Tony Urban Photography – Senior Photo Art, Pittsburgh Wedding Photographer – Somerset, Johnstown, Greensburg

Well, we didn’t reach the halfway point, but we did make good progress when it came to installing the wood floors. The morning was spent at Walmart buying some needed tools and we didn’t really get started until 11am. We began by cutting the end boards which went pretty well. Once we started to lay the planks, things went a bit more slowly. It isn’t quite as easy as the directions make it sound, but we figured it out and made good progress.

I’d say we’re about 1/3 of the way finished and that includes most of the hard cuts. We were even able to move the couch and armoire back to they usual spots, which helps free up a lot of space. The rest of the room will be pretty easy, at least until we get to the other wall, which will involve many, many cuts. I still think we can wrap this up tomorrow.

Here a snapshot of a bit of the new flooring.

I almost never work inside the studio and actually quite dislike it. For the type of work I do, there’s just nothing exciting about studio work. There’s nothing natural about it. I like to capture the essence of who someone is in their photos, and trust me, no one looks natural sitting in front of a studio backdrop and beside a fake pillar (or worse yet, posing on a ladder!).

Because I don’t like working in the studio, I never really bothered to design one. When I took formal photos, I simply draped a background from a large armoire, set up the lights and shot away. The setup worked well, but looked (for lack of a better word) ghetto. Since my senior photo work really took off last year, I figured I really needed a proper studio space and this week, the remodeling began.

I’m converting the den in my home into a dual purpose studio room/meeting area. Initially I’d planned on painting the old faux wood paneling but a quick test run of that yielded less than stellar results. So the walls are staying as is for now, and our first step is putting down wood flooring.

Last night, the work began. The first step was emptying out the armoire which aside from acting as a background stand served a more practical purpose as a storage unit for my books, albums, paperwork and assorted memorabilia. That alone took an hour and I ended up filling a trash bag with “junk” that I decided to get rid of.

Once that was emptied, I had to start moving furniture in order to get to the carpet. That didn’t take long but was tiring. I never realized how much stuff was in that room until I had to move all of it. Finally, I started to tear up the old carpet, which came up much easier than I expected. Still, removing all of the carpet from a 16×20 foot room was a fair amount of work and after a few hours I was ready to pack it in for the night. Below are some photos of the process.

This morning, with the help of Sharon, I pulled up the rest of the carpet and padding and dragged all of it outside and into the snow so we’d have more room to work. With the carpet and padding up, we then had remove the tack strips that held the carpet down at the edges of the room. That was easily the hardest part yet as those strips were nailed to the subfloor every 4 inches. The only way we could get them up was to take a flat screwdriver and hammer it under the strip, then pry it up. The strip would then snap, releasing a section a few inches long and we’d move on to the next section. Prying up all of those sections took a few hours and resulted in countless splinters. During this process the furniture had to be moved twice and was then moved one final time to one side of the room. That was it for today.

Tomorrow we need to clean up all the mess and will then begin putting down the new flooring. I’m hoping we can finish half the room tomorrow but that might be overly optimistic. The cutting part is what worries me. I don’t know why, it just does. I’ll post more photos tomorrow, but for now here are some snapshots taken at the end of today’s work.

It’s been 2 weeks now that we’ve had either rain or snow every single day. I hate not being able to go outside and shoot every day and today I’d had enough. I broke out the camera and 70-200 zoom lens and started shooting through the windows. Taking photos through household windows is never an ideal situation (especially when they aren’t squeaky clean) but I had no other option.

I started by staking out our bird-feeders and grabbed some shots of a tufted titmouse and a chickadee. Later on, a mourning dove showed up and then a cardinal. Unfortunately the cardinal insisted on staying on the backside of the feeder so I had to shoot him from a different window and had to really crop the image to show him off. But, I think it turned into an “okay” photo through post processing.

After a little while, the snow really started to fall and I happened to notice a young fellow pushing his bicycle out the road. I don’t know what possessed him to go for a bike ride on a day like today, but I had to grab of photo of the poor lad’s misfortune.

Once the snow started to blow and limited visibility to a few feet, I turned the camera on our dog Tobe. He’s usually the subject that I break all my new cameras and lenses in on, and I don’t think he likes having his photo taken, but I still got a few nice shots.

Below are some of my favorite photos from the days events.

Tomorrow I’m shooting photos for a surprise “Sweet 16″ party. That should be different and fun and I can’t wait!

While my site is currently being redesigned, I finally got around to doing something I’ve wanted to do for a while – update my bio. My old bio said a lot about the technical aspects and training, but it said very little about why I am a photographer. I doubt many people care that I worked in the film industry for 9 years or that my mom gave me my first camera when I was six years old, but hopefully people do care about why I’ve become a professional photographer. So if you’re bored, head over to the “About Me” page and read all about me.