New WPJA Award Winner
The latest WPJA contest results were just announced the other day, and I found that this image placed in the Trash the Dress portrait category. I had a lot of fun with the shots from this series — I took them last year in the Mexican Riviera Maya in Tulum, at Todd and Malissa’s wedding. We actually go to go into a cenote and shoot in a huge underground river. Wow! I brought along my underwater housing and snorkeled around shooting these two. Totally fun.
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Della Terra Mountain Chateau Wedding Photography
Della Terra is open, and wow does it look awesome! Pam let Sarah, her mom, her brother and myself in for a bridal portrait shoot, and we had full run of the property for a few hours. I think Della Terra is one of the best wedding venues in the state — no kidding. The rooms are incredibly well appointed, complete with walk-through showers and hot tubs on the porch! Inside there is a super cozy fireplace and a huge two-story waterfall. And the wedding deck itself looks up onto MacGregor Slab in Rocky Mountain National Park. Good stuff. Sarah and I had fun shooting all over the place — and yes, she did get into a bathtub full of water in her wedding dress. Can’t wait to shoot her and Mark’s wedding next month!
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Rudi’s Buckles
So back in April I had the pleasure and honor to photograph Rudi and Russell’s totally rad wedding in the Bahamas. They were married at the Abaco Club on Winding Bay, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful beaches anywhere. Anyway, Rudi is starting her own business called Nature Girl Designs making really cool hand-made buckles out of their big red barn back east.
Check out her site if you get a chance and are looking for something really unique. She’ll even turn a photo into a buckle if you’re interested.
Anyway, Rudi’s been touring SoCal and the Boulder area setting up new vendor accounts for her buckles, so she stopped by recently for a few head shots and advertising pictures to use to get the company rolling. Here’s what we came up with on a sunny but absolutely frigid afternoon in Estes Park. Kudos to her for enduring the miserable weather!
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Random headshots
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.
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New Coastal Woman Cover
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.
