Apple Country Photography

Spring Portraits

2010-05-04T23:11:14Z

Spring has sprung in "apple country." The outdoor shooting season promises to be spectacular this year. I have lots of spots scoped out for portraits. We'll have apple orchard blossoms, dandelion fields, spring flowers, and historic sites as backdrops and props. This image was made at Minuteman National Park behind an old iron gate in the gardens next to the main visitor's house. The gardens are a little unkept, but that will not stop us from making some stunning photos. This image hangs in my home studio as a 20"x30" canvas gallery wrap. I invite all clients to my home studio to see your print proofs on my large monitor and to see all the print options I offer, including canvas, Kodak Endura, Ilford B&W, as well as textured prints. Of course, you get to view all your proofs first from the comfort of your own home through my online proofing system.

For details on my portrait services, see the Portraiture page or check out the links under the "Apple Country's Services" heading.

I also am booking events of all types, including weddings, action sports (see below), and groups. Contact me and I can show you why I am worth your investment in fine photography.

Spring Sports Actions Shots

2010-05-02T02:28:25Z

The warm weather is here and Spring sports are upon us-finally! For a general introduction to my sports offerings, check out the Action Sports link under Services. I am shooting a variety of sports including baseball, soccer, and lacrosse.

I will shoot area athletes of all ages. For most sports, I will keep to my one to three athletes per event for best results. All images will be posted on a private website and will be available for ordering at my event prices. Check out the Services & Price List for more information.

As with all my other packages, I shoot with professional sports cameras and lenses and noise reduce all images using professional software. My images are printed on the finest papers and I offer other products (from bag tags to magazine covers to press books), giving you access to the finest line of sports products around. I promise you will not be disappointed and the memories will last a lifetime!

News: Sports Photojournalism

2009-01-12T00:12:50Z

I have recently teamed up with an upstart media outlet to capture images for regional sporting contests at the NCAA Division I level. I am also available to cover your sporting events at any level, be it for your organization's media needs or for individual portfolios.

For the past two years I have been building the skills necessary to capture exciting images at the youth and high school levels, while occasionally having the opportunity to cover events at the college level. I love capturing the excitement and human drama of sports. There are immense challenges that come with shooting sports, especially if you want to capture quality images. Of course, there is a question of access and being able to get close to the action. This is not really a problem at the youth level, and can help any photographer gain skills. But access isn't necessarily enough as lighting is typically quite poor for youth and high school venues and long, fast, and expensive lenses are a necessity for any venue.

Sports photography is based on capturing specific moments of peak action where there is the most drama. For the most part, action is super fast. The saying goes "If you see the action you missed it." Successful sports photography is all about timing and anticipation. Good sports photographers have a decent to excellent knowledge of the particular sport they are shooting.

Image: The number one ranked men's ice hockey team in the country, the Boston University Terriers, took on Maine at Agganis Arena in January. In this first period score, Maine's goaltender can only watch as freshman Chris Connolly's slapshot sails past him, through the air, and into the net. BU ultimately defeated Maine 4-1.

For details on my action sports services, see the Action Sports page.

Gift Certificates

2008-12-19T00:16:40Z

I get many requests for gift certificates, but this is the first year I am formally advertising them. They usually come from one of two sources: husband as a gift for his wife and family or parents or grandparents as a gift for son or daughter and their family. You purchase them as a dollar amount, but instead of posting the dollar amount on the card, I create a "package" that includes (at minimum) a session fee plus whatever prints will add up to the dollar amount you choose. I put together a nice gift note with all the details and will mail it, or if the recipient is close by, I will wrap in a box and hand deliver. If you are thinking of buying another electronic toy that will end up driving you crazy, try this route. You will have "memories that last a lifetime".

Happy Holidays

2008-12-16T02:01:03Z

Happy holidays from my family to yours. Thank you to those of you who had a shoot with me this year. I look forward to helping you capture those precious moments in the months and years to come. Outdoor shoots are over until the Spring, but I am available for indoor shoots (with lights and various backgrounds) as well as sports or event photography. With love, Paul, Maureen, Elena and Molly Trunfio.

Frames Now Available

2008-07-21T01:01:58Z

Due to demand, I've added a framing option for all my clients. I offer traditionally styled wood and metal frames with only the highest quality components: 8-ply alpha rag museum mats, UV and non-glare acrylic, as well as black foamboard mounts. As a special incentive, any frame purchase comes with a 20% discount on the corresponding print. Everything comes ready to hang and each order comes with a free bottle of acrylic cleaner and a microfiber towel. For more information, see my Frame Catalog.

