Jonathan and Charity are some of our closest and dearest friends, so you can imagine how elated we were when we found out they were getting married. These two are meant for each other.

It’s not every day some of your best friends get married in a mind-blowing building built in 1929 in Santa Barbara, but January 6th was one of those days. Rest assured, this is the most beautiful courthouse wedding you’ll ever see! If you know these two, its impossible to miss that they belong together. They’re a runaway freight-train hauling car after car of destiny, inevitability and meant-to-be. It has been a privilege to witness.

Jonathan and Charity have worked weddings with us in the past, either shooting video or helping us run around with equipment and lights, so we’ve all been in that setting together before. Being so close to them, the comfort level was amazing and they felt secure enough to get silly and run around madly, which led to the image above. It’s one of my favorite wedding shots I’ve ever taken, not just because I know and love them, but because of the way it makes me feel. I’ve been there running hand in hand on the beach with Heather and the feeling is phenomenal. Heather used to grab my hand in the early days without warning and seemingly tow me at light speed down the beach damn near removing my arm from joint, proclaiming we were flying.

This shot is a peak at what it feels like to be in love.

When we found out they were getting married at the Santa Barbara Courthouse, we were drooling over the opportunity to photograph it. When the director of our local planetarium showed me photos of the place a few years back, I began anticipating the day I shot there and now I was very happy that the day was coming soon and that it would be our best buddies pledging their undying love in such a historic place. We were thrilled.

We set out to get there early, but due to baby circumstances, we arrived at the courthouse just in time. Heather had to watch our newborn, while I ran through the courthouse past some of the most beautiful architecture I’ve ever seen, searching for the Mural Room. I’d seen it before in photos and couldn’t wait to get in there.

Unfortunately, when I arrived, it became suddenly clear to me that it was VERY dark. This makes for bad images that strain your equipment to the limit. (Warning- photo geekery ahead) I turned my ISO up to 3200 and 6400 to get the exposures I was looking for and threw on my 50mm 1.4 and opened it to f2.0 and was still having problems. I feel like the images I captured are great, but I was stunned to see how little light there was in there to work with, my tiny on-camera flash was blasting the atmosphere right outta that beautiful place, so I had to give into noise.

It wasn’t hard to get caught up in it all, all the love in the salt air and the history in that beautiful courthouse set us all up for an afternoon fairy tale.

When I left the courthouse, I knew I’d never be done photographing that building. One could shoot there for years and not capture it, I highly recommend a visit if you’re passing through or in the area. The coast of California is one of the most beautiful places in the world in no small part because of the amazing Spanish architecture and an endless highway of charming Mediterranean-like towns where you could get lost forever. Santa Barbara is a jewel. Fitting that such beautiful people chose to couple amongst the water, sand and Sun in one of the greatest towns on Earth.

Congratulations to Jonathan and Charity. It’s hard to find better people. Selfless, kind and extremely talented, we are the lucky ones to witness as their adventure continues….

Awesome Chase Jarvis live today. Watch Chase shoot Mix and you can even contribute. They’ll be taking lighting and posing cues from the internet. Who posed Mix on his latest album cover? IT COULD BE YOU.

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/live/

500+ miles, 36 hours awake, a # of checkpoints, 4 luchador masks, dozens of eggs, 2 cans of shaving cream, a couple of laps at Irwindale Speedway, silly string, a bandolier filled with shots and 5 hours, a supersoaker, a healthy dose of sabotage, 1 blizzard, some fish rocks, 1 set of tire chains, Death Valley, 1 joust and 1 speeding ticket = $500 in quarters and 1 Golden Gas Pump.

The Rental Car Rally is sort of like Halloween and Canonball Run had a love child. Its basically a photo scavenger hunt where teams compete for the best odometer reading from checkpoint to checkpoint with the best style and yes, I’ll say it, zazz, snapping photos along the way for proof and sabotaging each others vehicles with shaving cream, grenadine, silly string, maple syrup and about a farm’s worth of eggs freezing to windshields 4X4-ing in the dark and snow.

