Pekin Marigold Festival

Monday morning Peoria greetings to one and all!

Well this past weekend sure had some great weather for us here in Central Illinois. On Saturday morning the rains rolled through and brought with it a nice cool front and lower humidities and that was a welcome change for us. I love it when it’s hot, but not so much when it comes to the high humidity that we get here in the Midwest! Oh sure there’s lots of places that are a heck of a lot worse when it comes to summer and humidity, but I’m glad that I visit those places and don’t live there!

You know that it’s getting to be the fall season when the Pekin Marigold Festival is held and they couldn’t have had better weather on Saturday afternoon. We were there to shoot some photos of our friends in the band, The Rave. The guys were back on the stage on Saturday for a set at the festival and as usual they kicked out the tunes! Lots of great music on a picture perfect day, so everyone there enjoyed the show!

We’ve got a few snaps of The Rave (Jeff, Jay, Greg and Aaron) and we’re sharing a few of those today!

We hope that you have a great week to come and thanks as always for taking the time to check out our work!

Kev and Jan

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Out in the country!

Tuesday morning Peoria greetings to one and all!

Well for most of us, we’re back at work today after the Labor Day weekend and boy was it a nice weekend weather wise here in Central Illinois. We had a break from the rain and the hot and humid temperatures that have been seemingly with us for the entire summer! It was great to be able to turn off the air conditioner at the house for a few days and open up the windows and air out the place. Of course we’re right back to the hot and humid weather this week with the heat index back up to 100 today! At some point it’s going to cool back down, but not soon enough!

Jan and I were able to get out in the country for a nice little drive on Labor Day Monday and it was great to just check things out and shoot a few photos. Driving through farm country and seeing all the corn and soybeans and knowing that the farmers are going to get started with the harvest in the next couple of weeks will be great! It’s always fun to see them out there with the combines working the fields and bringing the crops in for the year! I’m sure at some point we’ll be getting out to shoot some of that as well!

Here’s a couple of our photos from our drive out in the country!

We hope that you have a great week to come and thanks as always for checking out our work!

Kev and Jan

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TIUFTT 2016

Monday morning Peoria greetings to one and all!

Well here we are at the end of the summer season with Labor Day Monday being next week! The summer has truly flown by and it really does seem like it was just Memorial Weekend and the Fourth of July! This also marks the end of our busy season of work and traditionally May, June, July and August have been our busiest months and this summer was no exception. We spent a lot of time on the road for a number of different shoots and it was really fun to be out all across the USA shooting photos and video! We never know what will happen for the rest of the year in terms of being busy with shoots, but if it’s not, we’ll be out shooting photos for ourselves as we always do!!! 🙂

This past Monday in Peoria we had the 8th annual Tee It Up For The Troops  and it’s a great event that raises a lot of money for the local Peoria veterans organizations. This year both Weaver Ridge Golf Club and Mt. Hawley Country Club hosted the day’s events and the weather couldn’t have been nicer! In the morning, it’s all of our great veterans that get to play these courses for free and then in the afternoon, it’s all the sponsors that are providing all the financial support for the day’s events. Between the morning and afternoon’s golf, they have a great ceremony that honors and remembers all that have served our great country and the sacrifices that they have made to help keep us free and safe as a country. During the course of the ceremony, a bugler will play taps and when you hear that, there isn’t a dry eye in the place!

Here’s a few of the snaps from the day at the 8th annual Tee It Up For The Troops. http://kevinmay.com/KMCTIUFTT2016.jpg

If you’re going to be out traveling this coming Labor Day weekend, make it a safe one and we’ll see you next week!

Kev and Jan

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MBG

Monday morning Peoria greetings to one and all!

We made it back safe and sound from a road trip this past week out to West Virginia for a shoot. We were shooting photos and video of the reconstruction of the TPC course at The Greenbrier Resort in White Sulfur Springs. That area of West Virginia was devastated with massive flooding just a few months ago in June. Besides the incredible property damage that was done, 23 people lost their lives in the flooding! With so many of the golf holes destroyed, the decision was made to completely redo the golf course. I was talking with the head contractor and amazingly he told me that they will have all the greens replaced by September 15th and the rest of the course will be rebuilt by Thanksgiving of this year! It’s truly amazing that they can complete all this work in such a short amount of time! The course will be ready to go for next year’s Greenbrier Classic in July!

On the way home from our shoot in West Virginia, we were able to pop in to St. Louis for a day and stopped in at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. MBG is a place that we’ve featured a few times over the years in our promos and it’s a favorite stop for us! It’s interesting to visit there at different times of the year because there are flowers and plants that are blooming all throughout the year.

Here’s a few of our snaps from an afternoon spent at MBG in St. Louis!

Thanks as always for taking the time to check out our work and we hope that you have a great week to come!!!

Kev and Jan

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It’s all about the beans!

Monday morning Peoria greetings to one and all!

We had another busy week and as always a lot of fun as well! It’s always great to have good shoots where we can also have some laughs and get the shots that we need to get for the clients.

We were out shooting for our friends at LG Seeds and as always it’s great to get out on the farm and see what’s going on! We were able to come away with some new people shots and also some new field signage photos. As always it helps to have a great day to shoot and we lucked out as we sometimes do on the weather and had some nice blue skies despite the higher humidity that we can get at this time of the year!

Here’s one of our photos with our friends at LG seeds!

Thanks as always for taking the time to see what we’re shooting and we hope that you have a great rest of the week!!!

Kev and Jan

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Blazing new trails

Monday morning Peoria greetings to one and all!!!

