It seems that my slow season is getting shorter and shorter each year! I usually try to get caught up on marketing materials, like updating the website, making new brochures, getting together with other wedding vendors, etc. This year I concentrated on rebuilding my blog (it went down with my website last summer when the host’s server crashed!), building a Ray Anthony Photography business page on Facebook (click here), judged a ISPWP (International Society of Professional Wedding Photographers) wedding photography contest of approximately 800 photos, attended the annual WPPI (Wedding & Portrait Photographers International) convention in Las Vegas, and worked on perfecting my photography skills – particularly my eye and technique for photojournalism.
To do that, I participate on a forum called the Foundation Workshop which has many current or former news photojournalists also participating and who have become wedding photographers. I collaborate with this very talented group throughout the year critiquing each others’ wedding photography and sharing business ideas. It has proven to be an immense help because my background was in working in the movie industry as a camera assistant as well as photographing weddings in a more traditional way (mainly in the 1990′s). This past February, I had an opportunity to be a student at their annual workshop called FW7. The purpose of the workshop is to put wedding photographers into a real life situation for a couple of days to photograph it like a newspaper or editorial style photographer. I did it because I wanted to be challenged by the countries best photojournalists.
I was fortunate that my mentor was Greg Gibson – a two time Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist. During the late 1990′s, he was assigned by the A.P. to be President Bill Clinton’s personal photographer! You can check out Greg’s blog where he put a post about FW7 and mentions myself and the other students that he mentored. You can also see some of my work there. Click here. I was given the assignment to photograph a major rodeo in Fortworth, TX. I was fortunate that a rodeo clown/bullfighter, named Dusty Tuckness, allowed me to follow him around for two days. If you want to see more of the photographs I captured, check out this slideshow of images, see below:
