Lights!

Got ’em.

Cameras!

Yeah, those too.

“Action!”

I’m more of a “Ready?  Go” kind of guy as a director.

However, as much as I may tout “Hollywood in Maryland” — even way out here in western Maryland (my little town has a school for the arts, the state’s symphony orchestra, live theater, a major blues festival, and an art museum, for starters) — I’m aware of my limitations, creative and logistical.

To keep this simple today (11/5/2012), I’ll stick to the logistical.

Location: western Maryland at the intersection of I-81 and I-70, about 90 minutes driving out of Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Transportation: 2000 Mustang, v6, with fold-down rear seats.  In basic professional photography service, one may “sweat the small stuff”, and from wires to stand bags (and rolls of seamless paper or bags of backgrounds), everything involved may be “small stuff” that fits into the Mustang’s boot.

Expensive small stuff.

That’s another story.

Range: mid-Atlantic region.

Seasons: “Ice and snow — Pony don’t go.”

Whatever possessed me — and still possesses me — the ‘Stang ain’t a reporter’s “beater” or a tough old bird’s four-wheel drive vehicle.  It prefers avoiding war zones, wild weather stories (although I like them), and fire roads, but it has an uncanny talent for sniffing out golf courses, marinas, manicured parks, and the kind of restaurants I really can’t afford.

The effect of owning a sports car — pejoratively nicknamed “The secretary’s Mustang” (as opposed to “The Boss”) and “grocery getter” — for general purpose driving is such that between about now, mid-November, and later March, I don’t want to commit to a must-go date that might imperil my ride and ruin an occasion.  However, weather willing — below freezing with roads cleared or sanded, or several degrees above freezing, raining or not — I consider myself on call, body, calendar, and Pony willing.

Experience and Range: from tabletop light tent to mansion grounds, I’ve shot fine small objects and prepared and directed models: college experience: photographer and editor for the Miami Student (Oxford, Ohio) way back when.  I was anxious and shy back then but went out armed with a Minolta SRT 100 and bulk loaded cassettes of Tri-X.  Today, I hope I’m less anxious and shy.  The workhorses are a Nikon D2x and D200 supported by Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, a pretty good XP box (built it myself in 2007), and a broadband connection.

It’s getting late in the day for me to have a Slim Aarons kind of career, but I’m definitely out here (I love those famous words: “I’m still here” — so true until one isn’t) in the countryside northwest of the Washington Beltway, or, north to south, in the area loosely denoted as the Cumberland and Shenandoah valleys.