As I walked back to my studio late yesterday afternoon, there was a report of a large storm getting ready to roll through Chicago later that evening. The sun began to sink lower in the sky, and the clouds were billowing in a way that makes your jaw drop. The sun breaking through in unexpected ways, creating layers of light and shadows, clouds backlit in incredible ways.

It was like Michelangelo was just stopping by to say hello and do a quick sketch. You know. For old times.

All I could think about as I continued my walk was, “Why did I not have a good camera with me today?” That never happens, except when I’m in a rush to get somewhere in the morning, which I was earlier in the day.

I picked up my walking pace, hoping the spectacular light painting happening before my eyes would hold out by the time I was able to get back to my studio and grab a camera and stick it out my window, or take it up to the roof. I’ve seen perfect light like this go away in the amount of time it takes to change a lens, so I was anxious as I walked through my door, dropping my bag and headed straight to my camera cases to quickly set up a tripod and get my camera on top of it.

No time to get to the roof, I thought. Just open up a window, take a light reading and get shooting. It could all be gone in a few minutes.

Luckily, it lasted a bit longer.

I decided it might be nice to shoot some motion of this lovely scene, so I connected my time lapse timer to the camera and chose a 100mm lens to get a bit closer to the amazingness of the sky. Sometimes I like to use a wide lens, especially when the clouds are doing interesting acrobatics. This time, however, I had my eye on a specific patch of sky where the sun was beginning to play hide and seek with one of the particularly billowing cumulous clouds. Beautiful rays and moving shadows.

I made my final composition, locked in my exposure settings and hit start on the timer. As my camera clicked away, I finally had a chance to just stand there and watch it all with my own eyes. Sometimes when I’m busy setting up cameras and gear I really don’t have time to just stand there and enjoy it.

But this time, I did. Beautiful.

These photographs are two images from the sequence of thousands of photographs I made yesterday evening. I’ll have the actual time lapse moving film up in a few days.

And I’ll never forget to throw a camera in my bag again when leaving the studio. Even when I am in a rush.

Fenway Park, Boston

About 15 years ago, there was talk that ol’ Fenway Park in Boston might be living its last days. The home of the Red Sox was built back in the day when baseball was played in parks, not stadiums and it seemed like Fenway might be the latest victim of out with the old and in with the new.

In the early 1900s, a baseball park wasn’t built all at once. The basic field dimensions and a modest grandstand were constructed for the grand opening day, but as more people began to come out to the games, over the decades that followed, more seats were added down the foul lines and in the outfield.

Fenway Park

Baseball parks were fit into oddly shaped lots in the middle of existing neighborhoods. The right field line might end up being much further from home plate than the left field line. No two outfields were the same. Players would learn the eccentricities of how a ball hit off the outfield wall might ricochet off in an unusual direction.

What resulted was a beautiful hodgepodge of what a classic baseball park looked like, unlike the perfectly symmetrical stadiums that were built in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, with so little character. We in Chicago have examples of both. Beautiful Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs, a true timeless gem. And then there is the last of the badly designed modern ballparks, U.S. Cellular Field, home of the White Sox, with all of the character of a major airport mall.

The Red Sox Nation turned out to be very smart about their beloved Fenway. They kept it. They added as many seats as they could here and there. And they put aside any plans to tear it down and build something new that would never live up to the historic and imperfect park that they all loved.

In 1999, when the future fate of Fenway seemed grim, I flew my parents out to Boston to take in a few games one weekend. We wanted to experience Fenway before it was gone. The hurt of the tearing down of old Comiskey Park in Chicago, where the White Sox played for over 80 years, was still a fresh wound for us. Fenway, as one of the greatest baseball parks in the world, deserved a proper visit.

Fenway Park

Yes, the seats are small and uncomfortable. And yes, some of them don’t face home plate, but instead some seemingly random point in center field. That’s okay. Fenway is baseball history.

And today it celebrates its 100th birthday. These photographs are from our 1999 visit, when we thought it might be gone soon. It’s a happy birthday indeed.

