things they don't teach you in business school...

i didn't actually go to business school, but if i had i don't think they would have taught me about last night. (this is long but worth the read)

let me first say that yesterday was a great day. church was great and immediately after that we set out for chattanooga with some friends to see the aquarium. i should also say if you live in birmingham and think birmingham is a cool place to live... don't go to chattanooga. they've got it together. as we were discussing with our friends, we think the key to their (and many other city's) success is that they have a river (and actual mountains), so what we suggested is we tweak/scrap the whole dome idea (as great as it is) to include a lazy river around the city. we could turn it green for saint patrick's day (is that today?) or you simply take a ferry tour for the evening. yeah, yeah, i know some of you may be saying "but we have the cahaba river." i know, and i'm very thankful for the cahaba and the medication i have to give my dog every time he swims in it.... but it's just not the same. anyway, i digress.... on to my story.

i would like to think i'm an optimist but i must say that when things start going really well, i start looking for the other shoe to fall. and, maybe through a self fulfilling prophecy, it actually does.

so it's getting late. erin and i are having some ice cream and watching some story on national geographic about people getting killed by polar bears (don't ask).... basking in the memories of a great day.... mind you there are only about 2hours left in this day. around 10 o'clock my cell phone rings. i check the caller id and it's not anyone in my directory so i let it go to voicemail (there's your proof stokes-if you read this). eagerly i wait for my message indicator so i can figure out who this is. Q: i mean really who would be calling someone at 10pm on a sunday night. A: someone who thinks i'm having an affair with his wife. still there?

the message goes something like this.... "corey nolen, i just checked a message from you on my wife's voicemail that said "hey baby, just want to know if you still want to do this, i still have the files". just letting you know that you better get rid of this number because if i ever see it again i'm going to track you down and kick your ass."... more or less.

let me really emphasize the lack of words i have to describe my feelings at this point. i'm being made aware that i'm having an affair with someone's wife and soon going to die.

so i call the guy back thinking we can somehow figure this out and come up with an explanation but unfortunately this guy really did just want to kill me and wasn't entertaining any other options than what he initially thought. after being threatened a second time i decided to pray and call the police.

erin and my first thought was "who would call someone saying they are me". honestly that was the worst moment, thinking someone was playing a prank/signing a death warrant on me (which is not beyond some of my friends). my sharp, smart, detective like, wife began to think outside the box and we thought of every single person i've called in the last 3 months. we even went into our cell & office phone records to try and find this #. during this time the fine officer who (really did a great job) i filed the report with called my assailant to try to figure out what was going on. he actually listened to the message that was left and ACTUALLY AGREED that it sounded like "hey baby!" i explained to the officer that "baby" is not in my vocabulary. i've never in my life called anything baby unless it was a baby. my wife was there to verify. i also, explained that we run a business and have to call clients on occasion, so the explanation must be somewhere in that.

no matter, the pressure is now on us to figure this thing out. it felt like some movie where the innocent guys fingerprints are all over the crime scene. erin and i sat at the computer for what seemed like forever looking through phone records. we found an outgoing call to these people on thursday afternoon... FROM OUR HOME PHONE! okay so erin's thinking who's been in our house... and who's in our house right now.... i'm thinking, am i having an affair and forgot? after maxing my brain out, cross referencing phone records, going through every phone number we have written down or in our directory, my beautiful and smart wife (i'll call her baby now) figured it out.

i am beginning to do some freelance work for a company who's CEO is named "beatty". beatty gave me 2 numbers to contact him with 1. his actual office 2. his home office. the number beatty gave me for his home office was the number of the assailant. apparently i did leave a message with beatty that was asking him about "the files" he had given me in which i was about to "do this" presentation with. it was like we cracked the case... it was awesome.

so i called the officer back, explained everything to him. he talked to my assailant explained the mistake to him. my assailant apologized and i was finally able to go to sleep. the end.

because this is a photography blog i thought you might like to see what it looked like through the various stages of this nightmare... all before the end of an otherwise wonderful day. and btw, the other shoe did fall.

the following is a dramatization...

my first love...

before this blog was about photography, it was about music. i love to write, play guitar and sing but especially love it when it's with ethereal. there has always been chemistry with us and somehow we have made it for almost 10 years.

we don't play very often at all. in fact we actually thought that we had quit. but somehow we keep getting sporadic gigs and we still throw a set together from time to time. a few months ago we all sat down at panera, the place where business happens, and talked about our future. we're not young any more and we all have fairly demanding jobs and home life's. but if you've ever performed music you know that it gets in you and stays in you and when you don't have it you feel a void. with an accumulation of new and in my opinion much more versatile songs, we decided to give this thing another year of focused attention. now remember we had thought we quit so this is a big deal. so we've been practicing for a month now and it's just like old times.

