Carl Hutzler’s Blog

Check this out!

I think this is the best portrait ever of my wife, Rylan. I love window light.

(click image for larger)

It has been a week or so since my son’s bike was stolen so I decided to try and work the system a little. While the police have been very helpful, I was getting the idea that their priorities were getting in the way of my priorities…getting the bike back.

So I printed out a few 8×10 glossy photographs of the kids and brought them to the local middle school. The principal and security guard did not initially recognize the kids. On a whim, I went to the high school even though I thought the kids were not old enough to be in high school. Luckily, the “School Resource Officer” (SRO) was there. He is a Fairfax County Police Officer. I guess for a high school of 1800+ students, they need a full-time officer…sad but true.

Anyway, Officer Bacon was very interested in the photos and he thought he knew who it was. I left and he pulled a couple of kids from class and grilled them a little. But the kids flatly denied any knowledge and the officer believed them. He apologized to the kids and got them back to class.

He then went to the middle school where I had been earlier. This time, one of the staffers recognized the “other” kid as one of their students (the friend of the kid riding my son’s bike). They pulled him from class and talked to him. He quickly identified his friend who was riding my son’s bike as a student at my son’s school!! All the way back to Dogwood :-)

Officer Bacon, now hot on the trail, drove over to Dogwood and found the culprit who took him to the bike which was hidden in his friend’s back yard. The kid said he bought the bike from his friend for $5 (the friend who just ratted him out). The officer told him that he could write him up for possessing stolen property and gave him a pretty good talking to (I hope his parents were involved and I imagine they had to be).

The officer then showed the bike to my son who was in school and he was very happy to see it! And Officer Bacon drove the bike over to my house and dropped it off. A good guy and much appreciated.

Thus ends the tale of the stolen bike.

Oh, and I put a new lock on it!!

The students at my son’s school are taking their final exams right now. Well, they are not really “finals” but are similar and long. They are called the Standards of Learning tests (no kidding, S.O.L. for short!). Anyway, the teachers are trying to get the kids to take their time, check their work, write out the problems, etc. To encourage this, they promised that all kids who wrote out every problem could throw a whipped cream pie at the teachers after the test last week.

All I can say was that participation in the pie throwing was 100%. And maybe for once, the kids thought that school and rules went together rather well ;-)

click here for more pix

My son started riding his bike to school about 6 weeks ago. Two or three days ago he lost his bike lock and he asked for a new one. I did not yet get a chance to buy him a new one and today his bike was taken from the school bike rack. He was bummed but had the chance to report the crime to a police officer who was at the school on other routine business at the time.

When he got home, I had the car ready for a little “site seeing” tour of the neighborhood around the school. I mean, if I were a kid that just “acquired” a new bike and it was a nice day like it was today, I know what I would be doing!

The kids were excited at the chance to find the bike. Oh, and along for the ride was my 11 FPS Nikon D3 and 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. Just in case we happened to find the culprit enjoying my son’s ride. 12MP can be damning evidence indeed!

We drove around for about 15 minutes before we came to the end of a small townhouse cluster next to the school. We saw a kid getting on a bike that had been on the ground. We got a little closer and the kid started to ride away. I thought it might be my son’s bike and handed the camera to my son to try and get a shot. He fired away, but we only got a distant, blurry shot. I called the officer and left a message as to our location and that we might have seen the bike. But I was not 100% sure as he road away fairly quickly.

I parked the car and waited nearby. We saw the kid ride by on the path a couple of times. So we decided to get out of the car and go play on the little tot playground and wait him out. Sure enough, within minutes the kid and friend came by again. This time I got ‘em.

After the kids road past, my kids and I left and got in the car and drove out to the main road where we called the police officer again. She called back and said an officer had been dispatched to the location (she was busy and could not meet us). Within minutes the other officer came to our location and took a full report. She then went to stake out our man.

Hopefully we will get the bike back soon. I told the officer I did not want to press charges if she would promise to scare the stuff out of the kid. She smiled and promised.

I told my son never to take the law into his own hands…which we did not. And I told him to be careful pursuing a criminal…especially an older kid or adult who might retaliate. But for this this silly issue, I think we did the right thing and I don’t think the kid will have any idea how he got caught.

I began working with Dégagé of McLean, Virginia about 6 months ago. Most of the shoots have been of their very unique line of Flat Screen TV Furniture which can hide a large TV when you are not viewing it. The line is hand made and very beautiful.

But more recently, I have been photographing the exquisite interiors created by owner, Trudy Simmons. She really loves her work and it shows in the rooms she creates for her clients. We used one of the shots in the premier Washington DC interior design magazine, Washington Spaces. I thought the ad really worked well. (click for larger)

From the news I understand we have received 3-5″ of rain in the last few days. And from my basement, I can concur!

Tomorrow will be a great day to visit Great Falls National Park. The river guage at Little Falls estimates the river will peak at over 9 feet which is just below flood stage. The kids and I went two weeks ago and enjoyed some terrific views, but that was only at 7 feet (picture below).

If you have never been to GFNP during a flood, don’t miss out!

I took a bunch shots at the Spring Demo’s a few weeks ago. The performance took place in a community center near the school and it is not the best “stage” for the dancers or the photographer as you will see. But I think I was able to get the background “out of the shots” as much as possible.

The main event is next week where they will perform at the Madeira School in Great Falls. Tickets are available online, but you better hurry!

Click for 3D Slide Show
All Images are © Carl Hutzler Photography.
Unauthorized reproduction is not permitted.

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 :-)