Hello everyone,

I am becoming more known in the Youtube community as a gameplay commentator. What that means is I create videos of the games I play and record my voice over the footage. I was recently made a director on TGN (www.youtube.com/tgn) and my channel will soon have partnership through them.

I will be posting more things on here related to that, however I will still be doing my photography. I will still be available for portrait sessions and weddings, I just simply will be blogging about more than just the photos I take.

I hope this will clear up any future confusion for when I start blogging about youtube related things.

Take Care,

Jeremy Dwayne

Happy New Year Everybody!!

The following story is the story of the past few days for me.

So, I’m sitting here, at my grandparent’s home in Florida on vacation, waiting for a delivery man – at 12:40am. (warning, this post is sort of a rant. I do not disclose specifics as I do not want to slander the company)

Two days ago (December 30th) I started my hectic journey down here to celebrate a late Christmas & New Year with the family on my mom’s side. Woke up at 7am, packed my bag and my camera gear, and headed to the airport for my flight that was to leave at 11:15am.

Checked my bag with all my clothes, shoes, flip-flops, etc.. under the plane. Brought my camera bag as a check-on. I’m told my flight is being delayed.. till 1:30pm.. due to fog/low visibility in the Chicago area. This means I’m missing my second flight, which was supposed to leave ORD at – you guessed it – 1:30pm.

The person helping me booked me for a flight that left the next day out of Chicago, at 6pm. Which meant I would be spending the night in Chicago. He said that my luggage, however, would go out on the next flight to Tampa whether I was on the plane or not.

So, I decided it would be best to get to Chicago and go Standby on every flight I could that would get me to Tampa. Guess what, there were two. The one I missed at 1:30. And one at 6pm.

*flies to Chicago after waiting on the runway for an hour because they had to shift luggage on the tiny plane so it was balanced*

Instead of waiting for the 6pm, the customer service rep in Chicago suggested me to switch my ticket to another airline, which had a “confirmed” ticket for me. But I would just have to make a stop somewhere and connect back to Tampa. No biggie, it meant I would still get there that night. So, I did it.

I get to the gate (which was in an entirely different terminal than where the cust service desk was) for that flight, which was supposed to leave at 4:30pm. It’s delayed till 5:30. Which meant I would miss the other flight I was to connect on to Tampa.

*walks back to the cust serv desk – which takes about 20 minutes to do btw. O’Hare International Airport is huge.*

Peter, I nicknamed him Peter the Saint, got my ticket brought back to my original airline after being on hold with them for 30 minutes on the phone, and put me back on standby for the 6pm flight, and he bumped me to the top of the standby list. What a great guy!

I get to the gate for that flight, chillax until the flight. I get a ticket. I make it to Tampa, Florida at 10pm EST.

I go to the baggage claim.. patiently watching the bags roll by on the conveyor belt. No suitcase. No big deal, they say it’ll come the next morning and I’ll have it by noon. I fill out a delayed baggage claim form, and head to my grandparents’ home that is 45 minutes away.

Yesterday/Today (December 31st), I wait for  a phone call from the delivery people saying my bag is on its way. No call. I check online, and it says it could be delivered anytime between 1:30pm and 5:30pm.

So I wait till 5:30. No call. I call customer service, which happens to be outsourced to India, who says in a voice I barely understand, “We are sorry for this inconvenience. The delivery people say they will call you by 6:30pm to confirm you are there to accept the package.”

6:30 – No Call. I call back at 7 and receive a similar response, “We’re sorry for this inconvenience sir. I just talked to them and they will call you within the next two hours.” I say, “Sure they will”.

9pm – No Call. Starting to get upset.

9:15 – They finally call. “We will deliver your suitcase between midnight and 2am.” Who seriously deliver’s packages at 2am??

So, its 1:05 and I’m still waiting here for my suitcase. Not only has my whole day been ruined because I was waiting for the delivery guy to show up, but I didn’t get to spend it with family because they weren’t at the house the suitcase is supposed to be delivered to. I celebrated the New Year with my dad, who stayed behind with me to wait.

Now, its 1:45am. I see lights outside. He’s finally here. I’m thinking about what I’ll say to him. How I’ll react. Will I explode? Will I rip his face off? I open the door to see an old man, out of breath, about 60 years old or so, carrying my suitcase. I’m speechless. That poor guy delivered packages for more than 12 hours, and I’m sure he still has more to go.

I accept my bag, sign one of the hundreds of slips he had for packages delivered, and say, “Happy New Year”.

Jeremy Dwayne

This is a new product I’m carrying. Its an excellent addition to a Portrait session if a regular album is out of your budget.

