We were excited today to receive notice that we were nominated in two categories for the 6th Annual Photography Masters Cup – International Color Awards; both for Advertising and for Portraiture!

In Advertising it was for a campaign we did for Pd46 – a shampoo & conditioner for grey hair where we were shooting both men and women with grey hair along with a BEAUTIFUL grey horse. In Portraiture it was for the image entitled “Seriously” from my personal project “Nuclear”.

Always honored to be included in such great company as the other nominees!

We have been using iFolios for our mobile sites for several years now and have been really happy with the results and user experience (both on the front end AND back-end)! They are built on the WordPress platform so most of the back-end user interface is familiar (as obviously we use WordPress for this blog) and easy to use.

However the look and feel on the front end is clean, simple, and refined (like us!). This month iFolios unveiled two new designs with many upgrades. While they are moving from a purchase model to an annual subscription model the pricing is so reasonable that it is completely worth the investment!

If you are a previous user they will migrate your old site over to one of the new layouts for you. If you are new to iFolios they have three startup options; a.) do-it-yourself, b.) assisted installation, c.) full service (where they get you up and running with little to no work on your end) When I fist signed up, I did the “do-it-yourself” and was up and running in about 2 hours (their documentation is really good! – and simple)!

iFolios main focus when they started up was to offer a mobile solution for photographers that have flash sites that won’t display on most mobile devices. However we have an HTML site and still opted for the iFolios solution because it was a ready-to-go presentation that worked better than our HTML site on smaller screens.

The folks at iFolios have done a really nice job of making the interface user-friendly and keeping the design clean and focused on the imagery. Check out their site at getifolios.com and check out our newly updated site on your mobile device at hursey.com or on your desktop at hursey.com/mobile!

A quick shout out to the folks at ooshirts who printed our last round of t-shirts for us!

We are getting ready to send off another order and thought we sing their praises!

Thanks ooshirts!

Sorry! We have been absent for a while…. We have been busy working on a few projects and neglected our blogging responsibilities!

But today is a benchmark day and wanted to share it with you. After many months, we have just completed a full cloud-based back-up of all of our systems.. Many, many terabytes if information are now securely stored in “the cloud” which gives us incredible piece of mind. I have always been a huge advocate for triple / quadruple back-ups of all of our digital data, both imagery and basic data.

Our back-up routine has long consisted of having our primary files that we work with on the local computers, then having a daily backup sitting right next to that. THEN having an off-site back-up that lived somewhere else in case tragedy struck here at the office. The problem with the off-site back up is that it was kind of pain in the neck to go pick it up, do the FULL SYSTEM back-up (which took 2 days) and then deliver it back to the off-site location. Consequently it did not get done as often as it should and sometimes spent a few extra days on-site that it shouldn’t have!

With both local internet speeds increasing as well as online backup services improving performance, we decided to take the leap. While things will only get better and faster, I am glad we did this now. It literally took months to complete, but now that we are 100% in the cloud for our “off-site” back-up, adding to and maintaining it is automated and effortless!

Did I mention piece of mind?

There are a few good services out there (and a few bad ones) and we have tried several. I am sure more will come on the market as time goes by. But our favorite players are CrashPlan and Backblaze. They both offer unlimited back-up space for your computer for a VERY LOW flat monthly rate!

We have multiple computers all safely (and securely) backed up and available from anywhere (including our mobile devices)!

Those who know me will tell you I harp about it all the time, “Make sure you are backed up!” I do it because I have had plenty of disk failures (simply the law of averages because we use so many drives!)

So here I go again! Make sure you are backed up!  2 or 3 times!!!! You never want to loose data, especially if it is valuable digital images that you can never get back! Cloud back-ups are the way to go (despite the time investment of having your computer run 24/7 for the first round) because IF the worst ever happened… at least your data will be safe!

Picking up from two weeks ago (…sorry) Here is one of the other shots we did… This is Brigitte… aka Stella from Modern Family… We had lots of fun dressing Brigitte up in ribbons and bows, although I don’t think she was as amused as we were… but in the end she worked the camera better bare naked… Again…Thanks to Sarah over at Animal Savvy for sharing Brigitte with us!

Wow… Can’t believe we didn’t share this image on our blog! Recently we sent out and eBlast with an image we did a while back that somehow we seem to have completely overlooked. We have used it in other media, but failed to share it here! This is Finn. An adorable LITTLE hedgehog. We were photographing him along with some other animal talent (like Stella from Modern Family aka Brigitte.. OMG we haven’t posted THOSE either!.. Next week!) and it was a crazy (but good) day at the studio! Finn had a mind of his own this particular day but we got the shot, in spite of him! Thanks to Sarah & Heather over at Animal Savvy. They’ve helped us out an SEVERAL of our productions!

