Perez Studios

Like I said earlier this morning that I wanted to repay my readers with some sort of gift.  I know it pays to get something in return and I would like to ask for your help.  I am pondering the idea of the following items:

1 – Free Photo Shoot

1 – Book with some of my best work

1 – eBook with some of my best work

1 – eBook written by Manuel Perez

I would really love to get some feedback from the readers on what they would like to receive.  If you have an idea and its not like any of mine, please I would love to hear it. 

I was thinking of ways to reward my readers and I would really love to reward you all but I will do this….To everyone that leaves a comment here on the site giving an idea or some feedback and I will gladly give the first 10 people that post something in return.

Thanks for your feedback!

Semper Fidelis,

Manuel Perez

The Firebaugh Police Activities League finished their season of Soccer and I must say it was a busy year for my business.  We got to go to some of the games and photograph the kids playing and just enjoying the spirit of the games.  During the finals the League had a theme that was just like the World Cup.  It was great because the kids marched down through the field and I could tell that they were having a blast. 

I had so much fun this year that I cant wait till next year.

That’s all for now!

Thanks for reading!

Semper Fidelis,

Manuel Perez

This weekend was nice to get away.  Dos Palos High School just started and the helpdesk tickets have been pouring in.  I really need time with the family to get away.  We really weren’t sure where we were going but we knew we wanted to get to the beach. 

We ended up driving to Monterey to do a little shopping and then we drove over to Pebble Beach where there was the Concours d’Elegance event that was going on.  Lots of really exotic and expensive cars.  We were able to snap a few photos while we were driving through. 

Finally, we found an easy to access area to the beach and we pulled out the blanket and the umbrella and the Barbeque Grill to do a little cooking.  We even saw some people getting ready to go out scuba diving.  I thought to myself, these people are crazy.  The water had to be about 30-40 degrees. 

That is all for now.  Thanks for reading.

Semper Fidelis,

Manuel Perez

This weekend was great, although I was feeling ill on Thursday and Friday.  I felt a lot better on Saturday.  We drove to Felton, CA to ride Thomas the Train Engine.  It was great and the kids loved it.  I thought they could do a better job on designing the train to actually be more believable.  I didn’t like that the tires or train rails didn’t roll.  

I got to join the Firebaugh Police Department last Saturday to experience them shooting to qualify on the gun range.  I must say it was an interesting experience.  I had the Sgt. come by the day before and ask if I would be interested in taking the photos for the officers and the cadets.  I told him I would be glad to.  I arrived at the range and saw how the police officers turn up the heat with their 9mm handguns, AR-15’s and shotguns.  It was interesting. 

I am working with the Sgt. to get some photo release forms so I can post some more photos up here to see but for now this isa ll I can share.

Thanks for reading.

Manuel Perez

I finally finished ordering all the photos for Cal Ripken Baseball Saturday.  They should be here soon.  Once they arrive we will sort through them and put them together according to who ordered what and put them into envelopes.  We plan on delivering them on the day of the awards ceremony for the program.  We will be having a booth setup with all the envelopes and photos and we will also have some other items to display. 

Now that the photos are done we still have a couple of projects planned.   I got to join the Firebaugh Police Department Saturday for a barbeque and watching them qualify on the pistol range.  It was interesting and I plan on posting some of the photos on here tomorrow.  We also have a wedding planned for later on in May which is going to be great and I cant wait to see the happy couple at the altar. 

Now that all the photos are backed up I am now ready to make use of those 4 Seagate 1.5TB drives to configure them as a RAID 5.  The problem was that the motherboard I bought didn’t support a RAID 5 and Vista doesn’t support a RAID 5 without a separate controller so I went out and bought one.  It cost me about $112 on eBay but its worth it if you plan on having a lot of storage and redundancy.  The whole purpose of the RAID 5 is to have three or more hard drives act as one big drive giving you speed and redundancy.  If one drive fails then you quickly swap that drive out with another and it rebuilds itself keeping your data safe and secure.  I started the RAID 5 initialization on Sunday and it said it was going to take about 33 hours to initialize all the drives and give me a total of 4.5TB.  Now, my C drive or my OS drive is on a Seagate 1.0TB drive which I plan on using the RAID for keeping backups of the C drive along with my photos and downloads. 

That’s all for today.  Thanks for reading.

Manuel Perez

This is another cool program that I learned about while attending the Central Valley CUE conference in Fresno, CA.  The program is called Cooliris and it allows you to create a slideshow wall with a set of photos either from your hard drive or your social network such as facebook/flickr.  It works pretty cool and they even have an express version that allows you to create quick walls that you can get the code from and post on just about any social network.

Thanks for reading.

Manuel Perez

I have been pretty busy lately.  I am just about almost finished with some major projects.  On Saturday I had a chance to attend the Central Valley CUE Conference in Fresno, CA.  I must say it was pretty interesting the things I got to see and experience.  One of the things that interested me was a workshop that Brian Bridges from California Learning Resource Network (CLRN) gave on some Open Source programs out there.  The one above is called Wordle and it allows you to type in a bunch of words or add an address of your blog and it will look at all the keywords and put them in a layout for you.  Look at the photo above and see how cool it looks.  It even allows you to remove words that might not make sense or you just don’t want them in there. 

I am planning on bringing you some more info from the CVCUE conference.  Let me just play with them some more and I will let you know.  I haven’t heard back from anyone on the model interviews.  I will try to begin next month about midway through the month.   If you have any ideas please feel free to share them. 

Thanks for reading,

Manuel Perez

I am thinking of doing something similar with my interviews that I did with photographers and do something geared towards models.  I thought it would be interesting to see what the models experience in their work and see how they have managed to survive the recession. 

I have only worked with a couple of models and plan to interview them as well but I would love to get some feedback from you readers as to what kind of questions you would like me to ask the models. 

If you or someone you know is a model and would be interested in doing the interview then please let them know so we can get them interviewed and published.

Thanks for reading,

Manuel Perez

I didn’t get too much feedback on the interviews so I went out on a limb and emailed a bunch of photographers that I follow around on facebook and twitter.  A couple of them responded that they were interested.  I am glad to say that I should have an interview to start off the April month with.  I will keep it a surprise who the photographer is but trust me you will love it.  I am waiting on a couple more responses from some other photographers that are still filling out the questions.  I plan on seeing how it goes and that way we could probably get a new interview every two weeks or maybe more. 

If you are interested in doing the interview then fill out the questions and email them to me. 

As for events….I have a big job lined up for next month.  The local Cal Ripken Little League agreed to allow me to photograph the team portraits for their program this year.  I am excited because I had always done the Police Activities League’s Soccer portraits for a couple of years and just last year I got to photograph the Firebaugh Area Swim Team for their team portraits.  Things are starting to look good this year.  I just hope I will be able to keep up with all the events going on. 

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Manuel Perez