I’ve just had a prospective client ask to see 5 of my favorite images. I generally post some of my favorite work on the front page slideshow or on this blog, so if I were to pick out 5, they would be images he’s already seen – so I decided to go with 5 of my favorite images from my last wedding. I think I’l narrate them a bit, and also I might do this on a regular basis. It’s a pretty interesting idea.

It’s always an interesting challenge to creatively shoot the bride’s dress and shoes – there are so many parameters and so much going on during the getting ready – there’s makeup flying around, bridesmaids and maids of honor getting things done and of course the bride. It’s always fun to find a nice quiet moment to shoot the details. This was shot outside the bride’s hotel room, while I was waiting for her to get halfway into the dress. On the right, sometimes a great image (in my opinion) is not defined by how much is lighting the scene, but sometimes areas of dark as well. This was shot by lovely, soft window light and a little kiss of light from inside the room.
  
I love images that hold emotion. It’s important to stay attuned to the events of the day as they unfold – in this image, the coordinator tries to help the bridesmaid (the groom’s sister) as she reads a poem written for the bride by the groom. It was beautiful. In the background, the makeup artist holds the emotional bride’s hand as she applies finishing touches.

It’s important that images tell a story. Each image is a building block of the story of the day. In this frame, the groom’s other sister waits for the right moment to present the bride with a little gift from Tiffany’s from the groom. It’s all about the anticipation. On the right, the couple is bathed with light from a single spotlight in the reception hall. It’s always lovely to see the connection between the couple. There’s nobody in the world but the two of them at that moment.

So… I’m a member of the Flickr group Assignment: Houston. I use the term member quite loosely, because I show up at assignments roughly twice a year. I feel like I’ve sold out to The Man, ‘cos most of the images I create nowadays are paid client commissions. I really miss just going out to shoot stuff for me – even though I *love* the images I create at weddings, it’s always nice to go out and just shoot whatever I want however I want (wait – how is that different from what I do now? lol!). I managed to make it to a pretty early morning meetup at the Wabash Feed Store downtown and it was great fun to just be unleashed creatively and shoot with a bunch of other photographers and see what we all got, and what we all missed. It’s actually a great learning experience, to see through your own eyes and then a bunch of other people’s as well. This shoot was actually a couple of months ago, but what triggered my memory was a bag of Lorna Doone cookies I just opened, and I remembered the Here’s how I saw things…

Last weekend, I shot a wedding out on South Padre Island – but my hotel was in Corpus Christi. After the wedding, I stumbled in to my room at around 1:30am, and I didn’t finish copying and backing up cards until a little after 3 am. I then managed to drag myself out to the marina right across from the hotel at around 6:00am to catch the sunrise. It was so beautiful and peaceful… I even got to hang out on a park bench and chat with my dad on the phone in the wee hours. Definitely worth the sleep deprivation.

I’ve been pretty busy the last couple of months – I was invited to beta test the latest incarnation of Adobe’s ubiquitous Photoshop. I started using Photoshop back in version 2, when there were no layers and pretty much everything worth doing required an intimate knowledge of layers or later on, Kai’s Power Tools and other great plugins. I wish I could say I was selected to test CS5 because of some fantastic quality of mine, but I think I just won a crapshoot! It’s been a great experience, except for the constant downloading of new builds and retesting reported bugs to make sure they’re gone. I’ve done quite a lot of work using it lately, and it’s always been rock solid and only a little quirky at the beginning. Below is a quick before and after of a wooded area I shot recently – I used a few familiar tools as well as a couple of brand new groundbreaking tools, which I cannot name, confirm or deny (Seriously! It’s in the contract!)

Basically, there isn’t anything that couldn’t be done with an older version, but now I can do these things SIGNIFICANTLY faster, more efficiently and more accurately than ever before. It’s pretty amazing! I think it’s definitely worth the upgrade. Less time editing = more time shooting – yay!.

This past weekend, I participated in a lovely small bridal show at the Hilton Americas in Downtown Houston. It was a really great experience, and it was so much fun to show my work and meet so many brides! I got lots of great positive feedback, and it was so worth the behind the scenes work of getting everything ready really early in the morning! Thanks to all who come to say hi at my booth! It was really nice to meet and speak with everyone. I was really excited to get to show off lots of the things I’ve been working so hard on. I took photo guest books, of course flush mount albums, my matted image portfolios, my stunning Vision Art books, canvas prints and lots of other great samples! One of the funniest things that happened was there were two brides in front of me at the same time who had the same date – I tried to start a bidding war!

