It’s been a while! Just a short note saying ‘check out the new web site’ for those out there with an RSS feed or who subscribe to this blog. It’s a sweet looking site! Click here to visit.

More updates coming soon, promise, it’s been a hectic winter. Spent a week in Florida photographing horses, revamped the office with all sorts of technonerdy stuff (new computer, w00t!), photographed a pregnant yogini for an outreach program on how yoga can help prevent post-partum depression!

Word up!

So this is just straight-up cool. My dad has his own photo web site that you have to visit!

About mid-career, he basically stopped taking pictures all together because he got too busy, but a few years ago my parents moved to an island off the coast of Seattle and prepared for retirement. My dad took a job that required a lot less time in the office, and he’s been devoting a lot of his spare time back to photography. Recently, he scored a job as a stringer at the local paper up there to the tune of $15 a week. W00t! Now that his shots are appearing all over the place, I decided to give him a web site for Christmas. It’s yet another rip-off of my editorial site, so it might look familiar, but the images on his site are better.

So check it out. I think there’s some super classic stuff there. It’s at http://www.davidweltonphoto.com.

If I were a dog, I’d want to be my dog. He’s just that rad. Flying through the air dressed in a jacket, pouncing on big dogs. Alicia thinks he looks like a bat, while I think he looks like a Gremlin, the kind with those huge ears after you spill water on them. Certainly he’s a lot cuter than an evil Mogwai.

Anyway, these two were having so much fun the other day.

Would have posted this on my editorial site, http://www.nathanweltonphoto.com, but I don’t have a blog there, so I’m posting it here.

Just got the results from the 2007 American Horse Publications awards ceremony, which covered all stories and photos published in 2006. I shoot for Practical Horseman Magazine covering dressage, hunter/jumpers and eventing, among other things, and I shot a cover for them for their breeding issue. The cover won an Honorable Mention for covers, and that was in the largest circulation division. Cool beans!

The magazine also also picked up a third place award for a story called “It’s Equitation, by George” written by one of the editors there, Kip Goldreyer. That was another cover story I shot, and was an awesome experience. Can’t wait for Florida this year!

Each year we go to Florida for a huge annual horse show near Palm Beach, and we are just finalizing the agenda for this year. It’s a pretty fun week because we do a year’s worth of stories all at once, shooting and interviewing some of the big movers and shakers in the horse world. More on that next month!

Happy Turkey Day!

Hope everyone’s doing well. It’s album design time and I’ve been putting together albums and albums and albums and albums. Here’s one I figured I’d post so you all can get a sense of what they’re like. This one’s from Amy and TJ’s wedding this past August in Estes Park. They chose a really awesome PictoBook, which are available in metal or wooden covers. Theirs was a metal covered album that will look something like this:

Black leather binding, aluminum cover, and a nice cameo on the side. The PictoBooks are awesome. Check them out online at www.pictobooks.com.

Here are a few spreads from the album, too.

Damn! The Google Gods have frowned on me. I dropped to hit #11 for world’s best wedding photographer! And now I’m on the dreaded second page. What have I done, what have I done?

Okay, this cracks me up. Sorry to toot my horn, BUT… I was poking through my site stats and apparently Google thinks I’m one of the world’s best wedding photographers. If you type worlds best wedding photographer into Google, Dreamtime Images shows up as hit 8. Hey, I’ll take it. Thanks Google!

UPDATE: I just moved up to hit #4! I wonder if I can get to hit #1.

Alicia and I have been kicking around the idea of getting a dog for a while, so we cruised down to the Denver Humane Society and looked around. We almost came home with a neurotic, bug-eyed Boston Terrier named Rader, but instead we brought home a mellower pup who’s part Basenji. The Basenjis — which translate to ‘bush things’ — must be part feline, because they walk, run, play and groom themselves like cats. Pretty cool. We named him Toots because we were listening to a Toots and the Maytals song on the way home (a John Denver cover, actually, but no matter) that went, “Take me home to the place where I belong.” Then, as if to seal the deal, the dog started farting. Or ‘tooting,’ if you will. So Toots became his name.

Then when we got back to Estes we drove to our first house! We closed right before we went to the Humane Society! So we’re now in the process of moving, which is becoming an epic, but we’re super excited. The home is perched up on the side of Prospect Mountain overlooking part of the Estes Valley, and it’s got a great hot tub on the porch for those cool winter evenings. Our home inspection missed some problems with the place, which became way too apparent once it started raining really hard (which it hasn’t done in months). Basically the roof leaks. So do some windows. So if anyone out there knows much about composite roofing and window reframing, give me a shout. This week we’re going to be doing home repair 24/7.

Anyway, as Toots wandered around the house, it became apparent that he hasn’t had much of a chance to get out much. In fact, we think he’s afraid of heights; the other day he freaked, jumped off the staircase and headplanted in the middle of the living room. Not good for a trail and crag dog, but he’s an athletic little dude who will probably learn to deal pretty quickly.

I wish I had pictures, but right now I don’t. Stay tuned!

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.