I am so excited to be writing about the Della Terra Mountain Chateau, a fantastic new Estes Park wedding venue. Pam and her team are in the middle of construction, and I got to take a tour the other day — and I have to say I’m super impressed.

The Chateau is up on Highway 34 about 100 yards from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, and the whole property borders the park. Pam’s pretty interested interested in green weddings, and as a result, the construction has taken environmentally friendly building practices into consideration. Yay! And della terra is Italian for “of the earth.”

The property is located just below Macgregor Slab, a huge, 300 foot rock formation (with great climbing, by the way!) that’s super beautiful. The views up to the formation are outstanding, as are the views across the the valley. Della Tera is replacing an old campground, and instead of building a huge parking lot, Pam’s decided to convert each campground space into a mini parking lot. So instead of having a huge patch of asphalt littered with cars, all guests will be parking in tiny spaces hidden amongst the trees. It will do a lot to maintain the natural feel that makes the property so special. Then the guests can get up to the chalet on battery-powered golf carts, or on foot.

At the top of the lot is where the ceremony site and building are. The ceremony site is going to be out of this world! There’s a natural spring that forms during the summer, which will feed a series of streams, ponds and water features on the grounds. When brides and grooms say their vows, they’ll be perfectly framed by the Macgregor Slab behind them, and the guests, sitting in a little amphitheater with stadium seating, will be able to see straight up into the park. It’s awesome. Afterward, everyone will walk along a little cobblestone pathway (along the spring-fed stream) back to the Chateau for the reception.

And wow, the inside of the building is going to be amazing. When you enter, there’ll be a little wine tasting nook, a huge fireplace in the middle of the foyer (surrounded by couches), a two-story waterfall, a private downstairs movie theater, and even rooms for guests to sleep in (complete with in-room waterfalls), the list goes on and on. It’s just awesome. I was so blown away by the tour. I can’t wait until it’s finished. I think it has sleeping for around 100 people in the Chateau itself and in some of the on-site cottages, with a capacity for up to 200 wedding and event guests.

Anyway, I gotta say, if you’re planning a wedding in Estes Park, check out Della Terra. It should be finished by next April, with weddings starting in June (I think). Word is still spreading about this place, but I have a feeling that once people learn about it, Pam’s going to be booked up pretty quickly.

Wow! That’s all I can say. Brandy and Tony are so awesome, and they put together one of the best weddings ever. Don’t even know where to begin — it was a whirlwind.

Be sure to read the whole post — there’s a slideshow at the end.

It was a cool six days, and shooting at the Atlantis Resort was one crazy experience. It’s a photographer’s dream, really — so much interesting architecture, vibrant colors, cool textures.

I flew in Thursday and shot a dessert welcome, followed by a rehearsal dinner on Friday, followed by an awesome wedding day on Saturday. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were all fun!

Here are a few of my faves (Yes, there really was a fire dancer! How cool is that?!)

The photobooth was out, for sure, and lots of ridiculous images showed up on my flash card, including this one, which was the last pic of the night. It’s like Christmas all over again when I download the photobooth cards. It’s so much fun, and you never know what you’ll find.

One of the funniest things that happened was that the wedding got crashed! Ha! It was my first experience with a real wedding crasher, and even though it wasn’t an intentional crashing, it was a crashing nonetheless. Meet “The Crashers”

Atlantis is big on aquariums, which I love. Big on big aquariums, I should say. There’s one bar that you walk into, descend down its stairs, and then walk through a giant glass tube suspended in the middle of a shark tank. Whoah!

After the wedding was over I had a chance to hang out and explore with Brandy, Tony, and the fam… And, of course, there were lots of shark tanks involved. Aside walking through that shark tank, we slid on a water slide in inner tubes through through a shark tank, we slid without inner tubes through shark tanks, we ate in a restaurant that had shark tanks instead of walls. We even got to pet dolphins. Whoah!

I had so much fun shooting the big day, and I’m so honored that Brandy and Tony had me do it.

Thanks, guys! You rock!

Here’s a slideshow — it’s on the long side, but then again, it was 6 days! Click the center play button to check it out.

Radiopoppers. I now have five of them, and they are awesome. What follows is a field-test user review from Brandy and Tony’s awesome Bahamas wedding. A slideshow of their day will come later this week!

To sum it up, I think Radiopoppers are the best thing to happen to flash photography since the invention of the flash.

For those who don’t yet know, Radiopoppers are little flash gadgets that combine ETTL with the radiowave goodness of the trusty Pocket Wizard. That’s pretty amazing. Until now it’s been basically impossible to have reliable ETTL off-camera flashes.

When I first started with off-camera flash photography, I’d use my ST-E2 infared trigger and put my 550EX and 580EX flashes on slave mode. Basically I had fully automatic ETTL flash. It was point and shoot, and it was oh-so-easy. This setup was awesome, or so I thought. I loved having spot-on flash exposures every time, but I soon grew annoyed. I couldn’t shoot outdoors at all, since the bright sunlight usually interfered with the infared sensors on the flashes. I was creatively stifled because I couldn’t hide the flashes behind rocks, behind people, behind walls — the infared beam only works with line of sight. If I wanted to shoot wide angle, I’d have to basically put the flashes way off to the side, and usually that just didn’t work. To be out of the frame, they’d have to be at such extreme angles that the infared beam couldn’t get to them. I mean, try using a master-slave IR setup with a fisheye. Impossible, unless you don’t mind having a flash, a flare and a light stand in your image.

