50 posts and SteamCon!

Yay! This is my 50th blog post! To celebrate, I will tell of our adventure at the first ever Seattle SteamCon. As you can see in the corresponding photo (courtesy of Nate Zimmer) our regular costume crew is back at it. This time we got all steampunked out. The event was at the Marriot in Sea-Tac. The venue really hit the style, though it was a bit small.

To see photos I took at the event, check out my flickr at it's new URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doranwa/

We met some really cool people there, my two favorites were Andrew Fogel and Scott Allen Caplan. Both these guys did panels on building and finishing props. I learned a ton of stuff at the 'con and am really excited to get some good prop-building in for next year's event!

To-Do List

I recently found myself with a growing list of things I really should get around to doing. This list only existed in my head, so these things left my conscious thought as soon as something more important or shiny grabbed my attention. Most of these were little things like "call Bank of America to activate new credit card". After a while these things piled up so much that I decided to consolodate them all into one to-do list. I chose to get a to-do list plug-in for my Google home page since that is what pops up whenever I open a web browser. I am certain that almost every smart phone, computer OS, web browser, and toaster has some kind of application like this (I am looking at you iPhone users).

Once I had the list I organized it into high, medium, and low priorities. The high priority stuff gets done today, the medium priority stuff gets done this week and the low priority stuff gets done when I have time for it. At the end of every day I check off what I finished and promote new things to high priority for the next day.
I highly recommend that everyone comes up with some kind of system like this. Treat the high priority items as "do this before I get to play today" type of things. If you can stick to this system you will be astounded at how much you can get done in a week.

Photography Assistant and a Portrait

This past weekend I got to be a photo assistant for Ron Martinsen, an extremely helpful and talented Seattle area photographer. Mostly this meant I got to hold things and aim bounce reflectors at the model. I was able to glean some extremely helpful photography hints from Ron as he worked. Working with a pro is probably one of the best ways to improve your photography, hands down!

The next day I tried to put some of what I learned to practice and shot some portraits of my beautiful and patient fiance, Brittany. The photo here is my end result and I am extremely happy with how it turned out.