Todos Santos Inn is a lovely place to live for a while. It’s a cozy, secluded and lush bit of paradise in the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. I had been staying there for almost a week as part of the artists retreat group of ZoeFest and was really beginning to feel at home. Waking up to the sounds of birds and wind whispering through the giant palm trees above as I walked down my little garden path from my apartment to the main house where a cup of delicious coffee was always waiting for me.

But with the exception of the pool and some of the garden, I hadn’t really done too much photography at the inn itself. Sometimes it takes me a while to find the handle on a location. Todos Santos Inn was such a place for me creatively. Many lovely areas, a little library off of the main office and a nice bar as well. But after walking around it all for nearly a week, I still hadn’t quite decided how to work with it photographically.

It was the lush leather chairs that finally began to strike my creative muse. Chairs in the library and chairs in the bar. There was definitely something there.

After my Saturday morning shoot with the lovely Stephanie Anne, it was time for my shoot with the first of two gorgeous Australian models that were along for the ZoeFest ride.

Anoush Anou is based in Melbourne and a woman whose work I was familiar with before our Mexican meeting. Like a few of the models I was working with, I had been aware of her for years. And since the fine art photography world can be a small one, it’s usually only a matter of time before we would end up working together.

Anoush Anou at Todos Santos Inn

Anoush has a striking physical beauty about her. But there is also a haunting mystery to her in photographs. She has a completely emotive face. Sometimes somber. Sometimes sophisticated and sensual. Yet always revealing a story unfolding in your mind as you ponder what she has created.

But she is also joyful in person. Silly fun and wonderful to hear laugh. A model with great positive energy even when her creations are slightly somber.

My mind was still a bit preoccupied with my mother at home in Chicago, still recovering in the hospital and I knew I was slightly less prepared that I would have preferred for my shooting time with Anoush. And once again, with a model of her caliber, she met me more than half way. It took me a while to find the correct angle and set up in the library where I wanted to begin photographing Anoush. She patiently waited until I had found it, giving me the extra mental space to figure it out.

That was the beauty of ZoeFest. We all wanted to create incredible art while we were there. And as artists, we all knew that creativity is not a switch you throw on when the clock strikes one. Sometimes the muse arrives fashionably late and as long as everyone involves respects it, something wonderful does eventually happen.

Not wanting to make her wait on set until I was happy with my vision, I began by photographing an empty chair in the library. There was wonderful indirect light coming in from a nearby balcony door. Soft and delicate. The library was a small room and even with a 50mm normal prime lens on my camera, I determined the best angle to photograph Anoush from, was actually for me to be outside of the room itself. I could use the doorway to the library as a bit of a framing device, which I like to do sometimes. It adds a slight distance in mental perspective from my subject. Not exactly voyeuristic, but not quite as intimate. Found beauty.

Anoush Anou at Todos Santos Inn

By the time I brought Anoush into the library, she needed very little direction from me to find the moment. Like the other models at our retreat, she has a complete sense of who she is from the first click of my shutter. And I found a familiar sensation wash over me as you have when you finally have physical proximity to someone you’ve long been aware of from a distance.

Just posing while seated in the chair, she was lovely. Every limb a coordinated effort of beautiful flowing lines and curves. Every purposeful point of a foot or toe completing a perfect composition.

And then she turned the world upside down. Literally.

“How about I try some like this?” she asked with her lovely Aussie accent, as she laid her back on the seat of the chair, her long hair cascading toward the floor.

As I continued to photograph her, she began to rotate herself until only the small of her back was on the seat, completely inverted as if her support was no longer the chair, but a trapeze, or maybe thin air for that matter. Creating the most interesting compositions in my frame.

Anoush Anou at Todos Santos Inn

One of the great things about our arrangement with the four boutique hotels we were all calling home during our time in Todos Santos was that if we saw a room or area that felt particularly inspiring we could secure it for private shooting very easily. I had my eye on the bar ever since we had arrived and now it was time to utilize that space in whatever way we felt like.

A quick check in with the bartender and the bar was “temporarily closed” while the lovely and undressed Anoush followed me into the room. I knew I wanted to do something with the chairs that were group along a windowed wall of the bar. I quickly began redecorating by rearranging the chairs in a way that made no sense for would be bar patrons, but made so much sense from a visual photographic point of view. I also tried to remember I would need to reassemble everything the way I found it when we were done.

