Ok, remember my last post? No? Short memory you’ve got…

Scroll down. I’ll give you a minute…

Done?

Ok great!

Well here’s my first attempt at shooting the appearance of video using my photo camera!!

Alisha from Raji Barbir on Vimeo.

Not exactly great, but it’s very, VERY exciting for me.

Alisha is a close friend of mine with whom I’ve worked many times. She rules. She needed me to do some photography of her working out, but before we got started, I asked her if it’d be ok to do this so I could see if the concept would actually work.

AND IT WORKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m guessing almost everyone reading this is completely unimpressed. But this is HUGE for me.

I’m going to start actively seeking out one female model or actress for an idea I’ve had buzzing around in my head for a music video.

Here’s most of August that I’ve been depriving you of.

Day 208/365

From Dustin & Cassie’s wedding. This was at the golf course in the morning before the wedding. We got kicked out of there… The place even called the cops on us!! I tell ya, it’s gonna be hard for any couple to beat the excitement of getting the cops called on us on the wedding day!

In fact, I’d like to ask that you please don’t make your wedding more exciting than that.

Then, true story, I went to the Great Clips to shoot pictures of the bride getting her hair done and got kicked out of there too!

Then I fell in a river in the amazon forest and a bunch of pirhanas ate my foot and half my chest. I look really interesting now.

Day 209/365

A headshot for a terrific actress and a personal friend of mine, Joylynne.

Day 210/365

Megan bridal shoot

Day 211/365

Marianne actually thinks showing THIS picture of her will hurt my wedding portfolio…

Day 212/365

My promos before they went out. (iPhone photo)

Day 213/365

The piano is in my basement now! Seems like I’m gradually moving all of my house down in my basement… Why don’t I live in an apartment? (iPhone photo)

Day 214/365

The uhh… The bride had a bigger piece of cake… Wouldn’t you agree?

Day 215/365

Although the groom looks deeply concerned for his new wife, they actually had a lot of fun on that trampoline.

Day 216/365

I LOOOOOOVE this picture!!!! I’m fascinated with celloists and violinists at weddings. I’m seriously considering hanging it up somewhere.

Day 217/365

Swinging (iPhone photo)

Day 218/365

The neighborhood on my way to the mailbox… I was really lazy with that shot… (iPhone photo)

Day 219/365

Utah Business Magazine shoot

Day 220/365

Amanda’s bridal shoot

Day 221/365

Amy gets a few extra words from me.

I loved working with Amy. Her optimism and enthusiasm was unstoppable, contageous and inspiring.

All weddings experience hiccups. All of them. If you’re reading this and you’re getting married soon and thinking “Not mine!”, then my answer is, “Yes, yours too.” It’s just how it is. So since hiccups are inevitable, the question becomes about how you respond to those hiccups.

Amy’s wedding was no different. Her wedding day was almost moved to 9/11. Not exactly a bride’s first choice. Then on the wedding day, the best man couldn’t make it.

Amy responded to every hiccup throughout the day, big or small, with grace, patience, endless optimism and a smile on her face.

So yeah, I loved working with Amy. That second shot of her will tell you everything you need to know about her vibrant and endlessly optimistic personality.

Day 222/365

After a long-ish stretch of work, I decided to treat myself to Lewis Black’s excellent comedy in Wendover. The show was hilarious. I always wished I could have seen Carlin in Vegas before he died earlier this year. I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake with Lewis Black. (iPhone photo)

Day 223/365

Robby & Jessica

Day 224/365

I have a fascination with wires and skies (iPhone photo)

Day 225/365

I printed this 11×14 of a shot that I’d taken with my iPhone (iPhone photo – yes, that means it’s an iPhone photo of an iPhone photo)

Day 226/365

I took a very long walk that night (iPhone photo)

Day 227/365

For giving me the green card after such a long and difficult struggle, I gave back to my immigration attorney by doing a free model-style shoot of his beautiful daughter.

Natasha gave me the images to our shoot from day 172. Reports indicate that the images were still in shock from having been held hostage, but are relieved to have returned home safely (with me) and surrounded by their family (my other photos).

