UM Gusman Concert Hall
Opening Night Red Carpet Celebration

Frost School’s Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra
Jeff Beal, composer, and conductor
Music and movie buffs alike will be mesmerized as Jeff Beal, five-time Emmy-winning composer of music for film, media and concert halls, joins the Frost School’s Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra on stage. The evening features a live music-to-screen performance of Battleground, Beal’s score from the acclaimed television series Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King. Other compositions by Beal will also be performed.

The final performances were mind-blowing. Each performer had a long list of musical accomplishments that would have been impressive for any artist at 3x their ages!

For more information, check out the Frost School of Music Website: Frost Chopin Academy

John Zhao, age 16 HSin-Yi Huang, age 27Stars of the Academy, Concert II Saturday, June 30, 2018, 7:30 – 9 p.m. Gusman Hall at the Frost School of Music Hsin-Yi Huang, age 27Stars of the Academy, Concert II Saturday, June 30, 2018, 7:30 – 9 p.m. Gusman Hall at the Frost School of Music Viet Trung Nguyen, age 21Stars of the Academy, Concert II Saturday, June 30, 2018, 7:30 – 9 p.m. Gusman Hall at the Frost School of Music

Stephanie Ding Draughon, age 15Stars of the Academy, Concert II Saturday, June 30, 2018, 7:30 – 9 p.m. Gusman Hall at the Frost School of Music Avery Gagliano, age 16Stars of the Academy, Concert II Saturday, June 30, 2018, 7:30 – 9 p.m. Gusman Hall at the Frost School of Music Avery GaglianoStars of the Academy, Concert II Saturday, June 30, 2018, 7:30 – 9 p.m. Gusman Hall at the Frost School of Music Victor Shlyakhtenko, age 16Stars of the Academy, Concert II Saturday, June 30, 2018, 7:30 – 9 p.m. Gusman Hall at the Frost School of Music Joanna Goranko, age 17Stars of the Academy, Concert II Saturday, June 30, 2018, 7:30 – 9 p.m. Gusman Hall at the Frost School of Music The Chopin Festival Stars of the Academy accompanied by the Amernet String QuartetStars of the Academy, Concert II Saturday, June 30, 2018, 7:30 – 9 p.m. Gusman Hall at the Frost School of Music

Roy Rogers and Carlos ReyesRoy Rogers is one of the world’s premier slide guitarists. The eight-time Grammy nominee delivers his signature slide guitar chops and entertaining songs in an adrenaline-charged duo concert with renowned violinist and stringed harpist Carlos Reyes. Their sizzling performances are filled with soulful instrumentals, hints of nostalgic R&B, and contemporary blues, delivered with musical mastery and an onstage chemistry that delights audiences around the world. Roy Rogers Carlos Reyes Roy Rogers Roy Rogers Carlos Reyes Roy Rogers and Carlos Reyes

Several of the concerts were amazing performances and have become amazing memories. The first was a Tribute to Dizzy Gillespie featuring Ignacio Berroa, Jimmy Heath, and Jon Faddis. All three were of course amazing players, but their stage presence and interactions with the musicians of the Frost School is what captured my attention. All three of them clearly loved every second of the evening and it could be felt with each note. Additionally... I got some great shot.

Jon Faddistrumpeter Jon Faddis Jimmy HeathSaxophonist Jimmy Heath Jimmy Heathsaxophonist Jimmy Heath Ignacio Berroadrummer Ignacio Berroa Ignacio Berroadrummer Ignacio Berroa Frost Jazz bandFrost Jazz Band conducted by Jon Faddis and including Jimmy Heath and Ignacio Berroa Ignacio Berroa Ignacio Berroa Jimmy Heathsaxophonist Jimmy Heath

John MarkoffJohn Markoff at the Computer History Museum.

For many years I was fortunate to be the photographer the Computer History Museum chose to hire for many of their events, including the annual Fellow Awards. I remember John Markoff from many of those events and I had the opportunity to photograph him both as part of the crowd and part of the event. I always enjoyed his graciousness, good nature and infectious smile, even if he once told me that a good picture couldn't be taken of him. I disagreed than and still do. While I have never interacted with John outside of those few times at the CHM, since the first time I met him I always stopped and read his articles whenever I came across them and on many occasions sought out his articles for the best Silicon Valley reporting available.

Backchannel.com reported that John will now be the writer in residence at the Simons Institute of the Theory of Computing and the University of California at Berkeley. I would like to wish him the best of luck and I hope to read much more from him in the future.

To read more about John Markoff on backchannel.com: 

BackChannel.com

Since I had 4 photo shoots last week and was a little behind on editing, I thought I would try reformatting the drive and doing a clean install of the OS. This usually isn't a problem because all of my data is on a separate hard drive, so its just a matter of reinstalling the OS and applications. I rebooted the machine and held command+R to enter the boot options and start the recovery process. After many tries and nothing working, including trying to reset the PRAM and using command+option+R for the internet recovery, I gave up and ordered a replacement drive from Amazon. 

