first for everything

I shot my first wedding this weekend with Emily Coovert. I really enjoyed every minute of the experience and I’m so glad Emily invited me to come shoot this with her. The couple was incredibly sweet; both Jillian and Adam were great to work with and I’m they shared their special Saturday with me. I hope they’re happy with the photos. Here’s a few of the photographs from the shoot:

I have a ton of photographs I need to go through, but was happy to see a few of them turned out well. I’d never shot anything like this, and I also don’t shoot portraits all that often, and this weekend gave me the opportunity to try new things and work on communicating with subjects. Overall, a very good Saturday. Now, back to media law homework.

Black as Coal

Last week was my fourth Picture Kentucky Workshop. I’m honestly surprised that it’s my fourth, and last workshop as a student. I’ve come a long way from my first year as a shooter at Picture Kentucky. During my first workshop, David Stephenson had to teach me how to use my camera. This year, I tackled a whole new beast: video.

I’d shot video before, but had never worked on anything where I had to collaborate with a writer to come up with a product. Kenny Colston and I worked together to create this video, and for our first narrative piece, I’m pretty proud of what we got. It took a lot of hard work, a lot of getting turned down, some mistakes and a lot of driving in the back roads of Eastern Kentucky to produce it, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

Black as Coal from Allie Garza on Vimeo.

Here are a few stills from the week as well:

Visit the Picture Kentucky Workshop Series Web site to see more the work produced during the annual workshop.

(not so) lost in Kentucky

This morning I woke up around 6 a.m. to drive out to rural Kentucky to work on a story. I love driving through Kentucky, especially during sunrise. I honestly believe Kentucky is one of the most beautiful states, if not the most beautiful, that exists. As you can probably tell, I took all of these from the car since we took I-75 south for a bit until we realized we were headed the wrong way. But in doing so, it afforded us a trip through KY-150 and KY-39. We traveled through Gum Sulpher, Preachersville, Crab Orchard, Brodhead and Maretburg, Ky. It was a great morning.

“Lones Seiber hears your boos.”

On Wednesday I had a pretty nice portrait of Lones Seiber run in the paper. With a lot of lighting assistance from different photographers at the Kernel, they helped me put together a pretty decent picture. Ben Jones wrote a solid story about the UK football kicker that I recommend reading.