Will and Jenn

These two people live far away from me, but somehow distance doesn’t separate us. I’m from Georgia originally. Will and I were in our first band together. We went to high school together. So when I heard that Will and Jenn got engaged I was beside myself with happiness. Will was one of my groomsmen just 4 short years ago, before I even started shooting weddings. I wouldn’t have missed this one for the world. It was a grand evening catching up with old friends and making some new ones.
I traveled light on this one and although I brought an umbrella and a softbox, I was unable to use them due to the wind and lack of proper sand bags or assistant. So it was all about bounce flash, or fill flash and for this I used and promptly lost my beloved Rogue Flashbender. Ill definitely be buying another one of those. So I ended up shooting the whole thing without modifiers, something I haven’t done for about two years. All shots are with either 10-22 or 70-200IS II and Canon7D. I did get to shoot two bodies, I usually shoot one. I thought it would be too cumbersome, but it turned out to be quite convenient and I didn’t miss fumbling around and changing lenses, that’s for sure. Glendalough Manor turned out to be one of the most accommodating, photographer-friendly venues I’ve ever worked< I can't to shoot again in Georgia, I'd love for it to be there again. In a shocking coincidence, Winslow Thomas, an old buddy from my days at the Atlanta Shakespeare Company, turned out to be the officiant. I've been in California since 1998, but I return to shoot this wedding and I ran into two old friends in a town of millions. What are the chances?
It felt amazing to catch up with old friends, take some photos and visit the state I grew up in. As I flew West, I must have been polluting the heartland with contrails of nostalgia. Click here for the full set of high resolution images.
It was a beautiful day, one I won't forget.

Burning Man & The Great Ticket Shortage of 2012

Today, the Burning Man Organization will announce its new policies regarding tickets to this year’s event. Growth, permit concerns and an aging ticket system has taken its toll and has caused, what many burners see as a huge disaster. Many of the amazing and mind-blowing art and projects that makes Burning Man what it is each year are threatened, because theme camps and project teams have received only about 25% of the tickets they need to complete their projects.

There’s a lot of debate out there right now and a lot of people who are devastated. I get it. I’ve only been once and there hasn’t been a day since I got back that I haven’t thought about its effect on me on how I can re-arrange my life to fit Black Rock City into it. Should Burning Man move to a private location? Should we use non-transferable tickets? Many questions remain unanswered. I’m not sure what will or should happen, but I do know that we can all find ourselves back there again. I have hope that this will create a better Black Rock City and that we can all be together again.

It is speculated that later today, they will announce a plan to place the tickets in the hands of those who have the know-how, resources and experience to make Burning Man amazing. I don’t consider myself on of those people, but I still hold hope that I’ll make it back. There’s still Burning Man’s STEP program, which is supposed to help facilitate a secure exchange of tickets at face value amongst burners. I’ve got my fingers crossed. Hopefully, today will be another step towards a better event and you can bet your ass there’s thousands of people holding their breath right now.

Last year, the planets finally aligned and I was privileged enough to make it to the playa. For years, I made excuses or had my head in other places, so I never made the trip. When I finally did, it was everything I hoped. It changed me forever.

Thank you citizens of Black Rock City, from DPW all the way to the Sparkle Ponies. Whatever happens today,  I hope to see you at home and good luck with tickets!

 

I will never forget the time I spent in the desert with 50,000 of my closest friends sharing ideas, living with wild abandon and being astounded by each other. It shook me up and poured me over some ice.

Every day since, I’ve been trying to hold on to what I learned there. I left some of my prejudice and judgement out there on the playa, gasping for air and I thought I didn’t bring any. I don’t know how long its going to last, but I see things differently. It’s easier to be in the moment and its easier to open up to people. Those were two things I thought I was good at. I know now that I do not know how to give.

I can hardly describe the feelings I had over the course of that week and I won’t even try to. I will say that my heart and my brain are different now and I want to stay this way. I want to hold on to that Its-A-Wonderful-Life feeling that I have right now and I want to carve in stone the truce I’ve made with everyone in the world, good or bad. Its easy to write it all off as some giant desert art party, but it is a very special place on the border between personal freedom and the law where people treat each other with more respect and empathy than I’ve ever seen. People are more real, less diluted.

They say it’s the 4th largest city in Nevada (for a week). They say its the most educated city in the world. I’ve been to a thousand cities and it is impossible to compare Black Rock City to any of them. It’s more a feeling than a place.

Black Rock City is now my favorite city. I had too much fun to take the time and really take careful photos, a mistake I won’t repeat next year. I was perfectly content at the time to just be in such a wonderful place with such amazingly talented and creative people. I was told not to shoot at all, but thats just crazy talk.

I normally shoot digital, but I decided just before we left to shoot film and I wasn’t even really prepared, I just grabbed the stuff I had lying around. I did however acquire an instant camera that I fell in love with.

Now, I’m find myself shopping for toyhaulers, golf carts and scissor-lifts, planning my future around how I’m going to make it back and how I can apply what I learned there to my everyday life. I miss the playa more and more everyday, but one of the lessons of Burning Man is live in the moment, so I’m off to be with my lovely wife. Hopefully, I’ll see you there next year.

Meant to Be – Jonathan & Charity’s Wedding

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….

Pep Bonet -emerging photographer

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.

The End of an Era

Steve McCurry took the above image on Kodachrome in 1984.

The last Kodachrome developing machine in the world will be shutting down at the end of the today. Forever.
If you’re like me, born in the mid seventies, then you mark one of the last generations to grow up with that look and feel of what some say was the best film ever made. In a way, I’ll be chasing that look forever, slightly saturating my images in post and boosting coors here or there to make up for the fact the we are now all shooting digital. Watch this film below for the best tribute I’ve seen to Kodachrome.

100 year old COLOR photographs and Gary Vaynerchuk says quit your job

An article at Boston.com features color photographs taken by a Russian Tsar’s photographer,  Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. This amazing photo was taken 20 years before conventional color film was invented. Prokudin-Gorskii used the three-color process developed by James Clerk Maxwell. Some astrophotographers still use this process today. I hope I’m not the only one that thinks these photos are very cool. Aside from being great compositions, they prove that indeed “the old days” were not actually in black and white as previously reported.

A good friend sent me a link to this guy: Gary Vaynerchuk. I had seen him do some wine tasting videos I ran into after researching the Caduceus brand being produced by Merkin Vinyards by an unamed rock star. I had never seen him speak in a motivational setting, but after watching just a few minutes, I knew I had a lot to learn from this guy. Take just afew minutes to watch this video and you’ll be better of for doing so.