My how time flies! Today we were gong through (what we thought were) recent images, just to make sure that our archives are up to date and that all is where it should be and in the process realized that a year has flown by without us even noticing! Sometimes (apparently) we get going at such a pace that we lose any sense of the passage of days, weeks, months, or in this case YEAR. This image was from a shoot we did last year but it still feels like one of our new images.

Elijah was quite a character, one moment an exuberant bundle of energy and the next an intense and contemplative old soul. I love when personalities take such dramatic shifts on a shoot, they always lead to great images!

I was at my friend’s (who also happens to be my extraordinary retoucher) house for dinner last night and some folks came over after to visit and say “hi”, and low and behold one of them was a model from a shoot we did last year! Wow what a difference a year makes, especially with kids! This was Ella, a year ago. I can’t believe 12 months have already gone by! Where did it go??? She has done so much growing (physically and socially) in that brief span of time, she’s a teenager now with other interests like gaming with HotRate products and a social life. I guess we’ll just have to do another shoot!

The final image in our “Nuclear Family” series is entitled “Simply Annoyed”. We used it yesterday in one of our semi-monthly eBlasts. The whole series was shot with a nod to my own childhood and while there were A LOT more siblings going on in my family, this image was definitely modeled after one of my sisters. We have been enjoying the process of playing around with this style and I think we’ll be using it for some more retro images in the future!

We found out this week that we have been named a finalist in the 2014 Hasselblad Masters Awards. This semiannual competition garners entries from around the world. This year there were over 4000 entries. These are narrowed down to 120 finalists – 10 finalists in 12 categories. We were named in TWO! The General category and also in Wildlife. The public is invited to vote through October 2013 and awards are handed out in January 2014. We are really honored to be selected as part of this distinguished group and hope you will check out all of the great work that is part of this competition!

Sure it’s the dead of winter, but this is Los Angeles, California! It’s (almost) ALWAYS nice here. So no excuse needed to get a little devilish and have some wet, wild, and wacky fun! Thanks Cole for playing with us! This is not the first shoot we’ve done with Cole Carney and it won’t be the last! Want to hire him for your next shoot? He is with Colleen Cler Agency!

We recently did a shoot with Ethan Bearman – a noted writer and talk show host. Simply put; it was Great Fun! We had a couple of conference calls, well before the shoot, to suss out the direction we wanted to take and by the time Ethan walked into the studio we had a great rapport. Ethan was a breeze to work with and we got a lot of great imagery from the session! Check out Ethan’s blog or one (or more) of his shows!

Check out yet another “Behind the Scenes” video, complied from a variety of shoots we’ve done over the last year or so…

The holidays are upon us, and many of us consider it a time for family. This year we have been putting together a family of our own (photographically). We have blogged 3 of the five images we have done and have already won some awards for some of them… Here is #4 entitled “Nuclear”. We’ll share the 5th and final one in the coming weeks!

It’s not always easy to keep up with all that we are doing and be able to share a bit of everything we shoot. But every once in a while we get a little breather and are able to post some of the personal work we’ve shot in recent months and this is just such a post. During a test we did a while ago we photographed a very cool model with a little bit of ink… This was all real and not done in post.

Hey!…So we just posted a “Behind The Scenes” video on our website! It’s a quick little 1 Minute peek at a typical shoot. We have a bunch more footage from other shoots that we hope to build into a second video, but in the meantime check out how much fun we have on any given day!

Okay, the cat is out of the bag… A couple of weeks ago, in a secret location we had a special photo shoot. It was all very hush-hush as we could not afford to attract attention or crowds! After all, our subject was making a special detour and only for the briefest of time so that we could do a quick photo session with him before he had to get back to his busy schedule. While Christmas is still a couple of months away, it really is now that our guest for that afternoon really kicks into high gear! So we had all of our ducks in a row, some milk and cookies on hand, and were able to get our subject (who would NOT STOP LAUGHING!) in and out of the studio without impacting his deadlines, and made a great image of him in the process!

Thanks Santa! See you again Soon!

Every other month we send out a little e-Blast featuring an image or two from a recent project. The mailing is directed to art buyers, art directors, creative directors, marketing directors, really just creatives of all types, as well as to those who specifically sign up to receive our bi-monthly “shout out”. This month we sent out the fourth image in a series of 5 that we shot earlier this year. The series features a family of four and was shot in a style that attempts to live in a space between photography and illustration. We featured two other images from this series in earlier blog posts (Dad, Mom). But we are getting great response from the series, and the image of the Dad was given an Honorable Mention in this years IPA’s (International Photography Awards)! But for todays communication we sent this off:

Hey.. Just want to give a shout out to our most favorite retoucher; Lisa Carney. She is always busy behind the scenes makin’ us look good! And when she’s not doing that she’s busy sharing her over-the-top know-how at one of her workshops. If you love our work, chances are pretty good that Lisa had her hands on it. Check out her work at lisacarney.com!