I only made a few dozen photographs in the bar because Anoush and I were on a roll and she quickly interpreted what I was looking for. The light coming in through the sheer curtains was perfect and in short order we had created what I was hoping for.

We thanked the barkeep and allowed the bar to reopen once again to the public and walked out back to the veranda, another area I had been looking at every day while having my morning coffee and daily photographic editing sessions one one of the many tables we would all congregate at during the day.

The brick arches of the veranda were visually interesting to me, although the low afternoon sunlight was creating a fairly severe contrast with the shade Anoush was posing in. We had to be careful to keep the harsh shadows off of her an that location and we found a spot for her in the first arch that had a bit less direct light.

Anoush Anou at Todos Santos Inn

We began with her standing and using her strong fingertips to hold difficult balancing poses that looked more effortless than they certainly must have been. I was still fighting the contrast of the bright arches behind her, not really satisfied with my composition even though Anoush was holding up her end of the collaboration bargain spectacularly.

We changed to her sitting instead of standing and it created a slightly more relaxed feel. Her compacted shape also allowed me to compose a bit tighter which helped my slightly too bright sunlight issue with my composition. She began to emote something a little more somber as well in her facial character, which I really liked.

When our time was up, I felt very good about what we had created. One of those shoots where you can’t wait to get back to the computer to see what you have. Working with the various chairs at the inn and the natural light really was all I was hoping it would be and more with Anoush’s beautiful collaboration. She really brought what I felt was a classic beauty to the images and we had a great time while creating them.

A perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon in paradise.

As always, more to come.

They are all alive and well and I’m happy to report that as new filmmakers and editors around the world continue to enter our industry that all of the groups are reporting increased membership and high turnouts for monthly meetings.

They are all still here. Nothing is dead. Some have, as the Chicago Creative Pro User Group has done, simply changed their name to reflect a less Final Cut Pro-centric mission going forward.

My apologies for any confusion, stress or spit-takes that may have resulted from simply reading the headline without reading through to the entire posting.

Thank you for your continued reading and support.

Billy

It’s with equal parts amusement and bittersweet acceptance that I noticed a bit of name changing going on in the professional film editing community the past few weeks. It’s just one initial, but it might as well be a thunder-clap.

As many of you know, I was one of the founders of the Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group back in 2002. Yes, ten years has flown by. CHIFCPUG (pronounced SHIFF-see-pug) was, and still is, a great community of editing professionals who gathered together once a month to discuss, troubleshoot and share the knowledge about our favorite film editing tool, Final Cut Pro.

And then, depending on who you talk to, in June of last year, Apple released either a revolutionary new editing program, or as many more professional editors came to believe, Apple took ten years of good faith and flushed it down the toilet. Final Cut Pro was dead. And in its place FCP X.

The debate on which scenario it actually was, still rages on. But perhaps most telling is that here in Chicago, as well as in many other cities with Final Cut Pro Users Group Communities, there has been a small but very significant bit of name changing going on.

CHIFCPUG is dead! Long live CHICPUG!

Notice the difference? Very similar, yet the difference represents a chasm. Just one letter, but it epitomizes the significant shift in my corner of the professional editing community world.

The Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group is now The Chicago Creative Pro User Group.

And it’s not just Chicago. When the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention takes place in Las Vegas next month, there will be no Final Cut Pro Users Group SuperMeet. In its place will be the Creative Pro Users Group SuperMeet.

Once again, the F is no more.

Ditto for Boston, Washington D.C.-Virginia-Maryland and others. New York is the Moving Pictures Collective of NYC. San Francisco and Atlanta managed to avoid the name change altogether by being agnostic from the start as SF Cutters and Atlanta Cutters respectively.

Ironically, many of you will recall, Apple took over what would end up being the last NAB FCPUG SuperMeet, to preview Final Cut Pro X to a room full of professional editors. Professional editors, who would, two months later, wake up to their editing software of choice being unmercifully removed from the shelves and replaced with what even the most accepting editors would have to admit was a frighteningly incomplete version 1.0 of software that defied the collaborative workflow many of us made a living with.

