It's Alive!

8/3
Up-UPDATE: The site is now live at http://www.parkersmithphoto.com/portraits/

We are still having an issue with the redirect for ParkerSmithPortraits.com, but hope to have it resolved soon.

Please check it out and let us know what you think!

Parker

8/2
UPDATE: Well, everything seemed to be working fine, but the site is not loading. :-( Sorry. We're working on it.

After many, many moons, the new website is now live. Yippee!

We have moved the blog to the new site.

Please bookmark our new blog page, and check in with us there. There are several fresh posts waiting for you!

The New Website (is almost live)! A sneak peak...

Tricked you, didn't I? 


The parenthetical song title was always one of my pet peeves. For example, Simon and Garfunkel's "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)." Hunh? Do they ever even mention the 59th Street Bridge?

Anyhow, after about 500 zillion hours of work, we are almost ready to launch the new website and blog! If all goes well, Monday July 18, we will have our new site live and ready for all your eyeballs.

I have been crazy busy with photography, especially commercial projects, and outside of that work I have been devoting an extraordinary amount of time to the site. (Lots of film piled up, waiting to be processed.)

The site is built on WordPress, and was designed and coded by moi, Parker. HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, it's all there, and I'm really proud of both the form and the function. Kristin has been very patient with the process; she knows how obsessive I am when I set my mind to something. Her thoughts on the design are all reflected as well. I've done all the hard code, but the design process has truly been a collaboration, as is our business and our lives. (She also did all the great copywriting.)

It is definitely a new look for us, but we've spent the better part of this year brainstorming and really contemplating who we are as a studio, and what we want to communicate to the world. The new site will be the beginning of our process, with much more to follow.

Thank you so much for all the love.

Parker

Hello, It's Me

Apologies for the extended absence from blogging. We have been working feverishly to finish our new website and blog, and, like so many things, it's taking a bit longer than anticipated. The new site will provide a very comprehensive look at what we do in the studio, our location portraiture, dog portraiture, Sprout Club, family portraits, everything. The blog will also be a part of the website, rather than a separate entity, so it's all good.

In addition, we are completely reframing and updating all of our wall displays for the studio. I keep moving the furniture around, too, trying to get the perfect feng shui arrangement. Our electrician Larry is here today setting up all of the new lighting, and the phone is ringing off the hook with commercial projects, so we are moving at a hectic pace trying to keep up with everything. I put in about 12 hours a day, pretty much every day.

Unfortunately, getting these various projects across the finish line always takes longer than I anticipate when I start 25 different things at once! See this post for a fuller explanation.

One super swell project we hit last week was to photograph Ms. Victoria Stilwell of Animal Planet's "It's Me or The Dog" for all her new marketing pieces as well as her new line of Positively branded dog products, soon to be launched. I'll post some of those images when I finish the retouching. Here's one of me working with Victoria:

You can see some of the endless bitz unt pieces that go into a studio portrait. In the back is David, one of the four dog handlers who helped us manage all of the dog units for the shoot. Victoria's dogs, Sadie and Jasmine, are real sweethearts. Jasmine likes to camp out on Sadie:

Anyhow, I've been saving up a lot of stuff for the new blog, and we'll hit it there when it launches. See you soon.

Okhata! - Mutt of the Week

Okhata came to the studio all the way from Clemson, SC!

A web image just doesn't work here; you have to see the original print to get the full impact of his beauty, the marvelous coat, the juicy nose, and the wild whiskers. So I've included a detail shot to give the kind reader a sense of what is really going on with all this beauty (and -- quick toot -- my superb lighting).

Note the white and blue inclusion in his left eye (right eye in the picture).

Thanks so much to Kimberly for making the drive and bringing her special buddy to us. :-)

Hammers and Lutes

The German composer Johann Mattheson is said to have remarked that if a lute player lived to be 80, he had surely spent 60 years of his life tuning the lute. 

In this painting by Rubens, you can see why someone might make such a statement:

Many years ago, buried deep in a painful renovation of a house that really should have been either gutted or leveled, I modified this witticism: if I spend ten years renovating this house, I will have spent half of it looking for my hammer! It turned out to be a 5/2.5 split!

Lute tuning and home renovations are both best left to professionals.

As you know, we recently moved our Atlanta portrait studio into a new space, and being the DIY guy that I am, I set about staining the concrete floors, installing new base moulding and a bunch more stuff that really should have been left to a professional.

The problem with DIY projects is that you are almost guaranteed to NOT get what you actually need whenever you make a trip to the hardware store. Thus, each project requires 3 or 4 trips to the hardware store, and each trip adds an hour to the total project time (when you factor in stopping at CoffeeBucks each time you pass by). My total number of trips to either ACE or Home Depot was really insane, something like 33!

Updating the axiom: if you spend two weeks on a DIY project, you'll spend one full week at Home Depot, about six days looking for your hammer, and one day to do the actual work!

Portrait Installation

Here is a view of a recent installation of my portraiture. You might recognize two of them from The Manhattans. They are an absolutely delightful group of children, well-loved by their family.

New Studio!

Greetings from the new Mothership! We recently moved to the front of our building, into a really wonderful space that has quickly become our new home.

So, same building at 1095 Zonolite Road, but we are now in Suite A.

We still have a bit of decorating to do to get everything just perfect, but we are very happy that we took the opportunity to move. We'll post some photos as soon as we get everything in it's right place.

Here's a little something to hold you over:

Wadsworth! - Mutts

Mr. Wadsworth came to us via Heather at Zoo Atlanta. He's a big hairy buddy, and it took me days to find all the fur tumbleweeds he left behind. What a face! I love it.

Wadsworth's sister felt compelled to get in on the action, too:

Francesca!

Meet Francesca:

Now, Francesca is a little sweetheart of a dog. She comes into the studio in her little handbag, dances for treats, and is just a general delight.

She had mom and dad eating out of her paw!

Ozzy - Mutts

Odd eyes? Check. Fruit bat radar ears? Check.

Say hello to our latest Mutt, Ozzy!

The Ozzy man is a beautiful mix of Australian Shepherd and Jack Russell Terrier. His mom said he was named after Ozzy Osbourne, and he certainly lives up to it: Ozzy is a wild man! The bottom portrait is his homage to Bark at the Moon and pretty much sums up the entire session. He never stopped moving! You might call him the "Blizzard of Ozz." (sorry, couldn't resist)