It’s been one week since the beginning of our journey to fund this incredible project and the response has been absolutely phenomenal. Despite anticipating that support would plateau and slow after the initial hype, quite the contrary has occurred. The project has grown almost at exponential rates reaching far beyond expectations. Yes, Erwan and I have worked extremely hard to promote this project but it is really your constant support that has kept the ball rolling. Rolling so fast and far in fact, that this project has caught the attention of a major photography website that believed so much in our project, that they have committed 1500$ in order to officially sponsor and support this project.

We are particularly excited, because this website is not a large corporate sponsor but rather a burgeoning company, dedicated to the free sharing of practical photography knowledge. They strongly encourages the pursuit of creativity and strive to motivate aspiring artists to higher of creativity with their videos. Sound familiar? Their vision dovetails ours!

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present to you: SLRLounge our official sponsor for the project. Check out their website, look at their stuff. It’s free, it’s great and there’s a wealth of information to discover.

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A little backstory.

Pye from SLRLounge was actually introduced to me by Udi over at DIYPhotography.net over a quick email. They were interested in doing a short interview of me following the Steel Wool Tutorial I did during my stay in Israel. One thing led to another and before I knew it, Pye asked me if I would be interested in being sponsored by them. One day later, while having Easter dinner with my family I received the good news on my iPhone. I instantly ditched the dinner table to ring up Pye which resulted in me shooting the following video:

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Phew. So that was the big formal announcement of the day.

In other news, general updates:

- Spoke to Dave and Shaz from the Underwater Realm at a random starbucks I happened to be in when they called. They’ll be featuring us on their weekly blog officially announcing our eminent collaboration. We’ve drawn up a couple concepts together and will have shoot dates up and running by Tuesday. C

- Had a conversation with Natasha Baker – para-olympic athlete – for the first time while marinating in a car somewhere in the middle of Toronto. We’re whipping up something romantically magical showcasing the relationship of a human and her horse.

- Had a conversation with Olivier Lance from Paris, one of the developers of a free and AWESOME lighting diagram software for ipad, iPhone and computer named Sylights. I’m sure you’ll be hearing about them pretty soon. We’ll probably be using their software on our upcoming BTS videos to explain the lighting in each shot!

A couple more conversations that I can’t quite talk about yet because things aren’t confirmed but I can guarantee you that things are shifting real fast… the project is growing so fast, I don’t even know what to say. I woke up at 7 and now am currently enjoying a 6 hour car ride back to Montreal working all the while through. Gotta love technology.

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I just wanted to end the evening with a huge thank you to Erwan who’s been working extremely hard in the background of this entire project.

For those of you who don’t know Erwan, unlike me, actually has a life! He’s a full time student in Political Science and History at McGill in his final year… and has been mysteriously managing to juggle this mind-boggling Europe project and final exams all at once. This little genius over here somehow manages to remain in the 90th percentile of his class despite suffering from sleep deprivation thanks to calls at 2 AM from yours truly. On top of that, he cares for his beautiful fiancé Kalan who… wait for it… is actually six months pregnant!!! So yes, this is Erwan’s final trip before growing from Boy to Father!

Organizing this trip has been an emotional roller-coaster of hopes and disappointments but anytime I’ve ever been down, Erwan’s always been there to bounce right back of. He’s been a tremendous support and without his support this project would not have been possible so everyone – congrats and thanks to Erwan

It’s 4AM right now and I should be arriving hime in the next 15 minutes… just in time for a good solid 4 hours of sleep before we record an updated project video for you guys. We love you guys and hope you’re enjoying reading about this journey.