Ok, here we go:

Day 172/365

Natasha in perfect balance… Ok no. She actually fell over a lot.

Day 187/365

The first model shoot I’d done in ages… This is Tim

Day 188/365

Natasha and I were both shooting Tim. We shot so late at night (ie. past midnight) that my camera classified this image as having been taken the day after our shoot started.

Early the next (or rather, the same) morning I did a family shoot, but since Tim’s shots showed up as being the same day as the family shoot, I think I’d rather show you Tim again.

Day 189/365

Jessica’s bridal shoot very nearly turned into a complete disaster.

We were headed to the Salt Flats and as we approached our location, we saw a truly spectacular dust storm from afar. I mean the thing was so big that at first I thought it was downpour. You know how rainy clouds from far away look like dust coming down? Well this cloud was on the ground and the dust was going up… So far up in fact, that it reached the actual clouds… People were pulling over just to take pictures of it.

Not good.

Once we got into it, I thought “Crap, time to think about rescheduling”. The wind was blowing amazingly hard, the rain was coming down like no other. When we got there, we started weighing our options; wait it out, hurry back to the Salt Lake and shoot what we can there before the sun disappeared, or reschedule to a different date.

We decided to wait it out.

And man was it worth it.

Funny thing was, the storm had passed us when we started shooting, but by the end of our shoot, it apparently decided to do a 180 and come right back towards us.

Day 190/365

The shot nobody liked. Did this for Utah Business Magazine. The magazine chose an entirely different shot.

Day 191/365

I replaced my old umbrella stand with this one, because the old one broke.

Day 192/365

Light-painting with my iPhone. For those who don’t get it, I basically set my exposure in my camera to being 30 seconds, then used the “Flashlight” iPhone app to paint light onto the rock. It was an interesting effect others had done that I’d been meaning to try out for myself.

Day 193/365

Vertigo. More expirimentation with long exposures.

Ok not really… I designed a book over at Blurb that I wanted to print and keep for myself. I’d been meaning to do this for quite some time, but just never got around to doing it. Finally, a few nights ago I decided to start, and once I did, I couldn’t get myself to stop until I was done. So I was up until about 2am, two nights in a row, obsessively working on it until it was complete.

I was never really planning on sharing it with anyone. I just wanted to put together a book with my work in it…

Weird, I know.

But then I finished it and it felt like such a powerful and intimate visual diary of my experiences and my growth as a photographer and a person that I decided I had to tell everyone.

I’m anxious to get it!

Meantime, I’m almost, if not over a month behind on the photo blogging… I’m still taking shots daily, but I’ve been supidly busy lately… I’m getting to it all still, so hang in there.

Oh and I still see some traffic to the blog, so I appreciate those of you still keeping an eye out for me! I’ll be blogging again soon.

One last thing. For those who haven’t noticed, I now have a “know me” section on the website. This will take you to my Facebook, Flickr and Twitter accounts if you feel like getting to know me a little.

I hope to see some of you there!

Lots to show this afternoon from all the days I’ve been away (up to May 7th – I’m not quite caught up yet).

Day 109/365

Many thanks to Natasha Roos for the brilliant ideas that led to this shoot. This is a bit of an edgier one.

Quinn:

Day 110/365

Shear material:

Day 111/365

A glimpse into my album collection:

Day 112/365

Lamp shade:

Day 113/365

My new car. I blogged about this a few posts back, if you recall. Now you get to see it:

Day 114/365

Dandelion:

Day 115/365

Personal favorite from Carley’s bridals:

Day 116/365

Personal favorite from Emily’s bridals:

More to come in a few days hopefully. Stay tuned.

This is why I’ve always assumed that most of the people who take a picture a day don’t have any actual work to do; I can’t keep up and I haven’t even reached the height of wedding season yet… How do people do this?

I jumped into this picture-a-day commitment after I heard that a prominent, very busy photojournalist did do this himself. Not to mention watching other highly successful commercial photographers do the same, and do it way better than I seem to manage. But I figured, hey, if they can do it, so can I. It’ll be at my level of photography, but I can do this.