Both Avid and Adobe Premiere wasted no time and pounced on the fumble when editors such as myself switched and/or returned to editing software that allowed us to keep working at the level we were accustomed to. Yes, there was a bit of a learning or re-learning curve, but even staying with Apple’s new editing tool would have been a learning curve. It was time to put our eggs in a new basket. A basket that worked today, not someday… maybe.

Probably the silver lining that came out of all the unpleasantness is that the discussion has once again become about the craft of editing rather than the platform specific-ness of the software. Even the best of us find ourselves with blinders on once in a while and it’s been refreshing to reassess the ol’ toolbox in the past year and reconnect with what we love about editing.

So, yes. I am sad to see the Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group end an incredibly successful run. Yet, I am thrilled to see that in Chicago and in many other cities all over the world, that vibrant professional editing group of scrappy creative people, have dusted themselves off and moved forward. On to other tools and methods that will continue to help us all tell the amazing stories that we live to tell.

Long live the Chicago Creative Pro Users Group indeed.

They are all alive and well and I’m happy to report that as new filmmakers and editors around the world continue to enter our industry that all of the groups are reporting increased membership and high turnouts for monthly meetings.

They are all still here. Nothing is dead. Some, as the Chicago User Group has, have simply changed their name to reflect a less Final Cut Pro-centric mission going forward.

For those of you looking for the original article posting I wrote, it now has a new headline, less likely to be misunderstood, and you can find it here… and here.

My apologies for any confusion, stress or spit-takes that may have resulted from simply reading the headline without reading through to the entire posting.

Billy

Yep, it’s been our turn to have our televisions inundated with desperate political advertising and our mailboxes full of propaganda from local candidates.

Even with all of that, it’s still important to vote. Yes, even the primaries. As I like to say, you’re more likely in your lifetime to have a face to face encounter with a judge or alderman than you are the President of the United States. It does matter.

But it’s a bit overwhelming, so as a continuing public service on the blog, I like to point out a few sources for getting real actual information about the candidates, rather than relying on their paid advertising.

First up, The Windy City Times. The LGBT community is hella plugged in to local politics. And more often than not, I find myself in complete alignment with their recommendations. Here’s a link to their 2012 Election Survey which lists the results of questionnaires sent out by several LGBT agencies.

If you’re more conservative in your thinking, The Chicago Tribune has a list of their endorsements here.

Here in Chicago, the Cook County Bar Association has a list of it’s judge recommendations here.

So there you go. Print the lists. Take them with you to your polling place (you are completely allowed to bring lists into the voting booth as long as any material your bring in is not campaign literature), and vote.

If you’re someone who feels, “They’re all corrupt and it doesn’t make any difference who gets elected,” then how about just voting out the incumbent? Throw the bums out. Keep doing it until you’re happy with your government. At some point, they may get the message.

Really, seriously. It matters. Even if you hate politics.

Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled photography blog.

Sorry it’s been a while since the last ZoeFest update. I’m usually always busy, but the last few months have been even moreso here at Billy Sheahan Photography. Finding a few hours to compose new ZoeFest entries has been a rare occurrence.

So where were we? Ah yes. Stephanie Anne!

It was Saturday morning in Todos Santos, Mexico. Not that Saturday really feels much different than any other day in paradise. Hell, even Monday feels like Saturday here.

I had two photoshoots scheduled that day, first with the lovely Stephanie Anne and later with the beautiful Anoush Anou.

I was looking forward to yet another day of working with incredibly creative humans. Unfortunately I was a bit distracted at the same time. You see, a couple of days earlier, I had gotten a call from my sister back in the States that my mom suffered what seemed to be a small stroke. A few years earlier she had a major stroke and it severely incapacitated her, taking over a year for her to get back a fair amount of mobility and that was only after which we could breathe a sigh of relief that she was going to live through it at all.

Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley

News was slow in getting to me in my cocoon of paradise and I had been weighing whether I should even stay or cut my adventure short and fly back to see my mom. We had decided to wait a few days to see how serious it was. There was a lot of family looking in on her, so while my mom was constantly on my mind, my absence was less noticeable than it might have been otherwise. But I was still unsure that staying thousands of miles away was the correct decision.

