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.

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.

Managed to squeeze in one last cool photo assignment before the big trip. This one was for Coastal Woman magazine, a cool magazine that’s designed by the talented Andrea Russell at Optasia Graphics. A few years back I shot her Bahamas wedding in Eleuthera, which was a lot of fun. At any rate, Andrea needed two quick portraits, one for a cover and the other for an inside profile. For the cover, we had a few ideas, one of which was our model jumping on a trampoline for a Spring beauty/fashion issue. The other was a more classy portrait in a huge chair, with a little rim lighting from an off-camera flash to add a little magic light. I think both came out well — now Andrea is figuring out which image will be the cover shot. The next was a head shot of a counselor, which I actually shot in a friend’s hallway against a white wall. It’s fun to try to make the best out of not much! I used two tiny Canon flashes with umbrellas and came up the two black and white images. I’d like to think the horizontal shot has an Avedon-like quality to it, but then again, that’s just a pipe dream! Here are the pix!

So getting this blog set up was fairly easy — here’s what you need if you want to do it and if your site is hosted like mine. (GoDaddy is my domain service, and httpme is my host.)

I downloaded WordPress (free blogging software), uncompressed the archive and uploaded it to the /blog/ directory on my ftp site. Then I went to http://www.dreamtimeimages.com/blog/ and set it all up.

Next I downloaded ecto, a cool blogging program that lets me write posts while I’m offline. Then, when I’m connected, I can publish my posts. I installed that and started posting.

Then I downloaded a WordPress plugin called Postie, which lets me send an e-mail to a secret account, and those e-mails show up as blog posts. This post is one of them.

I needed a free POP account for that aforementioned secret account, so I got one at http://www.bluebottle.com. I also needed something to trigger a URL on my site on an ongoing basis, and URL essentially logs into my BlueBottle account and downloads any new mail. So I got a free account at http://www.webcron.org and set it up to hit that URL every half hour.

Easy!