Knoll Showroom Opening

This past week I shot the grand opening of the brand new Knoll Showroom in DC, with the help of Armin and Paul. The place was packed with smiling faces and the atmosphere was electrifying! Their new showroom is absolutely stunning and I had a blast documenting the event for them. I wanted to share a little taste of the evening:

I don't drink on the job, but I heard these "Knolltini's" were fantastic

There were people all over enjoying the inviting spaces in the various workstation areas...

There were definitely a lot of funny photos from the "photobooth", especially later into the evening...

Armin snagged this great shot of Paul through the cutout for the photobooth

Update: just posted the slideshow, check it out!

Hail to the Chief

This past Tuesday I was there. Yes, I was in the the most crowded place in the world that day, Washington, DC. It was the 56th Presidential Inauguration Ceremony and I was asked to be the person to document an event sponsored by Best Buy at Constitution Hall. This event was offered as a free service to the community: seating for 3700 people to stay out of the cold as they watched the very memorable day on a 60 foot screen (and two smaller side displays). Geek Squad had a booth to burn people's photos onto DVD so they could free up their memory cards and make room for all the photos they wanted to take. Also Best Buy Mobile, Best Buy for Business, HP, Slingbox, Jawbone and Verizon had booths to do everything from hands-on demos of their products, to give away free souvineers to taking photos of guests with a cardboard cutout of Obama and printing it out on a HP printer. Best Buy also set up a charging station so people could charge their phones and cameras if they were running low on juice. All this completely gratis, with no sales pitch... pretty cool!

I was amazed by the huge crowds, you hear a number like 1.4 million and it doesn't mean much to you until you see it and are a part of it. Constitution Hall was packed wall to wall with people trying to get out of the 18 degree weather and avoid standing on their feet without access to restrooms for hours on end. It was simply non-stop all day. It would have been nice to be one of the official photogs for the inauguration itself, but there's always 2013! The full gallery is on noahhayes.net, but here's a little slice of history for you:

This girl was waiting for us to open up the doors at 8AM...

I dare you to count them...there's 3700, def..def...definitely 3700 (a little Rainmain impression if you didn't get that one...)

Mark "Voice of the Washington Redskins" Kessler was the MC for the event...

Slingbox and Jawbone representatives demoing their products (cool stuff too!)

I let Jon hold my D3 for this one...scary thought...LOL

Starbucks' new "grime the planet" campaign...seriously, can't DC keep it's streets clean?

Fresh Coat of Paint...

I recently decided my main website was a little bland and I definitely hated not being able to display my images at sizes larger than 800X450 (a non-standard aspect ratio for photographs). I've decided to rebuild my site and it now supports resolutions of 1200X800 (I could set it higher, but right now most visits to the page are screen resolutions of 1280X800 and 1400X900, so most will be able to view at almost full screen!!!). The actual interface design changes a bit, but it's more of an evolution rather than a complete top-to-bottom redesign. A lot of the visual elements and color scheme stays the same, just the content and the resolution of the content changes. Also now when viewing a gallery you have the ability to view a 'thumbnails' view or email a link of any image to friends or family, which is really cool! So if you see a picture on the site you just HAVE to show someone, you can email them a link directly to the one you want them to see! (Tip of the day for Mac users: You can select a portion of the screen for a "screen shot by clicking "command-shift-4", I've been asked about that numerous times...just figured I'd fill in everyone who didn't already know)

Here I've posted a quick screenshot of the before and after, see how much empty space there was around the old one? Keep in mind these images were taken on a monitor with a resolution of 1920X1200, so your display will most likely show less empty space.

Look at all that empty space not being used...so bland!

Complete redesign, menu options on the bottom, larger display, no more boring white background!

Thumbnails view inside of a gallery...

Email pop-up window for emailing images to friends and family!

So what do you think? I hope to be finished getting everything the way I want it by the end of the day (Friday) so I can go ahead and make it live, until I do the old site will still be visible.

Coming soon to a blogspot near you...

