Carl Hutzler’s Blog

I could not believe my eyes last week when I saw a pair of Bose 901 Series V speakers go up on Freecycle. The freecycler said they “needed some repair as one of the drivers was bad”. I responded immediately and tried to explain how handy I was and how I could likely fix them. An hour later, she responded and said I could have them. I jumped in the car…

When I got home, I didn’t even hook them up. I called Bose and they said for $100 plus shipping (one way), they would refurbish them to like new condition and ship them back for free! So $142 later, I have them back and they are awesome! Well, I guess a $1,400 pair of speakers should sound great :-)

Complete with sales receipt (from 1984, purchase at a Naval exchange for $800), two manuals, and stands.

If you don’t freecycle, you are throwing away stuff people want and likely missing out on stuff you would normally spend money on…perhaps BIG money.

Freecycle.org

I nearly got caught in the Pope’s drive through Washington the other day from his place up in Northwest to the Whitehouse. Luckily, the timing was right and we got the the National Building Museum for our field trip without issue.

Jon Stewart’s take below :-)

When you take a group of scouts fishing, it rather vaguely resembles the sport. They don’t really want to touch the worms (yuk!), they are constantly within 1/1000th of an inch of getting the hook lodged in their arm (or worse!), and they are screaming at each other throughout the process (which can be heard by the fish of course).

But on this warm April afternoon, I took 7 scouts fishing at the little pond near the school and everyone caught at least one fish! They were really biting. There’s something about catching your first fish, that is really exciting.

More Pictures

For a photographer, head shots are usually just a repetitive part of the job. I try and work the lighting and subjects a little to get some natural reactions and nice smiles.

Overall, I am pleased with these shots I took yesterday. They were for a DC Political Law firm downtown. They wanted some fairly typical business shots but they also wanted to convey a sense of being “fun to work with” and “not a bunch of stuffy Republicans” (they are Dems). I think that comes across :-)

Click for more.

Last December I shot a number of candids at a local Fairfax County elementary school. The principal wanted to install a number of large images of the kids on a couple of large brick walls in the entry area of the school. After about 3 hours of shooting on two separate days, I had a lot of great stuff to choose from.

For the first cut, I sent a link to the client to review the best images. Then we met for an hour so I could listen to what she liked and what we wanted to avoid. It was fairly easy after an hour to have a very good idea of what she liked and what would work well for the school.

I took another swipe at the images and narrowed the list to about 15 in total. On the day of the shoot, I also took a shot of the blank walls at the school. I used this to “arrange the best images on the wall” in photoshop, complete with drop shadows, etc. This helped me figure out how the images would look, how to arrange them, and spacing. But it also yielded an impressive “proof” for the client. And during installation, I used it to ensure each photograph was placed exactly as I wanted. This method really worked well. (click for larger)

Figure 1: Photoshop’d Proof for Client

I used Colours Imaging lab in Bailey’s Crossroads, VA for the printing. I use them exclusively for all my most critical printing. They are a great bunch of people to work with (ask for Rick!) and their printing skills are spectacular. The folks at Colours produced 13 of the finest 24×36 LightJets I have seen and flawlessly mounted them on black gatorboard with a heavy gloss laminate on top for protection. They mounted 2″ strips of gatorboard on the back so that when I hung the final prints, the images would be set slightly away from the wall (that was my idea :-)

The only thing I did not have a feeling for was how to mount the images. Rick at Colours suggested screws/nails in the wall which would rest/embed on the 2″ strips on the back of the images. This sounded good in practice, but with such a large number of images and the brick wall for inserting screws, I was hoping for something easier. Off to the Home Depot where I found contractor grade 2″ Velcro. It had a picture of hammers and tools being held to a wall with this stuff. I figured it would work for images on gatorboard (essentially extra thick foam core). I tried it at the site with the first image and it seemed very strong. Plus the velcro made it easy to position the images exactly where I wanted. And no drilling required! Plus they could replace a few images a year with some fresh ones if they wanted. Perfect :-)

The result is stunning. During the install people were coming up to me in amazement at how nice the images looked. It’s like having my own local art gallery :-)