Things are still rocking and rolling for us here in Peoria, so we’re very happy about that!!! We had a couple of photo shoots last week and a ton of video editing, so that’s always nice and keeps us very busy! We’re trying to get a bunch of stuff done in the next couple of weeks before we head back out on the road again!

We’re really proud to be sharing one of our latest video projects and boy did this turn out good. The shoot was for our friends at Cat Forestry and we were on location in Canada, Oregon and Washington in February and June of this year. Both locations had their challenges with the Canada portion being filmed in temperatures below zero and the West Coast locations being close to 100 degrees! Sometimes conditions aren’t always as perfect as you would like, but you just make the best of it and know that you’re getting good video and still images!

I’m happy to say that we did all the work on these videos from the shooting to the editing and there is a huge amount of pride in being able to work on a project from start to finish and all points in between like we did with this one!

Here’s a link for the 538 video that we put together! https://youtu.be/W8apLPGS7EU

Thanks as always for taking the time to check out our work and we hope that you have a great week to come!!!

Kev and Jan

Some local flavor

Monday morning Peoria greetings to one and all,

Well it sure is nice to be back home after our quick shoot in Denver last week! We had a good gig and the weather was perfect one of the two days, so that really helped everything look a lot better! If you know me, I like to shoot on sunny days and feel that for my type of images it brings out the bright snappy colors and lots of contrast and that makes me very happy!

Jan and I got down to Pekin, Illinois on Saturday for the Central Illinois Cruisers car show on Main Street. It’s always fun to go and shoot at these car shows and we always try to make at least one each year. That’s part of the fun of summer is having a car show when the weather is nice. As always, there were lots of great cars and it made for some interesting photos for us! We’re all about shooting the detail shots and trying to hide the sometimes unwanted backgrounds or people in the photos. As you’ll see in this week’s promo, I think we both got what we were looking for! 🙂

Here’s a few of our snaps from Saturday in Pekin!

We’re going to be in town for the next couple of weeks and are looking forward to that, so we hope that you have a great week too!!!

Thanks as always!

Kev and Jan

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What a difference a day makes

Monday morning greetings to one and all!

Busy, busy, busy, yes we are! We’ve got a quick shoot in the Mile High City this week and then back home to Peoria and that sure will be nice! As some of my road warrior friends know, being on the road for a bunch of time can really start to get to you. Don’t get me wrong, we do love road trips and being on the road for shoots and also vacation, but when you’ve been out there as much as we have been this year, it’s sure nice to get back home! There’s something very special about eating your own food and sleeping in your own bed and that’s pretty darn nice!!

Over the last year or so, our friends at UnityPoint Methodist Hospital in Peoria have been giving a much needed freshening up to the exterior of the hospital. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how old the original brick was that they had at the hospital, but it was time for a face lift! To see what they’ve done to the hospital is amazing and what a difference it’s made in the look and feel of the place! They wanted some new photos of the exterior of the hospital and we were able to get out and grab a few snaps of the new and improved UnityPoint Methodist Hospital and I have to say that it’s looking pretty darn good!

Here’s one of our shots and what a difference a day makes!

Thanks as always for checking out our work and we hope that you have a great week to come!!!

Kev and Jan

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Moving and grooving!

Monday morning greetings from Lafayette, In.!

We’re back on the road for the next couple of weeks, so our first stop is a shoot here in Lafayette for the next couple of days and then we’ll be heading back out West after that. It’s that time of the year when we are still in our busy season for another month and a half right up to Labor Day weekend, so we are ready for it!

We had a great shoot this past week for a new client for us. Fort Transfer is a trucking company based out of Morton, Illinois and unless you’re in the farming business, you’ve probably never heard of them. They deliver bulk liquid farming products to all 48 states in the continental US and also up to Canada as well. We had a lot of fun shooting a variety of photos of the operation and some of the people that worked there as well. One of the fun shots that we are sharing today is a little action shot. When something that moves like a vehicle (car, plane, train, truck, etc.), it’s always great to use a slower shutter speed and allow the background to have a little blur. It really helps give the sense of speed and motion.

Here’s one of our photos from our day with Fort Transfer.

Day one is about to get started, so we hope that you’re going to have a great week!!!

Thanks as always!!!

Kev

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Down at the park

Monday morning Peoria greetings to one and all!

If you had last Monday off of work for the 4th of July, this is going to be one of these weeks that’s a long week. By that I mean we are back to the typical five day work week and it’s always a little tougher for a week like this when you’ve had a short work week the week before. I think the other thing that amazes me too is that this summer is just rocketing by at what seems like light speed. In another month or so, we’ll start hearing people talking about the kids going back to school and then it’s going to be Labor Day weekend and the start of the fall season and high school football! Amazing!

Jan and I have had quite a busy summer season with all of the road trips that we’ve been on for some of our different gigs these past few months. Road trips are always good, but it can make it hard to get things shot for clients here in Central Illinois. We have been trying to shoot some images for a client of the Pekin, Illinois area for a couple of months and working it in between road trips and we weren’t having a ton of luck. As always, the weather can play havoc with us wanting to shoot on only the best days weather wise and the weather not cooperating. Between the summer rain storms and the higher humidities, it can really test your patience! We finally were able to hit a stretch of time in the last few weeks where all the elements came together and we were able to get out and get some of the photos that we needed! I’m sharing one of those iconic Pekin, Illinois images of the Lagoon at Mineral Springs Park.

As always, we appreciate your taking time to check out what we are doing and shooting!!!! Have a great long week as well!!!

Kev and Jan

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