WOW! I just realized I haven't posted anything in almost 3 weeks, whoops. Well I'll have at least 2-3 posts by next week up to make up lost time. I got a new photographic tool(toy) that I'm gonna post some review stuff up, including some sample photos I've taken and some others I expect to take later this week. I've got some other updates as well coming soon that I've been spending a bit of time working on, which I hope to announce by Fri/Sat of this week, well at least I'll tell you about it by then if it hasn't launched by then. 1 billion points to whoever can either guess A) what new tool/toy I picked up or B)what I expect to announce/launch by the upcoming weekend.. first person to 2 billion points wins the prize...which is to be determined. (BTW check the Drobo post, I've added an update to the bottom about the past couple week's experience)

Video Project in 3 days = No sleep

James and I on our first day of shooting...prior to sleep deprivation...

So those of you who don't know...I have had all of 8 hours of sleep over the past week. I got approached by a GM in my district about creating a video project around customer acquisition and innovation in our local stores last week. I agreed to work on it without knowing when he needed it by (he made it sound like their was plenty of time). The next day he calls to tell me a little more about the project. This is a video which is to be made to show to our Executive Vice President of Retail and our CFO who would be coming to our territory office on the 27th. I said "The 27th of July? Okay." No...it was the 27th of June. This conversation was last Friday the 20th.

I freak out as I had to work all weekend and was scheduled to work all this week. I managed to get my employees to work a bunch of extra shifts to cover me, and grabbed James ( a friend at the company who I've done several video projects before...also a fellow contributer to Tech Tuesdays at Sillyman.org) and filled him in on the details. We began shooting Monday morning and found out Tuesday afternoon after shooting the last bit that this video needed to have a rough draft (90% complete) by 3PM Wednesday...

To make a long story short, this project took about 50 hours of actual work and James and I were sitting in front of a camera or a computer for close to 65 hours (waiting for things to render, import, ect) over the course of 3.5 days. We found out Thursday EVENING that the time for the presentation has been cut back, and due to time constraints they won't have time to show the video (it's only 7.5 minutes long!)

I wasn't going to blog this, but I emailed the video to a couple friends in the industry and they wanted me to post this up just to show everyone exactly how (to put in Armin's words) "...this really shows how much TIME and EFFORT goes into a freakin’ 7 minute video!"

Sorry I am not willing to link or post this video as it is does contain proprietary company information, but just rest assured that it came out great.

At least I got out of a blue shirt for a few days...

Softball 08

Today I was shooting a softball game for Best Buy's D91 annual tournament. They usually don't take it seriously as to go out and make uniforms specifically for the event, but this year the Gainesville store went all out and got jerseys made. Sterling VA completely dominated every round they played, with the first game being the biggest landslide with Sterling aat 28 runs OVER what Gainesville had. I took about 1700 shots and boiled it down to the top 250ish and uploaded the lot onto noahhayes.net under events if you'd like to view the events from the whole day, but I decided to post a couple of my personal favorites here for you. 

You usually don't see baseball/softball games from the angle of the field in photos, but here's one...

Stu = failure   Kyle = hero

Kyle's pretty fast too

Stu warming up

Zach's would-be hilarious shirt if 1022 (Leesburg VA) had more than three people show up to play...those three got stuck on Rick's team

George sporting his Julbo shades...

These were some pro-quality burgers and dogs, many thanks to Helen for feeding everyone...

Jermaine decided to play a little basketball while on a break between going up to bat...

Leanna and Kat(below) both decided to slide head first into the muddy expanse between 2nd and 3rd base...

Hope you enjoyed these, I've got some new photo toys I'll be testing out this week and putting a full review (or at least some sample photos) later this week when I get some more time. (BTW I usually don't shoot JPEG, but I did today expecting to take more photos than normal...I used up nearly 11 GB of cards using JPEG alone, which was mind boggling to me. Fortunately nearly all the shots were great straight out of the camera and the only post-processing I had to do was a little cropping here and there)

White Castle or McD's? Choose your heartattack!

Upon arriving at work today, I was suprised to see a monument errected in our break room. Apparently an employee decided to devour his own weight in White Castle burgers over the weekend and brought a small number of the leftover boxes to work and decided to play around with his creative side. I asked him where he got all of the boxes, he then told me how he drove 4 hours to the closest location... must have been a Harold/Kumar type of urge, but I didn't ask.

Having never seen/been to White Castle (I have no idea where the closest one even is) I do not know if White Castle also has arches prominately displayed in their locations, but I know that these arches look more like a tribute to McD's! These were the only boxes to be displayed there were EASILY 15 more in trash cans all around the building.

I unfortunately left my Nikon at home, so I had to take these with my iPhone and brighten/sharpen them a little in PS. Hungry?