New Landscape Coming for Portraits

2008-05-31T01:02:36Z

I was tempted to show you some before pictures of our landscape, but I'm worried I might be sending potential clients away. The most I'll do is show you the beautiful Blue Jay that landed on my wheelbarrow to feast on grubs as I was removing old sod. I do most of my outdoor shoots at the Acton Aboretum, but take you to different places as the need dictates (i.e., more formal or more rural). I do very few shoots on my property, which is really a nice property but it just hasn't been landscaped effectively. This year my wife and I decided to plan and tackle an ambitious landscape project in phases with the first phase already underway. The end result will look like the places we currently take people to. In Phase I, we are making perennial, herb, and annual gardens. A renewed lawn will provide a wonderful floor for portraits. A new hedgerow with oak leaf hydrangea, dogwood, and viburnum will give three season color abutting the woods. A spring tulip bulb garden will give early season color and be a beautiful backdrop. And an array of area shrubs will provide seasonal color and background texture. Phase II will commence Spring 2009 and will consist of stone walls in the backyard, informal wooded gardens, benches, and a tree swing. There will probably be more, I just haven't thought that far yet. Feel free to check out my Landscape Project Notebook.

New Image Preview and Event Ordering Galleries

2008-04-03T01:04:08Z

I've been using my own manual ordering system, which has worked quite well, since Apple Country Photography began. I still use such a system for my regular portrait, sports, and individual clients as it gives us both the most control over the finished product. However, the back-end engine has been changed from being a static Photoshop-generated gallery to a SmugMug custom gallery.

Why did I do this? Well the initial impetus was that I needed an online ordering site for large events (e.g., weddings and fundraisers) where many people would order and a paper ordering system would be too time intensive for me. After searching many different options, I settled on SmugMug's Pro account because they have, by far, the best client experience of anything else I reviewed. They also very recently upgraded their papers, so now they are using Kodak Supra Endura paper on their premium prints and I only offer premium prints. Now I can offer a fulfillment system whereby you can order prints with a credit card, you handle the crops, and they get printed and sent directly to you.

For my individual clients, the SmugMug gallery is just for viewing and you cannot order from it. You still use the paper order forms. Prints from my Apple Country Living Galleries also have a manual paper ordering system since I don't get overwhelmed with requests. These images all get processed by Miller's.

In general, I think this will make a much better experience for my clients. I hope you like it. Let me know what you think! I have the Pro Account for one year, so I'll reevaluate the system next year before my account expires.

Gearing Up for Fall

2007-08-25T01:04:53Z

Summer is just slipping away. My fall season hopes to be spectacular this year. I have lots of spots scoped out for portraits. We'll have apple orchards, pumpkin patches, and changing leaves as backdrops. Book early because I began an advertising campaign this week that I hope will keep me busy throughout the fall. I'll be shooting outdoor location portraits for September and October. If you are reading this and don't live in the area, consider coming out here for apple picking and doing a photo shoot with me. I'll be happy to meet you at our local orchards (Honey-Pot Hill, Shelburne Farm, Carver Hill, and One Stack Farm).

Technology-wise, my office/studio/gallery space is all set up. I've enhanced the online previewing capability for clients and this new system seems to be working out better.

Other technology news: yesterday Nikon announced they're finally going to compete with Canon and introduced the D3 (full-frame, FX) and D300 (DX) cameras and a bevy of lenses which will be available before Christmas. Right now I'm on the sidelines. The D300 is a big jump up for sports shooters. The things I care about that make it better than the D200: high ISO performance appears to be much better, 14-bit color depth, better autofocus, UDMA support, and a high resolution 3" LCD. The D3 is a bigger upgrade, but I'll probably wait a year or more for the expected "D3x" which will undoubtedly be a high pixel count full-frame on par with the newly announced 22MP Canon. Your images won't suffer as a result of my waiting. I can still produce stunning 20x30" prints for you with my current gear, processing workflow, and labs. Come to my studio and I will be happy to show you.

Now we're buying school supplies and getting ready for my sister's wedding. I'm still trying to decide whether I'm going to take my cameras. I'm afraid I'll drink too much and forget where I put them, so I'm leaning towards not taking them even though I know I will!

