I might be buying a home soon, and I’ve been really concerned having one that’s energy-efficient and sustainable. The place that we might make an offer on is way cool, but it’s got some issues such as a lot of enormous single-pane windows. Ideally we’d like to invest in the home to make it more efficient, but we may not be able to afford to do that. So after a little digging, I found out that it might be better for us to buy carbon offsets. We’d essentially donate X amount of money to a nonprofit, and the agency would use that money on projects that reduce the amount of CO2 emissions elsewhere. And the amount we’d pay would offset the amount of carbon emissions we let loose. One project I read about involved hooking long-haul diesel trucks to the electrical grid at truck stops, so they can power their electronic systems each night without having to keep their engines idling. That cuts down on greenhouse gas emissions.

I think it’s a pretty cool notion.

Anyway, I poked around a number of carbon offset agency web sites until I came upon TerraPass, which has an entire section dedicated to having a carbon-neutral wedding. The idea here is that for any given wedding, guests will be driving or flying all over the country, renting cars to drive from the airport to the wedding venue, renting hotel rooms, etc. I used TerraPass’ carbon footprint calculator for weddings and came up with an estimate that a mountain wedding in Vail with 120 guests — which is a pretty normal affair — would let loose 120,000 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to having 6 households running full-bore for a year, or having 30 cars driving around for a year. Wow! So basically TerraPass lets you calculate what your wedding’s carbon footprint is, and then lets you purchase an offset.

I thought this was a pretty cool idea too, so I started thinking about the travel that I’ve done and will do this year in the name of photography. A trip to New Zealand, at least two weddings in the Caribbean, half a dozen weddings in California — needless to say, I’ll be flying around a lot too! So I am going to research running Dreamtime Images Wedding Photography as a carbon neutral company, and I hope to soon be offsetting all the carbon emissions from destination and local weddings that I photograph.

Technorati Tags: carbon, environment, global warming, green, greenhouse gas, low impact living, wedding, wedding photography

Here’s a crazy shot I just came across while organizing my Web site. I shot a Montana wedding last summer at the Holland Lake Lodge, which is on Holland Lake outside of Missoula. Really cool place, really beautiful setting. The lodge is on a tiny little peninsula jutting out into this serene, gorgeous lake. Check out the portfolio link to see what it was like. Highly highly recommended place to get married.

Anyway, the wedding was one those really fun weekend-long things. During the weekend, everyone discovered the mother of all rope swings. I got a bunch of rad shots of everyone on it, and here’s a shot that someone took of me on it… I know, I was working and playing. Sorry! Don’t tell anyone. I think I was about 35 or 40 feet up in the air.

So I do a lot of outdoor sports and adventure photography when I’m not shooting weddings, and one of my clients is Spire USA, makers of probably the best laptop bags on the planet — so I have to do a little plug for them on my blog. They rock. I’m an avid Apple user, and they make little laptop sleeves that fit my Macbook perfectly so it’s protected when I’m on location. Anyway, here’s a cool shot that Cory Barnes, the company’s president, sent me the other day. It’s a shot I took in Bishop that was turned into a huge banner at an industry trade show. Way cool! And if you’re looking for great bag for your laptop, you know where to go. Oh yeah — the camera I used for this shot is the same one I use at weddings, so if you ever wanted to make a huge banner of your wedding ceremony for something, you know it’s possible

It’s always cool to see what graphic designers do to your work once it’s in their hands. Here are two head shots I took recently, and then the resulting pages/ads designed by Andrea Russell at Optasia Graphics. I think she’s pretty good! I was psyched to be able to squeeze in a short corporate head shot gig and a magazine gig right before I left Santa Barbara for the summer and drove out to Colorado to begin the wedding season. Good timing, and it got the mind limbered up and the creative juices flowing.

Anyway, here’s the camera geek inside baseball: the corporate head shot was for a VP of a Santa Barbara financial advising firm. After checking out the office and taking a few other images, I decided I wanted to have her standing in front of the board room, arms crossed, looking like the boss in charge, the lady who knows what’s up, and the person who’s gonna get your money issues sorted. She had to look authoritative, so she had to stand out from the rest of the frame. So I lit her with 2 small flashes, one behind her for some rim light and the other to her right shooting through an umbrella. I got these ideas from the brilliant Strobist.com site.

The pic of Sam Tyler was taken in the corner of a kid’s bedroom, in front of the only white corner I could find in the house we did this shoot at. So he just stood in the corner, maybe 3 feet in front of the wall and a few feet from the wall on his left. I lit him with just one small flash at 1/128th power shot through an umbrella. It was so low power that I was able to stop my 85mm lens down to about f/1.8 to get a nice shallow depth of field. The idea was to have the umbrella light illuminate Sam and then bounce back off the wall to the camera’s right to fill in a little bit of his face.

The image was for a story about Sam, who makes documentaries. He’s going to produce a doc about what’s going on at the Santa Barbara News Press, my former hometown paper that’s hemorrhaging employees thanks to a billionaire owner who doesn’t understand the idea of a free press and instead uses the paper as her soap box. I’m glad I turned down a job there about 4 years ago! Since last spring, more than 20 (I lost count — I don’t have that many fingers and toes) editors, designers, reporters, etc. left because of disagreements with management. Without going into too much detail, it’s been unprecedented and extraordinarily ugly. As a result, the paper has become the laughing stock of California, and the readers in Santa Barbara don’t have a viable, reliable source of daily local news. Bummer. So anyway, Sam’s doc will likely be very revealing.

So this is kinda neat — Coastal Woman’s new summer 2007 issue features a shot I took a few weeks ago on its cover. An honor! Check it out!

For the camera geeks in the house (hi Dad!) I lit the shot with two off-camera Canon 580 flashes. I didn’t need to break out the bigger White Lightening studio stobes because I was shooting at twilight and wanted to utilize a lot of the ambient light. One flash is directly behind the chair, adding a little rim lighting to the subjects and also reflecting light backwards to fill in the background a little. The other light was on a stand and was shooting through an umbrella to my left. Both were triggered by Pocket Wizards. By the way, if anyone wants to learn a lot about quick and dirty lighting techniques, they should hit up the Strobist blog at strobist.blogspot.com.