I’m still doing it, but I’m struggling to keep up. I’ll keep at it though. I have no intention on quitting.

Anyway, here’s the ones from April 24th, 25th and 26th:

Day 103/365

Dan & Debbie sealing:

Day 104/365

Julio & Justine wedding:

Day 105/365

Mark (model shoot):

The beautiful Kelly Kaye!

*APPLAUSE*

Day 99/365

Where do I even start…

The fact that I wanted badly to work with Kelly goes without saying. Her portfolio is certainly stunning and even intimidating, but she seemed to like my work, so I wasn’t gonna argue.

We set a shoot date and I started thinking about what I wanted to do. I kept drawing blanks, so I went location scouting. I decided I’d had my fill of run-down, “ugly” areas of downtown and wanted to go somewhere a bit more grand, a bit more poetic; probably a canyon. I settled on Emigration Canyon and headed off.

I drove and drove, got out of my car and walked where I wanted to take a closer look, but I couldn’t find anything that really blew me away. Sure, there were options, but nothing I was uncontainably excited about.

It wasn’t until just before sunset that I found this perfect little place where I decided I wanted to take Kelly. It had a beautiful little trail made of rocks, the view was spectacular, especially at sunset, and on and on. That was the place.

And before long, I knew what I wanted to do:

Barefoot hippie.

The idea struck a chord with me in a big way. Imagining her carefully gliding over a beautiful little trail made of rocks felt right. Maybe a bit heavy-handed, but I liked the idea anyway and I already had a specific picture in my mind.

So everything was ready to go. My model was booked, I’d found the perfect location, I had a concept in mind, I knew how much time we needed for hair and makeup and when we’d have to leave to get there in time for sunset and still have enough time to shoot in different places.

Then Kelly threw me a curveball…

FOX13 – yes, THAT FOX13 – wanted to shoot a story, which, in part, involved interviewing Kelly and getting some footage of her in action, on location, with me in charge.

“Ruh roh, Raggy”, said Scooby Doo.

Ruh roh indeed, Scooby. Maybe some Scooby Snacks will calm us both down.

I was already a bit intimidated by Kelly’s very strong portfolio, now I was going to have to shine with a FOX camera pointed at me some of the time. I can’t even imagine how Kelly must have felt. This was new for her too and she was nervous just like me, except the camera would be pointed at her most of the time.

On top of that, because of FOX’s schedule for when they were planning on doing the interview and shooting the in-action footage, we needed to come up with a new location somewhere in downtown Salt Lake and shoot at around 2pm.

Worst possible lighting scenario…

2pm lighting sucks. A lot. The light is harsh, ugly and very strong. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky to shield us from this. I needed to find some shade, but in downtown Salt Lake, that meant buildings. And buildings are boring, unless of course, they’re in run-down, “ugly” areas.

So much for having had my fill of it.

Here’s my favorite of that part of the shoot:

Kelly had the whole day to do whatever we wanted and we had a gap of a few hours between when we shot for FOX and when we needed to go out to the canyon. So we decided to fit in one more look in between, and I already knew I’d been wanting to do a shoot with a model in black lingerie, on a bed, swimming in a big fluffy comforter, so I went for it:

And finally, my vision of the hippie when I first went out to the canyon. The first shot was the picture I was after, the second works well with the concept and the third is probably my favorite and the most spectacular. It’s very encouraging and exciting to see the gap between my vision and my results become narrower:

This didn’t really belong in the series, but it has a robotic, plastic mannequin, Marilyn Monroe feel to it that I absolutely love:

I can’t tell you how hard it was for me to cut these pictures down to just six. We took 686 pictures in all and I assure you, there’s a lot of them I loved enormously.

There’s an expression that is common among artists.

“Kill your babies”

It’s when you have to choose to get rid of something you love but that you know doesn’t belong in your body of work. You’ve got all these little creations that you love equally, but you know you can’t keep them all, so instead of giving your babies up for adoption, you kill your babies.

I had a hard time killing mine with this shoot.

