In the next few weeks, I'm going to be setting up the new websites and making it seamless to work between the blog and the portfolio. The reason for the transition is just trying to put something out there that will attract more clients. Don't get me wrong, this is a great website, but I just think there are a lot of things that could be changed to make it better.

For those of you who are dedicated followers, you are going to be wanting to change over to the new blog rss feed so you can get all the updates from the new site, like you are now. I guess I'll do something that I wasn't planning on doing yet because I'm still in the process of finishing up the blog and then moving onto the portfolio site, but if you want to get a head start and get your blog rss feed for the new site, then go to www.zachancellblog.com and you can subscribe there. I'm not going to hyperlink it just to make sure those of you who are truly dedicated and actually read my posts (which probably isn't anyone) get a little advantage over the others.

Some of you may be worried that the web address wont still be zachancell.com. Don't worry. It'll be transfered over to the portfolio site in the next few weeks and everything will be taken care of. Thanks for all of your patience. Once I have all this finished, it'll be time to get back behind the camera and working hard again!

Thanks everyone, I'll post one more time when I've moved everything over to the new site!

With that said, I wanted to post an image I took of the banners on campus (iPhone picture so it's not the best quality. The Track Office said they'd keep in touch and let me know where I'd be seeing my images next. So, if you live in Eugene and want to get the updates on where the new stuff is popping up, add me as a friend on twitter and become a fan on facebook. I'll be posting updates there as soon as I find out. 

Thanks for stopping by again!

I've been working out the details on what I consider my first Professional Photoshoot. It was my first opportunity really working with a client and marketing myself to them. I shot the photos last week and have been processing the last couple of days to get a quick turnaround. 

I'm sorry I don't have too much to say, I'm working on a couple of project which hopefully I can announce in the next couple of weeks but big projects come along with a bunch of planning so I'm trying not to get ahead of myself. But, stay tuned and I'll have some more great stuff for you soon. For now, I'll leave you with a couple of photos of ads that are running right now involving my photos. Hopefully you enjoy them and hopefully they catapult me to bigger and better jobs!

Take care everyone! Thanks for sticking with me during this dry patch of posting.

I told you all about the photo shoot with Cody where we ran into the drunken Eugene crazy. Well, I've processed a few more images from that shoot that turned out pretty well but aren't finished just quite yet. They both have solid black background that I will hopefully be able to replace with an HDR background of some football facility (I'm working on getting into the University of Oregon's stadium for just an hour). Anyway, here's those images:

I also wanted to bring it to your attention that for the next month I don't plan on doing a ton of photoshoots. I'm working on an advertising campaign to get my name out there and start having clients coming to me (rather than the other way around). Don't worry though. I'll still be blogging and keeping you all up to date with what's going on with my photography, it'll just be different information. 

I also wanted to draw your attention to a new addition to the site (the first of many). On the lefthand side of the webpage, you'll see a little banner that says "Tweets". If you click on that icon, it'll bring up a small page that shows you all of my current twitter tweets. You can sign in and tweet from there (I believe) but I thought it would be a good way to include another aspect of my viral marketing to my webpage. 

Thank you all so much for sticking with me. Once I have this new schedule figured out, I'll be able to schedule some more shoots and keep on growing my photography. Thank you for your comments and support. You'll be hearing from me soon!

I don't think it comes as much of a surprise that this is my image of the year. It received photo of the week on the National Association of Photoshop Professionals and was the homepage image for a couple of months. I think it really captures the essence of the athlete and gives off a dramatic mood (which is what I always try for). 

Flickr's Favorite: 

This has been the most popular flickr photo hands down. I posted this photo on October 23, 2009 and since then it has received 6,639 views, 166 favorites and been included in 4 different galleries. I think it's pretty safe to say that this is my most interesting (flickr's way of saying popular) image on flickr. The next closest image in views has 2,215 and it was posted two weeks earlier. The next image with the most amount of favorites is 83 which is half of the amount that this photo has. All I have to say is thanks Brianne for boosting my flickr stats over the past couple of months!

