More Ben & Cindy

Tonight's image is another from the session with Ben & Cindy. These chairs were set up for some play that was either taking place later on or had already taken place and they made for a nice patterned background. It was starting to get dark at this point but I was still able to pull off some shots with the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens.

Hopefully everyone's Christmas was as good as ours. Jacob got hooked up with a bunch of goodies and Jayden enjoyed her first Christmas. We started off the day hanging out at my mom's house. My sister is in from Arizona and we had a nice time visiting with her. My brother hooked me up with some bowling items so I can eventually join his team. I never thought I would enjoy bowling so much but it is actually quite fun. It also gives me time to hang out with my bro which is always an adventure. Jess got most of the items she was wanting as well. It's so tough to get in the Christmas spirit when the weather is as beautiful as it was today. The rest of the country is in heavy snow storms and I wore shorts and a T-shirt all day! We also hung out with Jess' family which was nice as we don't hang out as often as we should. We finished off the day with a prime rib dinner and a call to my dad. Maybe I can get him out here sometime for the holidays. Overall, the day was great and it was really nice hanging out with family. I will be posting some pix from the day as soon as I get them processed.

Stay tuned for more images with Ben & Cindy. I need to go as my little girl is getting ready for the 2:00-3:00 am feeding. I am going to deviate from this session tomorrow night so I can post some pix of Jayden's first Christmas along with her brother. I was also playing videographer today so I don't have too many shots. I do have enough though for a few posts.

Once again, I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and enjoyed time with your families.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! I can't believe how fast this year has gone. My baby girl is almost 8 months and my son is almost 9 years old. It's crazy how time flies once you have kids.

Posted tonight is an image of our friends Ben & Cindy. We always have a nice time hanging out with these two. This image was taken in Old Town after we stopped off to get some Mexican food last weekend. I thought the session was going to be tough considering Ben's height. One thing I should have noticed at the time of capture is the placement of Ben's right hand. He really is grabbing the wall! So many things to consider when posing people. Besides that, I really like this image. I dig the relaxed pose and I like how the door's darkness separates Ben from the background. Cindy's dark hair separates her from the white building. The sun was going down really fast but we were able to bounce around to about 5 different places to capture some shots. I will be posting more from this session as I process them. Thanks again you two for helping me out with my "multiple people" portraits. I really appreciate it.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas. Enjoy the time off and enjoy the time spent with family.

Back to the Ally

Here is to make up for the post with Rob yesterday. I have a few more to post from this session and that should take place over the next few days. This is going to be a short post today because I need to get some last minute Christmas stuff done. In the meantime, enjoy the image. With an image like this, who needs my rants anyway.

Blog has been updated

Well, no new images for this post. It's more of a "I got off my duff and finally moved everything to this blog" post. I should have some images in the archives that I should be able to post tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, you will have to read my rants.

I am going to be trying to expand my stock portfolio while I am on vacation for a week and a half. I plan on doing some lighting with LED's. I know what I have in my mind so let's see if I can actually reproduce the images I want. I need to get the lights first and I plan on bringing in Rob for the shoot so we can collaborate. Speaking of Rob, I do have a post for tonight. Here is big bad Roberto striking a pose during the shoot with Ally. I don't know about you, but I would rather look at Ally posing for the camera!

A simple post turns lengthy

I love black & white images. B&W photos in magazines always catch my attention and this was the first thing I thought of when converting this. I wanted the image to have the feel of something you would see in Vogue or something similar. There's so much I like about this image. This is one of my favorites from the shoot. The pose was all Ally (I didnt' direct her at all in this shot) and everything just came together. The way her left leg runs parallel with the shape of the rock on the left. The gentle S-Curve with her left hand adds another dimension. And then there's the angle of her head which runs parallel with her right leg. The more I study this photo, it IS my favorite from the session.

I have been doing a lot more reading & studying lately to take my photography to the next level. A few months ago, I started getting bogged down and getting frustrated with my images. I felt like I was at a stand-still with my images and my post-processing. I would sit at the computer for hours on one image playing with different settings and get nowhere. I ended up having a 3 month break from photo sessions and I feel like the break I took was the best thing I could do. I started critiquing the crap out of my images and making a real assessment of where I was going with an image before I even touched a tool in Photoshop. There are a lot of great photographers out there and I can become frustrated easily when comparing my work to theirs. That's part of what drives me to outperform my last shoot. Take the good and the bad from a shoot and learn from it. More of my reading lately has to deal with the actual shoot and the posing. I feel really good about my latest post techniques but you need a great starting image. A lot of my late nights are spent looking at ads, watching movies, and I find myself watching more commercials on TV lately. It usually takes me a while to get through a movie because I am looking at the lighting or the camera angle and trying to dissect the shot so I can improve my abilities and give the client images that they are truly happy with.

I know I have said this what seems like a thousand times this week, but working with Ally was what I needed to get inspired again. I'm just giving credit where credit's due so thanks again Ally. And a huge thanks to Rob for setting up the shoot. Everything just came together at a perfect time for me.

I was just going to post the B&W image tonight but I wanted to see what people's opinions of the color shot were as well. For those that made it through the text of my post tonight, thanks for hanging in there while I aired some thoughts.


Oh yeah, I finally got around to updating my website to take out the wedding section considering I am concentrating on my portraiture and commercial-type work. I also changed the image on the home page to the B&W image posted tonight.

I will be posting a few more images over the weekend so check back in. Enjoy the weekend.

