Word!

The Wedding Photojournalist Association just released the results of its 2007 year end wedding photography contest, and I managed to snag a few awards. Hooray!

One, in the Ceremony category, was for this shot from Heather and Todd’s Vail wedding. They were married at the top of the mountain on the wedding deck. A storm was brewing all morning and things looked a little ominous, but they decided to go for it and risk the rain. The sun was fighting its way through the clouds for the whole ceremony, and as soon as they were pronounced husband and wife, the sun broke through and splashed them with a crazy ray of light. Everyone was talking about it afterward. The judges wrote, “A fantastic, intense moment enhanced by the incredible light and landscape. A painting.”

This next image picked up an award in the Reflections category, and it was one of my favorite shots of the year. You have to stare at it a while to figure out what’s going on. The bride’s mouth is poking through the hole in the hand mirror, and she’s also the one whose face is in reflected in the hand mirror that’s shown on the left side of the image. Wait, huh? What?

So… I shot this image into a huge mirror, and the only thing that’s not a reflection is the stuff on the far right hand side (the back of the hand mirror, the bride’s hand, and her mouth). Everything else is a reflection, and the bride’s eyes are a reflection in a reflection. The image is a complete mindbender that I still can’t always get my head around, even though I shot it.

I guess imitation is the biggest form of flattery, so along those lines I’ve been trying to replicate the crazy look of Tim Tadder, who is my photographic hero. He is an absolute lighting master, and I think the best in the business when it come to edgy, modern outdoor commercial work. If you haven’t heard of him, check out his site. One of my favorite advertising shots of all time is his image a swimmer at the edge of a lake, shot from behind, pulling on her swim cap. See it here. It’s so beyond rad there’s not even a word for it.

Tim’s a super nice guy and really gave me some encouraging words and good advice when I went out on my own and started shooting full time, but he wouldn’t tell me how he got his look! So ever since, I’ve been trying to reverse engineer not only his lighting setup, but his post processing workflow in Photoshop. The other night I was messing around in the living room and I created the closest replicate yet. Not as good, but not too shabby either. I think you have to have the lighting just right in order to actually do the Photoshop work, which was a whole different story.

The subject? Sorry! I know this is sad, but nobody was around! It’s a self-portrait of yours truly.

I can’t really detail this too much right now, since this project isn’t completed yet, but I’m too excited NOT to say anything. To be super super super brief, I’m helping to illustrate a book on eco living and eco weddings by Angelica Weihs, a green wedding planner in Los Angeles. Here’s a note the author wrote to one of my couples:

Hi,
I got your contact from your amazing photographer Nathan. I am writing a book describing the path of an green wedding and portraying couples who have experienced them and the professionals who have helped them to manifest their vision. It is a lifestyle book, re-defining luxury as the chance to live consciously. I saw your inspiring pictures and would love to tell your story.

Look for an updated blog post in the coming months! Here’s an extremely abbreviated synopsis from one of my couples:

We used local indigenous flowers, conch shells, local palm trees as aisle markers, green transportation for the bride (a horse!), electric powered golf carts, local Bahamian food, etc. We have lots to say about out adventures in scouting out a sacred place, the elements(fire, earth, air, water), etc. Simplicity was our goal: we wanted our wedding to reflect the way we live our lives. Organic, healthy, earthy, conscious, etc. Bring it on!

I’m so psyched, honored and thrilled to be a part of this project. More later, stay tuned, I’m so bad at keeping secrets!

Took a break from designing some stuff and took a picture.

What is he saying?

Here’s a cool little project I got to work on the other day. Sona Dimidjian, a psych professor at CU Boulder, is doing research into how yoga helps pregnant women avoid postpartum depression, which apparently 10 to 15 percent of new mothers experience. That’s a surprisingly large number! As part of a community outreach program, Sona asked me if I’d be willing to photograph a pregnant yoga instructor doing a series of poses, with the end goal of publishing the photos into a poster and an e-book. She is also considering making a small bound book to give to them women who are taking part in her clinical study.

I figured this was a really awesome opportunity to help people out, so I cruised down to Boulder a few days ago and we did the shoot in Sona’s living room. Huge props to our instructor — I have no idea how she does it! Her baby’s going to be a yoga master! The shots for the poster were more for illustration than anything else, but I did snag a few nice candids of our model and her son. I’ll try to put up a link to the finished product when the whole project is done, since it promises to be really cool!

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.

Back in Cali kickin it with the crew. Miss it here. Good times, great friends. Toots got his first chance to visit one of our favorite places on earth, the stunning mountaintop boulder field at Lizard’s Mouth, home to the best moderate sandstone bouldering anywhere. And actually thanks to our buddy Bernd, a bunch of new hard lines have gone up in the last year.

Here we are on one of them, an unnamed route overlooking the ocean. We spent sunset here taking pictures.

If you want to know how it’s done, I used a really fast prime lens at f/1.4 coupled with a single flash bouncing off a gold reflector disk. Reflector was pointing up from ground level, flash was triggered via a PocketWizard. Very low ISO (100) allowed me to get the dark blue sky at 125th of a second. It also let me have a very noiseless image. I passed off the camera later on and Bernd grabbed it to take the last two shots, one of Steve and one of me.

Quite possibly the highlight of the day was seeing Alicia’s parents’ chihuahua Rosie wearing Bernd’s kid’s diaper. Finn, Bernd and Hjortis’ little infant, was nice and warm and had a spare diaper. Rosie was freezing and had nothing. So… What happens when you have a spare diaper and a freezing chihuahua? Diaper Dog. It’s was the only solution.

Another image placed in a WPJA quarterly contest! This one placed in the ‘creative portrait’ category, which is pretty competitive since photographers are generally pretty on point with these pics and tend to shoot all sorts of crazy stuff.

Funny story behind this image: Brad and Gina got married at the Vista at Arrowhead in Beaver Creek this past Labor Day weekend. While Gina was getting ready I asked her about what kind of stuff she and Brad do on vacation. And she said they take lots of pictures. Of what, I wondered. Well, she said, of signs.

So we decided to make a bride and groom sign and see what would happen. Her dad actually got psyched about the whole thing and wound up making them himself, and then Gina, Brad and I snuck off after the ceremony for some couples portraits. Part way through we decided to bust out the signs… And, among other things, this is what happened. I totally love their faces. They were trying really hard to keep it together!

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!