anyway, this weekend we had one of our bi-annual shows which was actually a 2 day event. we went up early and pretty much had the whole day together to play music and then just play. i had more fun friday than i have in very long time. i think after times like this we would all agree that it's as much about our friendships as it is about the music. i am very thankful for this part of my life which i feel like has been suppressed for the last year or so. hopefully it will re-emerge soon.

the pictures: at some point in the last 2 years stokes became an outdoors man. as soon as we had finished rehearsal stokes got us all to go "mudding" (and i use that term loosely) with him. after that we had a friendly game of paper hand baseball where will actually had a sustaining injury. it was a good time. here are some pics.

never done this before...

alright i've never posted my wife's photos on my blog before. i do most of the editing, though she still does a good bit, however we have always done so separately. after some discussion about what we want our pictures to look like now and what we hope for them to look like in the future, we decided to both sit down and work together on a few pictures.... give input on the things that matter to us individually. i should say, working together is hard... very hard sometimes. having 2 points of view and coming from 2 different sides can be difficult. i felt the need to show these pics since it shows the combination of our styles and reveals the efforts of our attempts to work together. did i mention it is hard? you will also find these on my wife's blog if you've never been there before.

oh and by the way we did not resolve that this is how we want our pictures to look. but it's progress.

michael dulin

mike is a piano player... a really good piano player. i don't know much about piano skills but i know he sounds good and his resume is impressive. also, one of the nicest guys i've met.

we spent several hours with mike at gorham's bluff. if you don't know where that is, you are not alone. it's about 2.5 hours away from birminghm, near chatanoogo. we got to hear a lot of his stories and a good bit of his music. i told him going into the shoot that i had been looking forward to having some great, peaceful music playing while i worked. i wish i could have that on every shoot. anyway, mike plays all around the country and back at home he owns and operates a recording studio. impressive guy to say the least.

one of the most challenging things about this job is shooting for someone who knows what they want and it becomes your job to capture that. that was just the case with mike. he has a new album coming out and wanted to capture the album title in photos. you'll have to get the album to see those pics, but here are some i did for his personal promotion.

primary colors...

alright this has brought on some discussion in my household so i figured i better do my research. here's what i found out....

apparently if you are involved with art or painting or can remember what you were taught in elementary school then you would most likely say that the primary colors are red, yellow, & blue. the reason being, they say, is that you cannot make these colors by blending other colors. they are unique and will not be replicated. and if your old enough to remember the Glad commercials you heard that yellow and blue make green not blue and green make yellow.

now if you are involved with graphic arts, design, photography, or have a television you may think of the primaries as red, green, & blue or RGB. the reason these are considered primaries in these fields is that the combination of the three creates white. these are considered "additive primaries". now, when the different combinations of 2 of these additive primaries overlap they create 3 other primary colors (where i was wrong in my previous blog post). the difference is that when you combine these three new primary colors, they make black and are therefore called "subtractive primaries". in my fellow bloggers defense, yes it is still a primary but in my defense, yes it is still a secondary since technically you can combine 2 colors to make yellow. sounds weird i know but the more you combine additive primaries, the lighter your result is.

bottom line is our kindergarten teachers were wrong! here a good link for how to make yellow.
and here's a visual of the new and improved additive and subractive color wheel.

oh yeah, and turns out yellow and blue don't make green. looks like the happy days guy was wrong too! color combination misrepresentation is apparently a big deal these days. apparently lots of artists are scratching their heads trying to use old science.

family portrait...

erin just posted our family portrait on her blog so i thought i'd post one on mine. this is the perfect example in the difference in our styles. she'd rather be outside on a big open wall with ton's of natural light and i'd rather be inside a narrow hallway with diagonals and manufactured lighting. the composition is a product of our individual taste but the photography rights actually go to my sister. she is starting to learn photography and just got a digital slr (canon of course) for christmas and had her first lesson in mexico. she did a good job. keep it up!

the other side of the camera...

erin and i had a great weekend cruising the gulf of mexico and eventually strolling through mexico. we carried but one camera, one lens (we are not insured out of the country and i can't lie) and of course it turns out mexico is the best place i've ever been to take pictures. it made us want to call everyone we've ever taken pictures of and tell them to fly down to cozumel to re do their shoots.

most of the locals are very poor and clearly have very little. still we found ourselves really envious of the culture. they seem to have much more wealth in that department. i think that's the case in most areas like this though. one way that came out was how they decorate. there are so many vibrant colors in cozumel. the streets just popped out. granted a lot of it was the yellow in the corona signs but still. at least they weren't neon bud light signs. why we don't use more primary colors in the states, i don't know (and yes i know yellow is not a primary color).

anyway, erin and i snuck away and had ourselves a mini modeling shoot. thankfully for you all she was the model and i was the one taking pictures. i've been doing so much editing lately, i haven't shot that much. it was fun to be the photographer for a photographer. we had a good time and i thought others might want to see the person who is usually behind the camera. more to come.