot product photos, corporate headshots, and location photos all at the same time. By charging one rate, I get to free up the schedule a little bit, leaving room for me to collaborate with the owner and get creative.
I printed the first small business story I’ve shot, of my Dad’s jewelry business, as an 18”x24” poster. (This is getting kind of long. Click through to see the rest of my print materials!)
It’s been a few days; I done got buried by work. Which is a good thing! On the other hand, my cat has gotten used to me being awake by 5am and when I tried to sleep in until 8am this morning, he proceeded to bowling ball himself down the hallway while mewing at REM disrupting levels. You win this time, Fat Orange Cat. But if you give yourself a concussion I’m gonna be pretty peeved at you.
Speaking of said cat, here are the typical “I just got a new lens” portraits. I got a Canon 85mm f 1.8. I’ve found to have wonderfully fast autofocus, and sharp as a tack above about a 2.2-2.5. I’m loving the shadow detail too. More gratuitous test shots no doubt forthcoming.
You know what makes me happier than shooting photo or video content? Rolling in a vat of high fat cheese with my mouth open and a baguette under each chubby arm Shooting a lot of photos and video!
So in an effort to drive more people to fulfill my evil plan of shooting more, you can find me all over out there in the world wide webernets.
In case you’re haven’t yet been linked by one of the manyawesome people that use Pinterest, let me just echo the crowd and agree.
Come find me and take a look at my inspiration for upcoming shoots. It’s like a Rorschach test for photographers but way better. And then hire me, so we can make magic. Wink.
Or, why not peruse a directory of sane, practical, wedding vendors? You’ll find me listed on A Practical Wedding’s vendor directory. We’ve all taken the Sanity Pledge, so you will a) have excellent photos and b) not get soul or price gouged by anyone on the list.
Which hey, would make me an excellent person to hire.
I had an itch to go back through some old work today and stumbled upon these two stills from a project I shot in 2009.
I remember pulling up to this location with nothing but a big silk and an A-Minima. I thought, “Fudge balls. I have to shoot this scene and there will be either blown out highlights or underexposed subjects and everyone will think I did not know how to expose it.” So I metered the scene and exposed in the middle. It’s okay… pretty standard composition and yeah, you can see everything. But absolutely no personality. No risks at all.
Here’s a still I shot of my husband and father in law from vacation a couple weeks ago:
There’s a million things still wrong with this image but at least I’ve finally gotten over my chronic fear of imperfect exposure. I committed to those blown out highlights, dammit.
On the other hand, it’s sort of a strange angle, plus I’ve caught James looking at something that’s apparently causing him some significant mental duress. But you know, for whatever weird thing I’ve captured here, at least I ran with it. And it’s certainly better than what I shot two years ago. It’s a few more mistakes out of my system. And I’ll get a few more out tomorrow.