Inside, and in the right conditions, the ST-E2 was marvelous. I loved shooting weddings in tents or white rooms, where the IR beam just bounced all over everywhere. But it never was all that reliable, so I eventually stopped using the combination and just used my ST-E2 as a very expensive autofocus assist beam.

Then I discovered Pocketwizards. I loved them because I could put my flashes everywhere. They were reliable. I could hide a flash behind a rock if I was shooting a bouldering image, like this one:

I could hide flashes behind dancing couples during weddings, like here, to produce a nice rim light, like here:

The PWs unlocked a lot of hidden creativity, and I could even use them in conjunction with my ST-E2 (so I could trigger the flashes but still use the ST-E2’s autofocus assist).

But with this reliability came a few huge limitations. First, when you use a Pocketwizard, you have to have your flash on manual mode. This is fine if you’re shooting in a controlled environment, but I found it could be difficult when shooting something like a wedding, which is an organic, free-flowing, sometimes chaotic event with rapidly changing lighting conditions. Wedding photographers don’t really have the time to run around and change the outputs on three separate units all the time.

More importantly, the Pocketwizards can’t do high speed sync. On my 5d cameras, the fastest shutter speed I could shoot at outdoors was 1/200th of a second. If I was at ISO 50, the lowest setting on my camera, I would need to be shooting around f/11. That means that unless it was almost dark out, it was basically impossible to get the beautiful, smooth bokeh I love from my 135 f/2 or my 200 f/2.8 or my 85 f/1.2. My images would have to have a totally uncluttered background to have the look I wanted. Sometimes that’s just impossible.

So then along came the Radiopopper. When I first heard about them I thought they were some sort of cruel joke, but no, they’re real. I have five of them and just used them for the first time in the Bahamas, at a destination wedding at the Atlantis Resort. I was astounded. Here’s one of the first frames I captured with them — there were two flashes going off at once. This frame was taken outside in extremely dark conditions.

I get automatic flash exposure, I can dial up or down the flash output from my camera, I can change the flash ratios from my camera, I can hide the flashes behind rocks, behind people, or behind walls for cool lighting effects, and I can shoot with huge apertures to get that awesome low depth of field — all in broad daylight. I even dropped one of my transmitters in a swimming pool, fished it out, dried if off, and it worked perfectly. What more could I ask for?

Check this out — a shot done with two flashes, fully automatic. Very nice! I actually used radios to dial down the right hand flash — all from my STE-II on the camera.

Here’s another one, just a few hundred feet away in The Dig at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas.

Basically, the Radiopoppers sense some sort of electronic signal made by the infared beam, convert it to a radio wave, and send it to the receiver. The receiver converts the radio wave back into an infared beam and sends it to the IR receptor on the flash via a little fiberoptic cable that you have to tape onto the front of the flash. Brilliant.

And get this: here’s a shot done with two flashes, outside, broad daylight, shot at 135mm @ f/2.0.

Like everything in life, nothing is perfect, but these things are an excellent solution that I will be using at basically every wedding and social event from now on.

The first problem I experienced was that there was some sort of sync issue whereby the flashes weren’t being triggered reliably. I, of course, didn’t read the instructions — but once I did, I realized that it was the result of the fact that there are many different flash and camera manufacturers out there, and that I needed to adjust the Radiopoppers to work with my system. I pushed three buttons and fixed it. So that’s not really an issue with the Radiopoppers. Then there were the occasional misfires, where I’d get way too much flash juice. That’s an unfortunate byproduct of the actual ETTL system. It happens without the RPs, too.

There were two minor issues with the RPs themselves. First, I didn’t like having to attach the fiber optic cable to my slave flashes with gaffer’s tape. It was a little problematic in the Bahamas, where the hot air seemed to loosen the stickiness of the tape. Now I’ve got goop all over my flash. I wish there were a way to somehow attach the fiberoptic cable better (perhaps a little plastic clip that I could attach to the flash that would hold the cable in place strongly - hint, hint!). Anyway, I am now over having sticky stuff on my flash, and I’m such a convert that I now think that the fiberoptic cable will be permanently attached since I’ll be using the Radiopoppers so much, so no biggie.

I also didn’t like having to screw the battery case onto the back of the unit. It’s a pain to have to find a screwdriver to get the batteries in and out (I wound up using a steak knife), and, if you drop the unit in the pool, you’re not going to have that much time to find your steak knife, unscrew the back plate and remove the battery before the circuits fry. But of course, if the unit can survive a splash in the pool, what difference does it make?

All in all, I give the Radiopoppers a 9.75 out of 10. Certainly one of the best pieces of photo-related equipment to come out in a long time. I think they’re going to permanently change my approach to event photography, and like I said before, these might be the best thing to happen to flash photography since the invention of the flash.