Spring is on the way, love is in the air, snow is still falling from the sky… Not entirely happy about that last part but the rest of it is usually a good thing. The past few weeks have been jam-packed with lots of fun stuff, and right now we’re learning about Weddings! You know… The things I’ve said I’ll never shoot… Well, that may change. It seems pretty interesting, we’re learning a lot about the business side of things, and I always get psyched about business management. And the teacher this week is great, she’s talking a lot about web presence, be it blogging and tweeting, to SEO and web design, and pricing and marketing.

The world is changing, and the way we have to run our businesses has to change with it, I’m excited, you should be too!

Also I helped out a classmate with a photo shoot he was doing, and he got some really great shots! Check out Jame’s Wang’s photo’s here.

I think I’m going to try to be more active in my blogging, I want to join the blogosphere! I’ve started reading a lot more blogs, now it’s time to get involved and be more active. I was thinking of getting into twitter as well but that probably won’t happen until I get an iPhone, to make it easy to tweet! So… a year… or two… or ten… depending on how the economy continues. We’ll see. Maybe once I get out of class it will be a business purchase.

So yes, It’s been FAR too long since I’ve blogged. I’ve been meaning to since I came back but just… haven’t… Anyway I am now! So first off you can see that I did a bit of house cleaning on my website, and my blog! Woo! So I think the new site looks much more professional, and it’s a lot easier to update and organize. And as for the blog: I was setting up a second blog on my site for something else*, and noticed the new updated interface (administrator panel) and I loved it, so I found a way to update my blog, and then I decided What the heck, let’s get the user’s end lookin’ shpiffeh too!” And so I did! Also, provided everything worked right, you can now access this page by going to http://blog.jdipierro.com (no www.) Yaay sub-domains!
*The details of this will be discussed at a later date.

So enough of the techno-babble and onto the gibberish, I mean news-update.

The past few weeks have been awesome. We learned how to work with models from one of my favourite teachers we’ve had, and I’ve been waiting for that class for a while. The first week was shooting week, we had a bunch of models come in from Models Club Inc. and had a great time photographing them. The teacher mixed up the groups a bit from day to day and that was a refreshing change, I got to work with people that I normally wouldn’t. Week two was photoshop week and was also great fun. I pretty much knew a good amount of what we had to do, but I did learn a few new techniques and the photos came out looking amazing if I do say so myself!

I’m signed up on Model Mayhem and I’ve wanted to get some models and do some cool shots but I’ve never known how to start, or how to work with them, but now that I do, I think it would be great to get together with some of my classmates and get some models into the studio on the weekend or something.

This past weekend Keith and I attended Vericon 2009 at Harvard University. It honestly wasn’t much of a con, but I got to meet Kris Straub, author of one of my favourite webcomics Starslip. It was pretty awesome to meet someone so funny, and awesome, and ‘famous’ online, go out to dinner with them, and understand that they’re just lookin’ to have a good time like the rest of us. They’re just comedic geniuses

And now we’re back in class, Photo Illustration Fundamenals, a class about photo compositions, and things of that nature, a great class, a fun activity, and a great way to make money.

Until next time – Justin

To view more photos click here.

The Waltham Winter Fowl:
So the ducks in Waltham are very religious, they don’t believe in Darwinism, because they don’t fly south. Maybe I’ve just never noticed this back home, but I’m pretty sure ducks are supposed to fly south… and I know for a FACT that geese are… and THEY’RE still here… Stranger yet… THEYSLEEPONTHEICE! I kid you not, I’ve seen them NESTING… ON… The ice…

Every day I walk over the bridge and see them and it baffles me that they don’t just freeze into ducksickles and sink to the bottom, how can they survive swimming in ice-cold water? This is not natural.. am I correct? Is this some strange phenomenon I have never witnessed?

Yeah Yeah, I know I haven’t posted in a couple days… I must be dead right? Fear not! While passed-out I may be, alive I still am! Not too much interesting stuff has been going on lately, shooting and learning, learning and shooting.

All week in class we’ve been trying to talk about how to modify available light… though.. no light has been available… we’ll spot a brief moment of sunshine and rush out the door, only to be covered in clouds the moment we step out…We’ve discussed the practice and have seen a bit of it in action but haven’t had much time to fool around with it. Stupid rain! Speaking of rain… for lunch today Keith and I walked down to Wendy’s… Unfortunately while we were walking it started to DOWNPOUR… So we got SOAKED… We got home and changed and drove back to school so we wouldn’t get even MORE soaked.

We started our first project this week, the Faces project. I like to call it the FACES project… I don’t know why, it just seems cooler in caps. I’ve been going to the two different fire stations nearby every night to meet the crews and take their photos, some great people around here. This morning we didn’t have to go to class until 1pm so that we had all morning to work on the project. I went and hung out at the Maple Street station for the majority of the morning and they informed me that the Lexington Street station was having a big event today at… 1:30. So when I went home for lunch I called my teacher and he gave me permission to come in late…er… than I already was.

This month is Fire Prevention Month and Dominos Pizza is teaming up with the NFPA to help spread the word about fire safety. I don’t quite understand how Waltham fire is tied up in this deal but it is so I lucked out! The mayor was there, an NFPA rep was there, and a dominos rep was there. After they made an announcement to a small group of people… and a video camera… they set off in a fire truck to deliver pizzas! The fire trucks would deliver the pizza, and if the people had working fire-detectors they got their pizza for free, if not the fire department would change their batteries for them and make sure everything was working right! Pretty sweet deal! I didn’t go with them on any deliveries, I was already late and wanted to get back to class.

So that’s pretty much all that there is to tell so far. The class is a bit slow-moving but that’s my fault for knowing about the program we’re learning about already… That’ll teach me to teach myself! Next week we’ll be learning about Photoshop……………… crap……..

Click here to view more photos from this shoot.

You asked for it so here ya go! My school Photo-ID!  Okay so I can’t get my external to work with my laptop (surprise surprise… time to throw this out the window! I’ll have my Mac in a few weeks.) But I really only got 1 photo today that I was entirely happy with so here it is. A pretty standard day today. We learned about exposure, metering, etc. and just went out to shoot. We walked down to a park and shot eachother and waterfalls and things and it was pretty neat.