Dog Days of Summer

2007-08-15T01:05:42Z

It's closing in on mid-August. I finally sold that Hasselblad kit and was just about to buy an "old" iMac for the bulk of my photo editing, when the new ones got released! So, I got a 20" new iMac that was released the same day I bought it! How's that for a summer Christmas present? And it's not even my birthday or Christmas! The new iMac is sleeker than last year's version. There's a black border around the main screen and the Apple logo is now black. Instead of the all white plastic, it's anodized aluminum and the keyboard is really thin and is aluminum and sports really nice keys. It's upgraded to a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 320MB hard drive, and better graphics ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory. Thank you OWC for letting me upgrade to the full 4GB rather cheaply. For $300 more I could have gotten the 24" model, and part of me was kicking myself. Then I found a lot of discussions about the difference between the two LCD panels and so I went today back to the Apple Store to get the 24" version without paying the restocking fee because the technology for the new 20" screen is inferior to the technology for the old 20" (TNT versus S-IPS). Luckily, the manager let me do it. So, now I have this monster 24" screen. There's also been a bit of discussion on the photography forums about the new glossy versus the old matte finish. For me, since I keep the light down, I don't get much glare and I actually like the colors better on the glossy. My office/studio space is real nice and inviting for clients. I have my keyboard gear there along with my photography gear and some comfortable seating. I rearranged the photos for better display and am had some electrical work done for better image lighting. I'm using track lighting in the office to show off an open-framed 20x30" print, two matted 10x15's, 12x18, 13x19, and 16x20. Half were shot with film, half digital. I like to let people guess which is which. In the hallway, I'm using gimbal-style recessed lights for two 20x30" and one 16x20" canvas gallery wraps shot digitally.

The image on the upper right was what I consider to be my best image from our trip to upstate New York. It was shot from a very country road (over the span of 20 minutes and 50 frames) with a herd of cows behind me and a very understanding family waiting in the car. The lake in the distance is Cayuga Lake, one of the Fingerlakes and right outside of the Village of Aurora around where my wife grew up. This one was taken with the Nikkor 17-55/2.8 lens at 55mm using my B+W circular polarizer at f/7.1 and 1/125s. In Photoshop I warmed it up a some and increased the vibrancy and sharpened some. Of course I shot in RAW. I used to shoot newspaper work in all JPG but now everything I shoot is consistent: RAW NEF that I then batch convert to JPG. Most of the time the JPGs are fine, but for large prints or when I make a mistake I work from the RAW file. The final image showed up at my doorstep from Millers as a 20x30" mounted linen-textured print and looks stunning. It's now at the framer. This will replace Childe Hassam's Boston Common at Twilight which is a poster reproduction that had brush strokes added and it looks rather nice in a 4" thick frame with a wooden fillet. But I'm trying to get my images in my home and not other people's.

Where Did the Time Go?

2007-07-29T01:06:23Z

Well, my original thought was to write to the blog twice per week, then it became once per week, and now it's once per month. Now I see July is almost over! Where did the time go?

Half of the month was spent at my day job teaching a summer course at Boston University (BU). I shot many good images for that event that will eventually find their way to our BU websites and press releases. If you want to view them, check out this link. I deliberately didn't schedule anything for that time period, except for my sister's wedding shower.

For those of you who care, I've developed a love-love relationship with my Nikkor 17-55/2.8 lens. I use it on everything from news to events to portraits. I've shot several portraits and events this month and today shot a 50th Wedding Anniversary (no the image of the couple shown here is not celebrating their 50th; she is their daughter and the one who booked me). I was lucky the weather held up. Immediately after, it poured.

I'm quickly selling off my film gear and using the proceeds to purchase new digital gear. An old 35mm Konica camera funded a love relationship with a new camera bag. I formerly had only one large bag and found that I was wanting to have all my lenses at my disposal for paying events. So, I purchased a Domke J1 bag which is now my working bag and put all the rest of my gear in my LowePro Nova 5. The Domke exudes quality and while it's roughly the same size as the LowePro, it holds much more gear and is more functional (and, of course, was much more expensive). An old lens bought me an 8GB Lexar 133X CF card. Some really old but well-kept 35mm gear funded a Nikon SB800 speedlight and a Quantum battery pack to supplement my slightly inferior SB600. Selling old gear and buying new gear is like paying with Monopoly money. Just don't tell my wife that my Rolleiflex sale didn't completely pay for the 17-55. My pending Hasselblad kit sale will hopefully fund a new Mac.

What else happened? I can tell you that my MacBook started to not launch certain applications and Photoshop CS3 was taking forever to open and was crashing all the time. After many fruitless customer service calls and forum searches and posts, I ended up doing a complete disk erase and reinstall and everything is now cranking like new. That took a whole six hour evening to do. And, yes, I did backup all my data! My backup is definitely part of my workflow. No, I don't backup after every shoot, unless it's really important. I do back up religiously every weekend to dual 500GB Lacie drives and a gold DVD. I bring my DVDs off site for security. A friend of mine suggested I do that even though I am really not that anal. Honestly! I just do it to do it. I figure if my house burns down, I'll have bigger things to worry about than where my original digital images are. After all, I have all the low resolution web galleries stored over my different web sites and those I back up to different machines after every update.

