Sunrise and sunset fun working with a local web developer

I recently completed some fun shots for Seedspring, a Bend based comprehensive digital presence management company. They hired me to create images of the company owners, their construction company workshop, and the latest residential development their clients have started. While it meant some early mornings (my tough negotiating position required a cup of coffee), I had a great time capturing beautiful images of their newly begun residential development and I got to meet the husband and wife owners of the company, both of whom were great. You can follow the links to see the websites my images were used in. I can't take credit for all of the images on the two websites, all of the panoramic images are mine, as well as the many of the detail images and images of the owners.

http://jimguildconstruction.com/

http://saginawsunset.com/

San Francisco with Photo Sensei, Joe McNally!

Four days in my favorite city with one of my personal photo deities, Joe McNally?! Oh yes! And that wasn't all. I got to spend some great time with my cousin and his family that live in the city AND one of my oldest and best friends, who I had not seen for nine years, attended the workshop with me! It was an epic trip filled with photo enlightenment, good times, and lots of insight into the art and science of photography.

One of my goals for the trip was to shoot a portrait of Joe. I wanted to create an image of Joe that would be distinct from all the images made of Joe I'd seen before. So, below you'll see the results, which I am quite pleased with.

Ok, not really, but this shot of Joe does make me smile, and gives you an idea of the goofy side of Joe McNally. However, what I wanted to attempt to touch upon was some of the other sides of Joe - his passion and commitment to the technical and artistic bag of snakes that is photography. And, yeah, I really am quite pleased with it.

Joe is a man whose has weathered the ups and downs of life and keeps driving forward. He is driven. He is passionate. And yet he doesn't take himself or the work he has created too seriously. He works to find the joy in his life and and in his work. So many people seem to only see the jokester side of Joe, so I wanted to attempt to capture something of the other side.

Below are a few of the images from my time in San Francisco. I'll follow up with some more later.

"AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER."

The title of this post is one of the last three tweets posted by Terry Pratchett before his passing yesterday. While I had a regular ol' blog post in mind for today, I realized that it would be much better to spend a few minutes celebrating an incredible author and amazing human being. Author of over 70 books, with over 85 million copies in print, Terry Pratchett was one of my favorites. An incredible wordsmith who was funny as hell, Terry exposed our cultural inanities and made us laugh while he did. I can't tell you the number of times something from Terry's books gave me some insight (while making me shake my head and laugh) into something going on in the world today. Part of what makes me sad is all of the people - yes, people, not just characters. His characters have lived real lives in my mind - that he takes with him. It is as if they have all passed away with Terry. I wish that Granny Weatherwax had been there to send Death packing when he came for Terry, but I wish she had been there to send stupid Alzheimer's disease on its way before it got ahold of that great mind. 

Enough of all of that though. Terry went on his terms, as his next to last tweet said, "Terry took Death's arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night. " Followed by his final tweet, "The End". His was the kind of story you hope you never came to the end of.

If you haven't read Terry's books, go buy some now. The Bromeliad Trilogy is amazing. His Discworld series (which is separate from The Bromeliad Trilogy) contains some of my favorite books, but some of the earliest books are not so great. Google around for which ones to start with. Guards! Guards! is a favorite and a great introduction to some of my favorite characters. (Death is a character in some of his books, and that is Death speaking to Terry in the tweet from which I took the title of this post).f you say to yourself that you're not into fantasy, just try one. It is the best of the genre and so much more.

When you come back, I'm sure I'll talk about photography and light and pictures and stuff!

Everything is NEW!

Hey there! As this is the first post, let me introduce myself! My name is Charlie Thiel (pronounced like T-e-e-l). I am a photographer, husband, father, filmmaker, snowboarder, all rolled into one with lots of other stuff thrown in as well. And yes, everything is new! Seven months ago we moved to a new town and a new home. We left Charleston, SC, a great coastal town with rivers and beaches, great food, lots of mosquitos and plenty of heat and humidity to move to the high desert mountain town of Bend, Oregon. 2700 miles later and 3600 feet higher, we are now settled into our new home. It has been a whirlwind seven months! New schools for our girls, a new studio for my sculptor wife (you can see her work at www.kellythielstudio.com), soon a new business venture for my wife and three of her new friends, fantastic new friends, a new mountain lifestyle filled with outdoors stuff to do, snowboarding and skiing lessons for our daughters (3 1/2 and 6 1/2), a new office for myself, a newly formed photo business with a new name and new focus, new skills and gear added to my photo business, new business partnerships and opportunities, new clients already, and finally, here it is, the new blog! 

Things have moved quickly for me and my new photo business. The photo business that I started seven-ish years ago, Charlie Thiel Photography, is now in the past and the new photography business here in Bend is Charlie Photo. Thankfully, registering an LLC and the name was fairly painless. I was able to find an incredible office much faster than I thought I would. The space was unattractive, but its the perfect size - small enough to work in, but big enough to shoot in - in an incredible building in downtown Bend. It took a lot of work to get it ready to move into, a project that took away from time spent working on the website and the blog, but it has been worth it!

This is the way it looked when I first moved in. What you can't really see is how dirty the carpet was. This photo also does not really represent just how dark this space was!

This is at the priming stage of repainting the place. 

Here's me, having great fun spraying my new office.

The finished product! The new home of Charlie Photo!

I barely got settled into my new office when I began to get a few small jobs for businesses here in my building and for a local web design company. I'll post about some of those jobs soon.

I'll leave it at that for now, but if you have stopped by to take a look at me and my work, feel free to get in touch with me by text, email, phone, or whatever method strikes your fancy. I've spent a lot of my professional photographic time shooting weddings and designing albums, an aspect of photography I love, to commercial and editorial work, something I see being a much larger part of the equation for my business here in Bend.

So come back soon. I'll have at least one post a week, with topics ranging from life and parenting to photography, to why I really love what I do. There's more to come!

Charlie