Content (media)

Shooting with New Models: Ashley Perry.

AJA_0072More often than not people always tell you that it’s all about networking when it comes to getting jobs and people finding your work and that’s exactly what happened this weekend when I helped Ashley Perry start her modeling portfolio.

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Ashley was referred to me by someone I did a shoot with a month prior and since she just got into a modeling agency, she needed to get some portfolio images put together. All the photographers her agency refereed her to were very expensive so I cut her a deal.

AJA_0066Working with a new model is always an interesting experience and you never quite know what to expect. Sometimes they can be a bit timid or shy especially around the camera. However, Ashley didn’t have any of these problems; she was very comfortable around the camera, was able to give me different looks and took direction extremely well.

AJA_0031One of the biggest factors in any shoot is the weather during the shoot. The photography gods very gracious in giving light overcast, no wind and moderately warm temperatures giving me everything I needed to just do my thing and shoot. There was one point where the sun was piercing through that clouds but it was at golden hour making for some excellent light.

AJA_0113For this shoot I relied heavily on my 85mm 1.8g lens for most of the shots. I played around with using the 28mm and the 50mm but everything always comes back to my work horse lens. I shot exclusively at f2.8 making sure I got enough sharpness and detail out of Ashley while still getting nice Bokeh (blur) in the background.

AJA_0033As far as post processing goes I kept things very simple. I tried to bring in as much contrast and color as I could while still keeping things natural. I ran in to some issues with Ashley’s tan skin but I normally get around that by bringing in some vibrancy but pulling down the saturation. Other than that I did some spot correcting, but nothing super drastic. When I edit my portraits I try to keep things subtle while at the same time making things pop.

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Over all it was an extremely fun shoot and I’m looking forward to working with Ashley in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adblock forcing sites to try the subscription model?

So today we live in a world of online media where the businesses running online companies have few options when it comes to monetizing their online content. Two of these options include ad based revenue where they can make money off of advertisements or a subscription model where someone pays a monthly fee to have access to the content. Needless to say neither option seems to be that popular.
Both are so unpopular that people will willing go to lengths to avoid dealing with ads or paying monthly fees.

In the case of avoiding ads we have the app that can be added to select web browsers known as adblock.Now what adblock does is fairly straightforward. It blocks ads. Many enjoy this option simply because you can now listen to pandora or watch videos on Hulu without dealing with pesky ads ruining your experience.

However this little short cut raises a slight problem, How do they make ad revenue if the users aren’t seeing the ads? Well the truth of the matter is a lot of ad money comes from the websites selling their user information and analytics to ad companies and not so much selling of ad space. However the money being lost from ad revenue has not gone unnoticed. It’s a big reason why services like Pandora and Hulu+ have been moving to the subscription model.

It’s harder for services that have gone through ad revenue to adapt to a subscription model because their user base is not used to having to pay for their services and they will often lose viewership because most people won’t be willing to pay. But remember as previously mentioned there is more money coming in from the selling of user information than there is the selling of adspace.

Where Adblock really becomes a problem is on services like YouTube where content is being not only being created by everyday people but it’s also letting the content creators benefit off of ad revenue. The amount of money youtubers get from ads varies depending on the views they get and whether or not they are using copyrighted material, but it’s still important to leave that in mind that it’s not just google benefiting from the ads on youtube.

Like many other services before it YouTube is trying out the paid subscription market by releasing channels you pay a monthly fee to watch. Personally I don’t see this model succeeding on youtube simply because YouTube is a place where users are not going to willing pay to view content.

I’m not going to tell you not to download adblock because I know that on many sites ads have a tendency of ruining the experience but I would at least say air on the side of caution when using adblock simply because if content creators can’t make money off of ads they will be forced to find other ways of monetizing. One thing I would recommend if you do use adblock is to disable it on the websites that you wish to support. For example I disable adblock on YouTube simply because I want the YouTubers I watch to benefit from me watching them. But just realize that by using adblock you might be bringing about some long term consequences.