We'll be traveling the next few weekends, so expect to see images from our trips. Our plans will bring us to upstate New York (near Ithaca where there's some kind of hay festival), New Hampshire (Mt. Washington Valley and Franconia Notch where we go every year), and Western Massachusetts (Tanglewood, where the Boston Symphony performs and where we'll be sleeping in a cabin).

Half-Year Anniversary

2007-06-21T01:07:10Z

Apple Country Photography is celebrating its 6 month anniversary as a business this week and I thought I'd take a moment to look back on what's been accomplished. I've been honored to shoot dozens and dozens of sports, events, and portraits for local media, sports, commissioned family and children's portraits, and private events. You can check out the photo galleries to see just a smattering of what I've done.

My move to digital this past winter was looked at by me with disdain and skepticism as I had strictly been a film photographer for work for over 10 years, honing my skills using classic 35mm and medium format cameras. The move was done purely out of necessity since I really couldn't shoot the kind of action photos I needed to without modern cameras. I was also completely at the mercy of my pro film labs for their "interpretation" of what my images would ultimately look like and limited by their scanning and processing skills. I can say now that I'm completely sold on digital. I've built a completely redundant digital system around Nikon's professional line of cameras and the fastest lenses I could lay my hands on that cover a focal length range from an ultra-wide to super-telephoto. I've been putting this equipment to good use, shooting many thousands of images. I've also upgraded my computer hardware and software. I'm an all-Macintosh digital darkroom, using the brand new Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook and iMac with regularly calibrated monitors for perfect color correction and a redundant backup system that consists of dual hard drives and burning to archival DVDs.

After a months long search and many trials, I settled on two custom pro labs that are giving me unparalleled print quality: Miller's Professional Imaging and Simply Canvas. The above shot at Honey-Pot Hill Orchards in Stow, MA is by no means my best image, but it was printed to a 20x24 canvas gallery wrap and looks fantastic. It's proudly hanging in the foyer of my home. The quality and the look of canvas is truly outstanding. Miller's does all my straight prints and press products. I've printed color and true black and white prints from 4x6 to 20x24 and have had them dry mounted as well as experimented with various surface textures. I've also created several soft- and hard-cover press books. I'm confident that the product offerings I offer are of the utmost professional quality.

I've been a sporadic Photoshop user for almost 20 years. I remember going to a 1989 product rollout from Apple at a hotel in Boston of the Mac IIci which sold for roughly $9000 and had only a 25MHz processor and 4MB of RAM! It took many minutes to do the simplest of Photoshop actions on an image and the engineer was touting it as a major advance. I yawned. Times have changed. I had never really got my hands dirty with the software until a few years ago with Photoshop 5.5 and I simply used it to resize my digital snapshots for my family photo galleries. Over the past 6 months using my new hardware, I have developed a digital workflow that works for me and I am most happy with the image processing skills I have acquired. I'm currently using Photoshop and Bridge CS3 as well as Adobe Camera Raw 4.1 and am producing wonderful images. For high ISO noise reduction I'm using Noiseware 4 Professional and for upscaling my images to really large print sizes, Miller's does their own software interpolation up to 16x20 and I use Genuine Fractals 5 for larger prints.

I've been fortunate to have booked several sessions for this summer and I'm available to shoot many more! If you live in my neck of the woods, you'll most likely see me shooting at area events and will see my images in my online photo galleries. I'll be shooting professionally and for my own personal portfolio as we have several family trips planned during this summer school vacation. If I've shot images for you, then let me know what you think. I'm happy to hear from you and potential clients will get to see what you have to say. Hopefully what you say will be all good! I've had a blast during this first 6 months and look forward to many more to come.

Welcome!

2007-01-14T02:07:54Z

Welcome to the Apple Country Photography website! On this site you will find details related to first class photography services. I know this is not the traditional flash-laden photographer's website you are used to seeing. I do value images. But I also value words. So, you will find both here. I maintain several websites on photography. The first is Paul's Personal Photography Pages, which contain all my personal photo galleries as well as technical guides based on my Boston University server. The second is Apple Country Living, which contains all manner of posts and images about Stow, Massachusetts and the surrounding towns. Then there is here at Apple Country Photography, which deals mostly with the business side of things. You can also find my images on my Photo.net Gallery.