My friend Vivian runs The Event House, a well known destination for brides in Houston before their wedding – she’s an amazing wedding coordinator and invitation designer. Not too long ago, I got to shoot some images at her beautiful studio of some of her wedding & event invitations – check them out!

I’m so so so excited right now! A couple of months ago, I decided to experiment with album cover materials, and I went to a few unorthodox places and ordered different materials – a plastics company, a glasscutter and a couple of others – and I had my favorite album company – Albums Innova – help to bind them into covers for my new sample books. The results completely blew me (and everyone who has seen them) away! Well, as I type this, B&G – whose wedding I shot a couple of months ago, are on their way into Houston from Dallas for the weekend and they’re stopping by. They have no idea I’ve made this kickass sample with images from their wedding, and I can’t wait to show them! They’re also my first clients to let me pick the images for their album and run with the design, which is the model I’m working towards using from now on. Check out a few images of this new sample book!

A couple of days ago, we had snow in Houston! For these parts, that’s definitely headline-worthy. The forecast had called for snow almost a week before, but most people had adopted an “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude, and on Friday morning, when I got a couple of really tiny flecks on my windshield, I was like “Is that it?” Well around 2pm the snow started in earnest and went on for almost 4 hours! That’s the most it’s snowed in Houston in a really long time, and the last time we had any snow at all was in 2004. Anyway, check out the pictures – the last image is Y’s teddy bear, Mr. Ted. He’s been photographed in so many different places, it seemed really appropriate that he was allowed to put on his scarf and go play on the swing.

A few weeks ago, I bought a 35mm Canon film camera from a lovely gentleman by the name of Kinjo, who was looking for a good home for his old camera. It certainly has found one! It’s an older EOS Elan 7E with Eye Focus, which means that it focuses wherever I look in the viewfinder  - amazing technology for the 80s!  I kind of wish I had that in my current camera. No idea why it was discontinued. Every time I tell a photog buddy I bought a film camera, they immediately ask “Why!??”

I have a couple of reasons – I’ve always heard about this unique inimitable look that film has, and I wanted to try it out and see how it came out, not with a view to switching to film, but shooting a few special frames every now and again. Also, since I fly so much now, and I often see great images out of the plane window that I’m not generally permitted to shoot with a digital camera (electronic device etc etc).

So far, the freakiest things about shooting film are: I keep looking on the back of the camera after I make an exposure, and of course I can’t see anything, and then it takes a while for me to get the film developed, to finally see the images – and when I finally do get the images, I can’t see the settings to figure out what I was doing when I captured each image. I think I read that Ansel Adams used a notebook, but I’m not sure I have that kind of patience. Plus, since I’ll be shooting around a roll of film a month, I can actually remember settings for 36-odd exposures.

So, the images below are – a shot from a reception, a few of my plane window images, and a couple of “on the road” images that I pulled over and shot on my way back from Austin one day. I think I’ll be shooting some more film – AZPhoto Lab did a great job processing it. So far, I’ve only shot black and white film, but I might get my hands on some color film in the future…

Also, I realized that for a wedding photographer, I have an awful lot of non-wedding blog posts, so I double posted today – there’s a lovely wedding right after this, and another coming shortly!
P.S. The flight images were from a flight to Dallas to shoot F&G’s session. I’ll post them after the wedding – they rocked!

I got a call today from a friend’s son who’s interested in photography. It didnt take long for me to realize he really didn’t know much about photography, but was very interested. We’ve made plans for us to go out on a shoot at the zoo or somewhere and I can talk to him about lenses, focal lengths and other technical things so we can decide what kind of equipment he needs for the kind of images he hopes to create.

I remember when I started out in photography. I hung around the local camera store for hours a few days a week, so much so that I often helped customers when the store was busy. I’m still really good friends with the good folks over there. I was so green, it took ages for me to understand why I needed more than one lens, as my old fixed lens camera obviously was stuck with just the one lens and it was doing just fine. I bought my first lens – a telephoto for about $200. I think my mother has that lens now. I actually bought it before I could afford a camera, and I would look through it with my naked eye to motivate myself  Now I’m the proud owner of 8 great lenses, that I know how to use, and with 2 more on my wish list!

I hope that I’m able to teach him as patiently as I was taught and that the knowledge I impart to him helps him along his journey as I was helped. Most of all, I hope he has as much fun as I have had, and continue to have with photography!