I hope this post was worth your wait and thanks for sticking with me this long! Giant shoutout to Kelly Kaye (model) and Jaylene Barbir (makeup artist) for such fantastic work and FOX13 (giant media corporation – you may have heard of them) for allowing me to promote my business through their story. Thanks also to Kelly’s husband who helped enormously in making this possible by holding up the gold reflector, a simple job but I can’t stress how crucial a role it was in capturing the shots I did.

I’ll let you all know as soon as I find out when the story airs on FOX.

More catching up to do. I think I’ll be fully caught up now. Whew! That only took about… what? Seven years? Oh wait, no, I’ve only been doing this for 95 days…

On with the show:

Day 89/365

Natasha and I scouted some locations prior to a model shoot. We found an awesome little abandoned location in downtown Salt Lake. Here’s my favorite shot:

And then the model, Katerina. You may remember her from last month’s Salt Flats shoot:

Day 90/365

I was the designated photographer for our Easter family party:

Day 91/365

This is a really easy-to-make middle-eastern specialty called mana-eesh. I’m not sure that you’d spell it like that in english, but phonetically at least, it’s correct. Anyway, me likey the mana-eesh:

Day 92/365

This is my personal favorite sample wedding album. It’s an 8×8″. I just ordered a 12×12″ silk album about a week ago and I’m looking forward to showing that off to clients when it gets here.

Day 93/365

Sasha is a truly, truly terrific actress. I’m not just saying this; I know this for a fact. I’ve seen her in action at the local Actor’s Lounge which I used to have time to attend pretty regularly. Sasha impressed me so much from just the few scenes I’ve seen her perform, that I knew almost right away that I wanted her to have the biggest supporting role in an upcoming project I had cooking. That is, “upcoming” until my camera was stolen recently…

By the way, you might not believe it from seeing that third picture especially, but it was pouring down that day. Very ugly day to be shooting, but I tried to make it look and feel like summer.

Day 94/365

I really need to clean out my window well. I saw a mouse scurrying around using the tumbleweeds that got trapped in there as a means to get to the bottom of the well and back out.

Now, the normal reaction would be “ewww!!”, while my reaction was “Oooo!!”

In fact, I was on the phone with my realtor when I noticed the mouse, emails kept pouring in from other sources, chat windows kept flashing, my facebook kept popping up with new messages, and all I could think of was “I’m gonna need to switch lenses to get a half-decent shot.”

Day 95/365

Seems like a lazy shot to take, but I’ve been making a big marketing push for rajibarbir.com. Among other things I’ve been doing, I’m now listed on AltPick. In any case, I’ve been staring at that screen a lot lately.

For those of you who missed the post from the other day, here’s a reminder.

Day 85/365

Day 86/365

As the title implies, I worked with Dani again. We’d actually planned the shoot for that day (the 7th) weeks ahead of time, while the one from a few days back (the 4th) was last minute. That’s my excuse at least.

I tried doing some natural light stuff and it really didn’t work out… Like, at all… It’s making me want to get to the point where I can do it well, so I’ll probably try again in the future.

And then I turned my lights back on… Ahhhhh… The control…

Day 87/365

I honestly didn’t think Quincy was gonna show up! Communication had been touch and go, but I was glad when I heard a knock on my door.

Also from that day, I took this shot of my cologne… Why? Because I was in my bathroom getting ready, I look down to my cologne and then realize… I have the most pretentious, arrogant cologne on the planet!

I promise, I really just bought it because I liked how it smelled!

Day 88/365

I’ve never bought a Seventeen Magazine in my life. That day, I did. And that’s because I’ve been published in it! Woohoo!!

Look for this photo in Seventeen’s May issue, which I shot in the summer of last year:

Day 84/365

Like Benjamin Button, the new pictures are aging backwards…

Or something.

Alisha is an awesome model and another personal friend of mine. She and I have worked together several times. Here’s my personal favorite from the last shoot we worked on in the summer of last year:

It’d been way too long and we both knew we needed to work together again. We threw around some ideas in our various conversations but nothing really stuck.

Until Natasha suggested we use these cool aviator glasses she’d bought online recently. That sparked the ideas this shoot was based on.

Enjoy!