Best Landscape:

I took this photo during my Mile by Mile project in the summer. I love how this one image contains so many different variations of orange. But, what really makes this image stand out in my mind is the journey it took for me to get there and finally get to one of the places that I had always wanted to photograph. When I was in Vegas last week, I walked through Peter Lik's gallery and came across one of his photos at the exact same spot. He took it in vertical orientation (which I wish I did now) but I still love the coloration of my image better. It's just cool to see a photo selling for $10,000+ and I have my own version of the exact same spot. 

Best Portrait:

Ashton's image finished as the best image of the year but I still wanted to post the best Portrait of the Year. You can either think of this as the runner up Portrait of the Year, or Ashton's photo was not only the Image of the Year but also the Sportrait of the Year. Nonetheless, this was probably one of my most successful photoshoots of 2009 and I love the way it turned out. I always had a concept like this one in my mind and I'm just lucky that Cassie brought along a shirt that worked perfectly with my vision.

Best HDR Image:

Coincidentally, this was the first HDR photo that I ever did, but no matter what, it always seemed to be one of my most popular images. I had been reading a lot about HDR photography and decided to go out and try my hand at it. No matter how many HDR images that I composed, it always seemed like everyone continued commenting on this photo. I reworked it over and over but I still came back to the original version. 

Inspiration for a future Photo Series:

The more that I look at this image, the more I think that I could create a great series of photos involving U of O athletes in their given arena. But, even more than that, I like the balance between half of her face and the HDR background. I would love to come up with a series of 10-20 photos of different athletes with different backgrounds. I'm not exactly sure if I would be able to come up with that many different venues (if I just stick to Oregon Athletes) but I'm sure I could come up with an extensive series. If that tells you anything, you'll be seeing more images like this one!

Biggest Time Commitment:

It may surprise you, but I spent over 10 hours of post processing on this individual image. I took on a project for a friend of mine after we had been talking about doing some individual shots of her (Taylor). She presented the idea and wondered if I would be interested in putting together something for them for a Christmas present. School was out, and I had some time on my hands so I told them I would and here's what I came up with. If I were to do it again, I'd probably go another way with it but that's what photography is about, learning and growing. And I learned A LOT in those 10 hours of editing. 

Viewers Choice:

Here's your chance, vote for your favorite of the image of the year. To make it simple, since I don't usually post the title of the images (and half the time their titled after the model), they are arranged from top to bottom. So, go through, vote for your favorite and we can figure out which photo wins the Viewers Choice Award. 

In a matter of a year, I feel like I've accomplished a lot of things and created stunning images that take others years and years to do. In my mind, it came down to my desire to grow and learn as much about photography as possible. But, more importantly, I experimented and that's probably where most of my luck came in. 

All of you avid readers of my blog know that Joel Grimes has had a huge impact on my photography. Originally, I thought his images were done in an HDR format and I decided to combine that style with my desire of being the next Ansel Adams. I definitely had the last name for it (Ansel and Ancell are close enough, right?) and I thought that it would best allow me to do one other thing that I've always wanted to do, travel. 

I can't argue though, because my landscape photography took me on a 5000 mile road trip across the Western United States. I got to see some of the most amazing landscapes that the United States has to offer and documented it all through my camera. Two of my favorite images from the trip are Hole in the Wall (Antelope Canyon) and On the Water (Aspen, Colorado).

                                                                                                       After the road trip, heeding the advice of one of my good friends, I decided to try my hand at Portraits so I didn't limit myself to anything. He told me to try my hand at portraits before I committed myself to any style of photography and well I guess you all know how that turned out.

Once again, I hit the books to try to understand a little bit better the process behind Joel Grimes images. Through reading his tutorials on his website and a tutorial in Scott Kelby's book, I started doing a Joel Grimes style but not anywhere near as good.

I got a chance to attend his workshop in November and it really changed the whole way I looked at photography. I finally had the confidence to take my photography to another level and realized that I have talent when it comes to photography.

I have so many different Sportraits and Portraits from the past three months but I'm going to make you wait a couple days before you find out my favorite of the year (keep on reading, you'll understand what I'm talking about).

