2011 Memories: Knoxville Photographer Jim Walker

Let me start with a big Thank You to my clients for making this past year such a fun and wonderful year. I also want to thank my friends and facebook fans for all your encouragement too!

2011 was a milestone year for Jim Walker Photography as I made the move from a hobby to an officially licensed business. You may recall that two years ago I moved away from shooting sports to focus on portrait work. This was my first full year of shooting portraits. I'm having a blast and meeting so many cool and wonderful people.

One of the highlights of the year was meeting and working with Los Angeles based commercial photographer, Joel Grimes. I learned a lot about artistic lighting, tasteful HDR processing, and compositing images. Joel arranged a group of 4 rocking models including the very animated Dr. Russel Brown from Adobe, costumed as the Mad Hatter. Their images are a huge part of my commercial portfolio. Thank you Russel, Jessica, Lauren, and Taylor!

The following short slideshow features the 3 main areas of my portrait work (h.s. seniors, kids & families, and commercial). Crank up the volume (or hit mute if the music is not your style) and enjoy a look back at a sample of my work from 2011.

If you want images like these, hit the "Contact" link above and I'll be happy to schedule your rocking photo shoot today!

Thank you all once again for your business and encouragement. I sincerely wish you a Blessed and Happy New Year!

UTAH: Part 12 The Still Images

Hopefully you have enjoyed watching the short daily videos I've posted about our recent trip to Utah. Those videos were shot with my new Sony Cybershot camera (DSC-HX9V) which I absolutely love and highly recommend.

But we didn't go to Utah to break in the new point and shoot. We went to attempt to capture the vast beauty of the region with our DSLRs. I used my Nikon D300s and primarily shot with the ultra-wide 14-24mm and occasionally with the 70-200mm. (Sandra shot with the D90 with the 18-105mm and occasionally the 70-300mm.) We are both portrait shooters and know little about how to shoot landscapes properly. So we dove in and really challenged ourselves to learn more about how to use our cameras in a very different setting than portrait work.

The scenery was so inspiring and we had so much fun and got some great exercise hiking to our locations. It was so much fun having Sandra by my side shooting too! It was truly a wonderful vacation. We are already talking about next trip! (maybe the California National Parks? ) I've put together a slideshow of my favorite images from each of the places we visited. I recommend you click on the video and change the setting to 1080 HD if your connection will allow it. Also, crank up the speakers and enjoy!

UTAH: Part 11 - Final Day

Today was our last full day of our vacation and it was a pleasure to spend it in Zion National Park. Wow, what an incredibly beautiful place! We spent the entire day in the park beginning at Weeping Rock. We then walked the Narrows trail until we got to the river crossing. We finished the day shooting along the river all the way back to the bridge at the main junction at sunset. We have had so much fun and taken so many photographs. I'll be editing for a while to catch up once we get home. I've been trying to turn the videos around quickly and get them online, so you could follow along on our great adventure. Hopefully, you've enjoyed these daily updates. Here is the final day. Enjoy!

UTAH: Part 10 - Zion National Park

The day begin with a sunrise shoot in Bryce's Canyon before checking out of our hotel and driving to Zion National Park. Sorry, no video of the sunrise, but I got some awesome stills that I'm still working on.

We entered Zion through the east gate and drove through the mile long tunnel and then down the switchbacks into the canyon floor along the Virgin river. We exited the park through the south entrance and found our hotel and grabbed some lunch.

We returned to the park in the afternoon to scout some locations for tomorrow's shoot. We drove from the gate to north end of the park where the road ends at the Narrows trail head. Here is the video of the drive. Tomorrow should be awesome!