What I didn't realize is that without a OSX recovery partition on the drive, you can not use any of the boot options to start the recovery process. The failed "new" drive was a clone of the operating system partition from a previous failed drive which did not include the recovery partition. When the new drive arrived, I had the same issue. Usually this would not be a problem because if an operating system is not found, OSX should automatically boot to the internet recovery system. In this case, again, it did not boot to recovery and no key combination would load the recovery system either. 

After some time searching the Apple.com forum (no link saved, sorry) I found a single comment that suggested using a Lion recovery disk to boot to the internet recovery system. Since I did not have any of the old install disks handy - I do keep both disks and images of Snow Leopard and Lion - I chose a different path: TechTools ProToGo.

When I originally purchased TechTools pro by Micromat (https://www.micromat.com/products/techtool-pro) it was over $125.00 but it was the best program for what I needed at the time. The price has come down a bit now but it is still the best tool I have found for a testing memory, SSDs, HDDs, and other hardware for Mac. Most importantly, the ProToGo features will create a basic recovery start-up disk on a flash drive. Once I had that created, I popped it in and booted straight to the internet recovery system; partitioned the disks using Disk Utility, performed a clean install in a matter of an hour or so and was back up and running. 

So far, I am very pleased with the Samsung SSD drive I purchased from Amazon - very fast, very small! 

A few months ago, a couple of buddies and I ventured down to Everglades City for a fishing trip through 10,000 Islands. Driving across the middle of the Everglades during the early morning, I become more inspired than I have been with South Florida for a long time. A few weeks later we went back to do some photography and had an amazing time. Still not crazy about the idea of running into a python or water moccasin, but we are determined to go back and continue to work.

Everglades, series 1 Everglades, series 1Switch grass and lonely pine field Everglades, series 1Switch grass and lonely pine field Everglades, series 1Switch grass and lonely pine field Everglades, series 1Switch grass and lonely pine field Everglades, series 1Switch grass and lonely pine field

Every so often, the time comes for an artist to take stock of their...well, in the case of a photographer, quite literally: Stock. During the time that Jenifer and I have been shooting together first as best friends and then as husband and wife we have compiled a collection of images that tops more than 125,000. Personally, I have shot more than that during the 10 years or so since I graduated from Barry University. 

The process of looking toward the future of Versatile Light Studio and my personal work began with a look back over the past 10 years.  Generally, I knew what I would find in my personal archive - after all I shot them all! What I didn't expect among the well-defined bodies of work from Paris, work-related and thesis images, was such a visceral reaction to the personal history that this archive represents. Additionally, as I had hoped when I started the process of editing through the first 54,000 I found several bodies of work that needed to be revived from a long stored hard drive and rescued from the dust bin of fading memories. 

Over the next several months, I hope to publish much of this work into portfolios, stock galleries (possibly for sale or license) and most importantly to bring the images back to life. 

Looking forward to presenting more to come....

FOCUS

frost school of music events

“Some songs are just stops on the way to the next one.”

“Writers block is when the pencil is not on the paper”

“Some times you have to let the patient die on the table… You have to be willing to let go of stuff that doesn’t work.”

“The muse will show up, but it likes to find you working” quote from Picasso

During the shoot we photographed 3 attorneys new to the firm and 1 that will most likely be hired (yesterday was his final interview, sounds like he is expecting an offer). In addition, we did photos of the partners for a national ad and to update their website. Below is a photo I grabbed while we where switching between partners for an environmental headshot.

More to come…

MCDS junior varsity boy basketball bested Hebrew Academy 52-40 in one of the worst refereed games in recent memory. Playing strong to the end, MCDS didn’t let it affect the outcome, outplaying Hebreew through the whole game.

Next up, the Spartan’s JV boys against Marathon…

At 4:30 this afternoon the Lady Spartans will tip off for the last home game of their season. Come out and support the Spartans as they take the court against LaSalle high school.

The MCDS men’s soccer team finished their regular season strong, beating Coral Springs, 8-0. Congratulations to them and their “Blue Steel” seniors for a great season.

At the end of the game, the entire team called Florida Hall of Fame Coach Watson from the stands to help celebrate a great season. Coach Watson lead the Spartan’s varsity men’s soccer team for many seasons before moving on to other responsibilities at the school and the announcers booth for all the home games this season.

The varsity men begin district tournament play this coming Monday at 7pm.

In the last home game of the season, the Miami Country Day School Men’s soccer team takes the field against Coral Springs Christian. 6:00pm start time.

Lead by the fired up Blue Steel squad, the MCDS seniors will be looking to crush their opponents as they head into the district tournament.

Jenifer and I have been using Lightroom since version 2 for RAW processing all of our personal and studio images (I teach seminars and private lessons for LR v. 2 and 3). Version 3 had some great improvements: Better processing algorithm, better noise reduction, better printing control, etc. Lightroom 4 is going to have some of the things we have been waiting for.

• Localized adjustments for white balance, sharpening and noise reduction among other image adjustments
• the ability to move multiple folders at the same time (seems minor but quite a time saver)
• The ability to hide unused modules (we never use the web module, so now we can save that screen real estate)
• A map module that will utilize GPS metadata. This module will allow searching by location for photos as well as importing GPX track log files from handheld GPS units

I have not spent too much time with LR4 beta yet, but this weekend I will be doing a bunch of images processing and I am looking forward to giving it a more intense run through.