A small group of family members finally convinced me that considering my penchant for overworking myself during the year, it might be a good idea for me to stay put in paradise and try to enjoy myself unless things took a turn for the worse.

Still, since telephone service was spotty, I was spending a lot of time looking for signal bars on my phone so as not to miss an urgent call. It was tricky to fully relax and concentrate on shooting.

By the time I met Stephanie Anne at another of our artist hotels, the lush Casa Bentley, I wasn’t nearly as prepared as I wanted to be for her. I wandered around the grounds looking for inspiration. Some unusual spot to allow her to find something special and inspire her as well. By the time she was ready to go, I had found very little that spoke to me. Or perhaps it actually was speaking to me, but I was having difficulty hearing it over all of my mental chatter.

Luckily, Stephanie is a joyful soul. Her energy and spirit can lift the volume of any gathering, and I mean that in a good way. I apologized for my being a bit distracted and Stephanie immediately took over the load of creating the inspiration. She carried me that morning. No question about it.

Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley

I remember starting at the base of a beautiful wide Hule tree that anchored the grounds of Casa Bentley. I was still trying to decide which lens I was going to start with and when I looked up for a moment, I could see that she had already found a place among the intertwined roots and vines and was handing it to me on a platter. I really hadn’t imagined that. But she did and that was enough to kick start our shoot.

I stepped behind a low branch, putting a series of long slender leaves between Stephanie and myself, defocused enough so that it created an almost there set of diagonal lines across the frame that played with her poses and the strong lines of the tree’s root structure. My head was beginning to find some focus at last.

It was wonderful to feed off of Stephanie’s energy. I was still struggling more than usual. But I knew the pictures were beginning to work. She was brilliant and beautiful and as I sometimes have to do when my mind is preoccupied with events away from the photo shoot, I just tried to not over think anything. I’ve found that emptying my head in these situations is the best way for me to go. It results in less direction to my subject as to what vision I’m seeing, which is a bit more challenging for my model, most of whom are accustomed to more feedback from me. Instead I find myself switching to a more documentary photographic style where I’m just looking through the viewfinder and composing what feels right at the moment.

Just letting go.

Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley

We walked along the grounds of the lovely Casa Bentley, the design inspired by the castles of Portugal. The owner, Bob Bentley is a geologist and used his collection of rocks and gemstones, acquired during years of world travels, to adorn the walls and surfaces of the lavish grounds when he designed and built the hotel beginning in 1985.

Stephanie and I stopped along the garden path and I began to compose photographs of her along the walls and ledges of our idyllic environment. She stretched and curved and evoked and I began to see a character emerge. I was watching a story unfold. Sometimes joyful, sometimes somber. A fitting mirror to my own thoughts at the moment.

I was enjoying the dapples of light cascading down through the leaves creating additional patterns to compose with in addition to the decorative rocks and gemstones. As hard as the surfaces were that we were creating in, Stephanie managed to add a softness that made the rocky nature feel more like a living organism rather than an immovable force.

Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley

We continued through to the back of the hotel grounds and found a shady, more natural area. Again, she played among the trees and a large stump in the center of it all. At this point I was simply happy to observe her explore and play. Creating human shapes among the existing elements of nature.

Nearby, we noticed a small little canal perhaps for water runoff from the rest of the grounds. In a rare bit of direction on this shoot, I had Stephanie pose near one end of the small waterway while I planked across the other end, trying to line up her reflection in an interesting manner.

While water is something I always enjoy working with as an element in  photograph, since we didn’t know exactly where the water was coming from, we decided it would probably be best to be close to the water without actually touching the water. I felt a bit like a human teeter-totter balancing precariously above while trying to focus and compose. But it worked.

The day was getting hot by this point and I thought we might try to find something interesting in the Casa Bentley pool. Whenever possible, I like to compose pool images without any of the obvious pool tile decorations and as Stephanie and I got our bearings, I found an interesting look when I stood right at the pool’s edge, leaning as far over the water as possible without falling in and shooting straight down into the water with a wide lens.