Ally continued

Considering I haven't posted any photos of Ally since Sunday, I decided to post 3 tonight! I have some more that I will be posting this weekend. Thanks again Ally for giving me such a great variety of photos to post. You rock. It's been another busy week with post-processing and trying to get some sleep. As you can see from the time of this post, sleep wasn't a priority tonight. Volleyball is going to be rough tomorrow at noon.

I would write some more but I need to get some sleep.

Just a reminder that I will also be updating this blog sometime over the next few days with all the archived posts from the old blog.

Let's Hear Your Opinions

I am curious to hear from my readers their opinions on the new blog. Hopefully what I am about to write doesn't bias your decision in any way. I just want to shed some light on my thoughts.

First off, let me cover the reasons for switching over to this blog. The ability for you all to leave comments was the major reason for moving my blog. I think it will be a lot easier for people to comment directly from the blog instead of writing an e-mail to let me know their thoughts. I also like the fact that you can subscribe to RSS feeds and get an update whenever I post. How this works right now, I have no idea. I know how it works for other people's blogs I have subscribed to but I still need to test this one out (I usually get an e-mail update from a few photographers and that is purdy sweeeeet). Hopefully this one works the same.

I'm also debating on whether to keep the white background with black text like the old blog or should I switch to a black background with the white text. Let's hear what you think.

Labels were another reason for switching over. If you look to the right side of the blog, underneath "blog archives", you will notice the element called "Labels". This blog allows me to add labels to a post so readers can sort the archived posts by these tags. For example, a reader wants to see the latest photos of my family (Jake & Jayden are the usual subjects). All the posts that have photos of my ninos will be labeled "Family". Once you click on this link, all the posts with that label will be displayed. It's a way for me to organize my posts to make it easier for whomever is viewing my blog. See that! I'm always thinking of you and how I can save your time in your busy schedules (my goal is to actually get you to spend more time looking at my photography which might not save you any time at all).

Now for the bad. First off, I can't stand the small photos that are linked to a bigger photo. I don't like unnecessary clicks and I wish I could upload a photo at the size I specify and it displays at that size. This was the main reason I created my old blog. I have yet to find out why blogger is like Microsoft Word in that it formats things in ways I don't want it to. That means more time for me to "play" with settings and still not get the results I am after. Secondly, I liked the way my old blog followed the design elements of my main website. It would be nice to have a seamless blog. A lot of time went into the design of my old site and I wish the blog matched.

So there you have my opinions on the new blog. Overall, I think the good far outweigh the bad. I still want to hear from you all though. Don't hold back. And if you do comment on this, thank you for taking the time to participate in my market research.

Now it's time to get back to processing some photos. By the way, I will be adding the previous posts from my old blog throughout the week.

Ally

In order to make up for my lack of posting last week, I will be posting images this week from today's photo shoot with Ally. She had contacted Rob a few weeks ago in regards to a photo session. I mentioned last month that Rob and I were working together more with our photography. Working with him pushes me even harder than I normally push myself. Rob is one of them dudes that is just naturally good at whatever he decides to pursue. About the only thing I can beat him at is Madden on XBOX360 (it probably helps that he usually chooses Detroit but hey, he's making that decision for himself). Anyway, not only does this make me push myself, it also gives us some time to hang out.

So Rob calls me the other day and says that the photo session is still on with Ally in spite of the weekend's rainy forecast. The weather was perfect today for some location shots. Working with Ally was a complete pleasure. I wish everyone I met was as nice as her and her dude, Joe. They were great to hang out with for the 4 hour session and Ally just worked the camera! It's a different ball game when you are working with someone who has experience modeling. She would tweak her pose in between shots which gave very subtle differences to ensure just the right look, which meant very little instruction from me on the posing. This allowed me to concentrate on the composition and get the shots I was looking for.

This image was taken in La Jolla and is one of many that will be posted this week as I work on the post-processing. I hope you enjoy (you can click on the photo to view it larger, which I highly recommend).

Ally was great to work with and I hope to arrange some more photo sessions with her in the near future.

Jayden's 1st Holiday Season

Sorry for the delay with last week's posts. I have been busy as ever. This is the first time I have been on the computer all week. I'm gonna start this week off with a photo of Jayden dressed up all pretty. We had "Breakfast with Santa" last weekend and the kids were dressed up. Of course I had to get some pix of my baby girl. Isn't she a doll? She's getting ready to crawl so I should have some new pix sometime soon of that. In the meantime, I will be posting some photos from a photo shoot today with Rob...more to follow soon!

Mason's 1st Birthday

I can't believe how fast time is going by. Christmas is just around the corner. We went to Vegas a while back to see some friends we haven't seen in a long time and also to celebrate their son's 1st birthday. It was a wonderful weekend and it was a chance to photograph the party so the parents could enjoy the event. Craig and Christie were so kind to let us stay in their sweet pad for the extended weekend. Craig and Christie went all out for this party. The Harley theme set the mood for a good time for everyone invited. Mason had a blast digging into his cake. I'm just wondering how much cake he took in for this look (I think I looked like this after Thanksgiving).

Here's Mason's cool little VANS. It's all about the details during these times. They grow up so fast.



Thanks again for a wonderful weekend. It was great seeing you all and we are looking forward to another trip.

For those keeping track, I set a record in November with the amount of posts! I hope you all are enjoying the photos and the write-ups as much as I enjoy posting them. 2008 is just around the corner and I can't wait to update the new offerings for clients!