Jeremy Dwayne

My friend Josh decided to have some portraits taken, and it was my honor to be of service. We had a blast in the snow. Poor Lily didn’t like how cold it was though. Lily is the Atkins’ dog, but Josh stole her for the day

Jeremy

Jeremy Dwayne

I seem to be behind on my blogging.. Its a new years resolution of mine to write a new blog post at least once a week, if not more often.

The Atkins are close friends of mine. They recently moved away, but I managed to rope them into a session before they left. These were taken back in November.

Jeremy

Jeremy Dwayne

First off, CONGRATULATIONS!! Secondly, I had the blessing to capture the celebration of 25 happy years with the Jalil family and friends. I knew some of the people there, but most of them I did not. Seeing as most of the crowd was made of Doctors.

Nathan Jalil is a Doctor in the Dialysis department at Sacred Heart Hospital. Today was the first time I met him, his wife Pansy and their daughter Zoe.

To start the day off, they renewed their wedding vows at the First Presbyterian Church which was officiated by Rev. Eric Nielson.

A few hours pass, a nap, and some iPad amazingness later – we begin the party.

The band, In Kahootz, played live for the party. I must say, they were pretty amazing. They covered a lot of great songs.

Its not a party unless there’s Champagne!

(from left to right) Cindy and Mary go to my church, unfortunately I do not know the other lady… But, she took my business card – so if you’re reading this.. send me an email so I can know your name! Mary was the hostess of the night! She “MC’d” very well. She’s also the person who contacted me about shooting the event for the Jalil’s. Thanks Mary!

So glad I was able to enjoy some of this amazing Prime Rib! Gotta love getting paid, and getting fed great food!

Mmmm… Mouth Watering

Cutting the cake – for the second time.

While I ate I imported my favorite images to my iPad and let people pass it around.

Well hello ladies.

More iPad amazingness!

I believe Born To Be Wild was the song during this next picture.

Oh look, the iPad.

iPad!!

All in all it was a very fun night! Thanks for viewing my images. Please leave a comment if you enjoyed this post!

Jeremy Dwayne

Jeremy Dwayne

So, tonight, i added the Apple iPad to my list of gear.

When it was first released i was skeptical and made fun of it. I now have seen the benefits it offers to professional photographers, which made me NEED to have one.

Not only is it sweet, but it can do many basic things that prove to be successful tools for photographers.

I’m going to be using it to showcase my favorite images of the night at the 25th anniversary party I’m covering tomorrow. Beyond that I will use it to proof client images for portrait sessions using a nifty app called “portfolio” that let’s the user rate and comment on photos as you view them. It will also be my portable portfolio to show prospective clients images and album layouts.

Some of you may not know this but I accept credit cards using a wonderful service called Square. Square was developed by a cofounder of Twitter, and allows people to accept credit card payments without having to pay monthly fees. They only charge like 3% of each transaction (which normal cc processors charge in addition to their other fees). Anyways, to use this service you must have either and iPhone, iPad, or android smartphone. I have a droid, and now i have an iPad. In my opinion the application for the iPad is MUCH better that droid. You can create a list of items you sell, and when you make a sale, you simply select the item instead of having to type it manually (which you have to do on the droid).

Anyways, I’m excited about what this device is going to do for my business. Not to mention it’s just plain fun to use

I wrote this blog using the wordpress app on my iPad.

Jeremy

Jeremy Dwayne

I recently sold my Nikon equipment and got away from the dark side back to the side of all that is balanced and holy – the Canon 5D Mark II.

After playing with the video features for a couple days I have realized that its much harder than I was expecting. I give major props to the videographers that work with these professionally (I know they use 5dmkii’s to record the TV show House, crazy). Definitely gonna take a LOT of practice to nail down the MANUAL focusing. I’m also gonna invest in a steadicam like device at some point, but for now my makeshift counterweight will work for the small amount of video work I do.

Tonight during band practice for The Underground service, I got bored, and decided to do a bit of video taping while we were goofing off. Go full screen to enjoy the HD’ness!

And this one is a little more “serious”

Some pictures of my friend Jesse playing zeh drums. Taken with the lovely 5DMKII with my 50mm f1.4 USM

1. f/2.5, 1/200, ISO1000

2. f/1.4, 1/800, ISO1000

3. f/1.4, 1/640, ISO1000

If you can’t tell from these images: I’m in love with this camera and I just got it Wednesday <3

Jeremy Dwayne

Jeremy Dwayne

I had the opportunity to shoot Jeremy’s senior pictures back in August. It started raining on us before we could get everything we wanted so we did it on two separate days. Jeremy goes to Fall Creek High School and is one of their top basketball players. So of course, we did some basketball shots.

These are my favorites. Enjoy

- Jeremy Dwayne

Jeremy Dwayne

Nicole is a senior over at Memorial High School, and I had to privilege to take her senior pictures this morning! These are my favorites!

- Jeremy Dwayne

Jeremy Dwayne