In the end, we sat, fat with buffett food overlooking the immaculate Lake Tahoe Sunday morning trying to figure out how we possibly came in first over the amazing stylings of the Tiki Bar Car or The Bruces (Springsteen, Campbell, Lee & Willis [who was actually in the snow barefoot a la John Mclain]) or Shawskank Redemption, a van full of prisoners and cops. It seemed like maybe all computer hell broke loose at the last minute and it all came down to who hit all checkpoints and had the lowest mileage. It might be hard to tell based on the photo above but, if style was a factor, we lost, big time.

I suppose this subject deserves a long, descriptive narrative about each and every minute of our trials along our crazy journey; instead, I’ll be brief.

1. We all had heaps of fun.

2. We were very cold and tired and broke.

3. We won.

4. We still can’t figure out why.

5. We think you should try the Rental Car Rally, too.

Our hats off to Pants, Supreme & Mustache for putting on such a cool event.

Back on October 2nd of last year, Heather and I went to Los Angeles to attend a Burning Man party in anticipation of our first trip to Black Rock City in 2011. We had an unbelieveable time which made us very anxious for August. The art everywhere was amazing. From the XyloVan ( a giant xylophone on wheels) to the tent giving away sun-dried tomato quesadillas to the amazing music and stage show of  The Mutaytor, good vibes and culture was all around us. We definitely look forward to it and we’ll keep you posted.

Thanks again to everyone out there who encouraged us to go. We’ll post more images as they come….

The world's most expensive photo. $2.9 million.

The guys over Neatorama posted this great article on the meager beginnings of photography. The photo above could be the world’s first portrait although I’ve seen other photos that share the distinction. To me, the low-tech analog nature of these old processes produce amazing images. Another lesson in not relying on technology to make great iamges. Check out the article and let me know what you think. Anyone out there still using film? How about Daguerrotype?

This could be the first portrait ever.

I threw a few lapses together for a juried exhibition at the Lancaster Museum of Art Gallery. They said they never get video entries.

I love an artform where you’re called “young” at 36. I’m actually 36 + I’m a photographer = I’m still young. There it is: proof that I’m young in equation form. Jokes aside, Pep Bonet is the real deal. This is a great interview with a very talented photojournalist. Worth 7 minutes of your time for sure, and theres some great advice for all photographers and well, everyone. Enjoy.

A great way to get quality images for cheap is to acquire a 50mm lens. If you’re a Canon or Nikon shooter you have a number of choices. In a strange vortex where price doesn’t always reflect quality, the 50mm 1.8 lens costs $100 for (both brands) and it’ll blow the socks of most of your zooms for image quality.

Spare another few hundred and you can get the 1.4. I’ve been shooting with this thing for 8 months now and I love it to death. Sure a perfect portrait may need a little more compression than 50mm can give you, even on a crop camera, but this thing rules for low light, shallow depth of field and it really delivers intimate portraits. I am so completely head over heels for this lens, the 50mm 1.2 seems reasonable now.  This collection of photos is from my first session with the lens, exploring one of those million tiny places in Los Angeles that is its own universe.

After years of manually acquiring time lapse movies, I finally bought an intervalometer. I’ll never make money using it most likely, but its a purely fun purchase that I made when I finally found an alternative to the pricey Canon TC-80N3, which can go for $150. So far, the cheap Chinese version I found on Amazon is holding up. It seems to work perfectly thus far and my only complaint was outlined on Amazon in the review over and over: to turn the unit off, you must remove the batteries. I knew what I was getting into and for the price I’d be stupid not to try it.  The trade off: I get sit in the warm car while my 7D time laspes in the sub-freezing wind outside. You can’t argue with that for less than $20. I shot the video above just a few days ago and a, quite happy with the results. Thanks to Synthecircuit and No Exit Records for the sound track. All I did was drop the song in and it fit perfectly with no editing whatsoever. Fortuitous.