Stephanie Anne at Casa Bentley

I told Stephanie to submerge a few feet below the surface and try to pose as she would out of the water. It’s actually a challenging thing to do because bodies tend to want to float to the surface, but Stephanie did an amazing job of swim posing as I followed her along the edge.

The resulting photographs are very unusual for me with their bold color and loveliness. The combination of the intense sunlight overhead created interesting patterns and water reflections and gave Stephanie a nice glow. her hair picked up the highlights from the sun resulting in an unearthly splash of red color. Something unexpected when I got back to my studio to review everything. A very happy surprise.

I was so pleased with how the shoot turned out, especially since I was not at my best that day. It proves again what I’ve been saying all along. Stephanie and the other ZoeFest models were such intelligent, lovely and creative collaborators. My shoot that morning could have been much less than it turned out to be without Stephanie’s positivity and her love for creating beautiful art.

Thank you Stephanie Anne. You can put me down now.

Another in a series of Short iPhone Films by Billy Sheahan.

This time, Jimmy and Billy excitedly discuss this morning’s 84th Academy Awards™ nominations.

Photographed and edited by Billy Sheahan using the iPhone 4 and Premiere Pro.

Cast:
Man……. James Helm
Other Man……. Billy Sheahan

Music:
A Public Domain Recording of “Les Jeux d’Eaux a la Villa d’Este” by Franz Liszt

About six years ago, I remember trying to figure out which of the many New Years Eve options I would be participating in. For a long time I’ve felt New Years Eve is a bit of an amateur hour. High expectations, entry level, over-served drinkers and the pressure that if you didn’t have an incredible New Years Eve, the rest of your year would be equally sub par.

So I decided New Years needed a do-over. A chance to ring in  the new year in a much more reasonable way. No pressure. No worrying about who you were going to try to kiss or be kissed by at the stroke of midnight. No stumbling drunk girls stealing your cabs.

And New Years Redux was born.

DJ Rafáel slow jams the Redux

Half way through my first New Years Redux back in 2006, I was amazed out how many people breathlessly came up to me and said, almost in desperation,

“You’re going to have this again next year, right? It’s going to be an annual thing?”

“Um, sure. I guess. You’re having a good time?”

“Yes! This is such a good idea!”

And so, more often than not since then, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day Eve, because a lot of people have the next day off, I throw my nearly annual New Years Eve Redux party.

This year I had a DJ, the amazing… well he’s so new he doesn’t have a DJ moniker yet. But we’ve been kicking around a few names for him. Anyway, we’ll call him Rafáel for now. He played a deliriously cool six and a half hour set. I kept telling him we could put on Pandora or something so he could take a break, but her wouldn’t have it. He just kept going.

DJ Energizer Bunny? Naw… We’ll keep looking.

My photography studio filled up nicely with great friends, old and new. It really does turn into a nice party place. People brought delicious things to eat and drink. Wonderful wines that were those kinds that are saved for special occassions. Lovely plates of handmade creations.

And whoever brought the bottle of Patron XO Cafe Tequila Coffee Liqueur, nice thinking outside of the box. I will be enjoying that for some time to come. A lovely thing to discover in the bar area the next morning.

And two of my great friends from the past, Charlie and Kim, gave me a belated Christmas present of a pair of beautiful martini glasses with exquisite Eiffel Tower stems. They know me too well. I immediately put them into service with a few cosmopolitans I enjoyed throughout the evening.

As always, we counted down at midnight, as DJ Rafáel, yeah I think we’ll go with that, went old school with Prince’s 1999. It was hysterically inspired. Great fun.

About 1am, a dance party broke out, as it often does, and the music took another odd but good turn featuring music I hadn’t heard since college and was produced before many of the lingering dance party guests were born. We did shoot some footage that turned into an impromptu music video of sorts, but I think we’ll keep that under wraps until someone decides to run for public office.

Another in my series of short iPhone films, usually created during a few hours of downtime, waiting for client feedback on other projects. A short personal challenge to create a film using my iPhone in a limited amount of time.

The B&W vintage film look is realized in camera with the iPhone, using the 8mm Vintage Camera App and edited in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Music track is a public domain recording of “Cançons i Dansas” by Federico Mompou.