Over the past year, I signed up for a Pro Flickr account which allowed me to track people visiting my photos and recorded stats throughout the year. I do have to say the first couple of months were pretty slow but once I started dabbling in HDR (around March), the views started to grow.

I have high hopes that I'll be able to grow this to a much larger extend by the end of next year. I hope to have over 250,000 views which means I need to quadruple the amount of views on my account. I don't see this as a problem because realistically, I could say that the first 3 months of my pro account didn't see more than 100 views total. I'll continue to grow as a photographer and add techniques to my images that will make them more impressive than before. 

Either tomorrow or on New Years, I'm going to post my images of the year. I'll try to include photos from various different categories, i.e. Best Image of the Year, Best Landscape, Best Portrait, Biggest Catastrophe, Most time spent on an individual image (you'd be surprised how long). But, I'm also hoping to put up a Viewers Choice Award. I'll either take the images that I choose in the categories I said above, or if I get some suggestions on which photos were your favorites and then create a poll for you all to vote in. I'll even try to come up with some sort of prize for one of the voters chosen at random. 

So make sure you check back and vote when the time comes. Maybe you'll end up as the prize winner!

The more we talked, the more it was evident that both of us needed more Fashion and Beauty shots to add to our portfolios. I drove up to Portland yesterday to check out some apartments and then we planned on doing a photo shoot later that afternoon.

We met up in the Pearl District and I had a couple spots where I wanted to shoot so we just grabbed my gear and hiked around the downtown area. I always feel bad for my models because they have to help me move all the gear around (and it's not light). We joked about wishing we I had an assistant to do all the dirty work but we have to work with what we have. 

I was thoroughly impressed with Portland and the Pearl District. Not only was it beautiful but completely photography friendly. I don't know if I've ever said that about any place and I probably won't ever again. She brought two huge duffle bags full of clothes and in order to change into them she ran into stores and said we were doing a photo shoot and needed a changing room. They were completely fine with it and I don't know why, but I just think that's amazing.

Overall, I think the photo shoot was a great success. I think both Cassie and I will have some great photos to add to our portfolios. We just ran out of time to do anything besides a fashion shoot but we are going to meet up again sometime soon to do some interesting Sportraits. It's just another excuse for me to spend some time in Portland and check out places to move to once I finish up school. 

Thanks for stopping by again! I'm traveling home for the holidays and then off to Vegas. I still have a ton of images to process from the last three shoots so I'll be working on and posting them as often as I can. I just want to wish everyone Happy Holidays! Keep on checking back for more photos from my shoots with Cody, Cassie and the Women's Basketball Team. 

P.S. Let me know if any of you have any suggestions for places to live up in Portland :)

This is by far the most difficult image that I've ever done. After being woken up by the fire alarm Sunday morning at 7 a.m. and not being able to get back to sleep, I decided to start working on this image and see what I could do. I think by the end of the day I had spent at least 10 hours trying to make it look as natural as I could. I've gone back to it a couple times this week to tweak a couple things but I'm pretty proud of how this turned out. Especially since this is one of the toughest photo concepts I've attempted. 

I think this one turned out a little neater and cleaner. I really have had a lot of fun with this shoot and I think I've come out with more great images than any other photo shoot that I've done before. Actually, I usually plan on coming out with one or two good images out of the two or three hundred I take during a shoot. The two photos I've already posted of Taylor aren't just good images, they are great. So, that in itself makes helping the girls out with this little photo project worth it!

In fact, the photo of Taylor with the Basketball in her right hand received an Editors Choice award on NAPP. That bring the total up to 3 in the past two months and two of those being Sportraits! Things are really taking off with my photography and the last two shoots - the Women's Basketball shoot and the shoot with Cody - have definitely been huge confidence boosters. I just ordered my business cards and two of the images out of four are from these past two shoots (I'll let you guess which ones). And speaking of business cards, my sister helped me come up with a great concept and they are in the mail. I'll be sharing them with you once they get here and the finishing touches are added.