As you may or may not know, my dad got married this afternoon! It was a very special, intimate family ceremony in Richmond. We have enjoyed getting to know Barbara over the past few years and we’re so excited for them to be entering into this new phase of life! I seem to have a hard time going to weddings without taking pictures, so I obviously had to capture some special moments of the day! I won’t take long to write now because it’s been a long day and Sarah and I have an episode of The Office to watch! But for now, here are two quick images for you to get a quick glimpse of the day!
This week’s foto Friday entry is a lesson in anatomy in regards to how your sinuses are connected. When we were visiting friends in Charlotte a few months ago, Patrick and I had a good time messing around with our cameras after the kids were in bed one night. I brought out the wireless triggers and my flash to see what we could come up with while the wives talked about whatever it is that ladies talk about while their husbands are putting flashes into their mouths. At any rate, I obviously can’t take credit for snapping this shot, but I can take credit for having a huge mouth and nice sinuses! Please don’t judge me. Stay tuned for what might come about during our upcoming dudes-only, college-buddies weekend in a few weeks when there are seven of us guys alone in a house in the mountains! It’s gonna be grand!
Wednesday the 24th was our daughter Kyla’s sixth birthday! I know I don’t look old enough to have a six year old, but alas, I am. Because her birthday fell smack dab in the middle of one of the craziest weeks ever, we held off on the real celebrating until yesterday. And because she is such a popular young lady, we had to hold two parties for her since our house would have been bursting at the seems if we would have tried to fit everyone into one party! This is the first year since she was born that we weren’t living either a six-hour flight (Los Angeles) or six-hour drive (Charlotte) away from family, so everyone was excited to be together!
We started out with the party for her friends and my nephews and nieces in the morning! Here’s our big girl wearing her birthday crown Sarah made for her last year.
I had an old roll of photo background paper we used to use for the photobooth laying around in the garage, so we cut up big sheets of it for the kids to draw themselves. That was a huge hit!
Next up, we moved on to the first round of cake and presents! I love watching Kyla’s expression with her friends. She loves them so much.
Once that party cleared out, my brother Matt stayed around so that the cousins could play together for a while. In all reality, I think he stayed so he could have an excuse to jump on the trampoline!
My nephew managed to get some pretty serious air too! Matt looks like he’s in one of those old Toyota commercials in this one. “I love what it does for me! Toyota!” Sorry, I used to watch too much TV.
The second party began a little later, and soon grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends filled the house! It was a great gathering and Kyla scored some pretty cool presents! Avery lucked out pretty well too because she got a few presents herself.
Then it was on to cake, part two!
The day wrapped up with a trip to get pizza with everyone, two tired little girls, and two exhausted parents! It was a fantastic day, though, and one Kyla will hopefully always remember. Birthdays are supposed to be magical for little girls and a little exhaustion is worth it! Kyla, happy birthday! We love you so much!
And speaking of little girls, Sarah’s sister Rosie is due pretty soon with our second niece! Here are Sarah and Rosie together with their pregnant bellies!
This week’s foto Friday post continually cracks me up! This is so surreal. I took this at Meghan and John’s Halloween wedding where the guests were all decked out in their Halloween best. I doubt I’ll ever get a shot like this for the rest of my life.
I am so excited right now! I mentioned a few weeks ago that our website we designed using Showit’s free version was up for 2009 Showit Free site of the year. After what seemed like an eternity of waiting for the results, I got an email this afternoon announcing that we won 1st Place in Showit’s Best of 2009 Free at Last category!!!
We’re so honored to be recognized in this way and we are incredibly grateful to those of you who voted for our site! What an encouraging way to jump start our Spring (assuming that the snow will eventually melt and that Spring is indeed on the way) and we’re looking forward to keeping the momentum going for a great 2010!
Yesterday was one of those days. You know, the type of day where you just have to buckle down and do something that isn’t so fun, but is necessary. For me, the something that had to be done was to work in the property we own and rent out. The house is in between tenants and it needed some painting and cleaning and a few little other touch-ups. Now, that might not seem like too big of a deal, but the house we own is in Charlotte, NC (4.5 hours away) where we used to live!
Normally, I would have gone down in the morning, worked all day, crashed on a friend’s couch, and headed home the next day. This weekend, however, Sarah was on call for a client, so I couldn’t be gone overnight in case her client went into labor! Our kids are pretty independent, but since they’re 5 and 3, we’re not too comfortable leaving them on their own overnight. Maybe next year.
At any rate, my day was to include 9+ hours of driving and 9 hours of labor, so I got out the door at about 5:30AM. The trip down was pleasant and I enjoyed a good cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich as I drove. I played my favorite road-trip game of hitting scan on the radio and seeing if I can name the song before it switches to the next station. I have some strange ability to remember song lyrics and since I love all genres of music, I can pretty much tear anyone up in that game -try me sometime, I dare you! Since most of my road trips now include Sarah and our kids, I don’t get to play too often, so I truly enjoyed playing by myself.
My time in Charlotte went well and the house looks great…now we just need some renters (that’s a story for another day). I painted, scrubbed, and painted some more. I also listened to a lot of NPR while I worked. I don’t do that much anymore, either, but I really enjoy their in-depth stories on things I never even knew existed. I took pictures of the house and caught up with our great neighbors. I hopped back in the car and headed for home, tired and hungry at about 7:00pm.
The trip home was going well. I caught up on the phone with my brother (even though I missed a turn while we chatted), I talked with Sarah and heard about her day with the girls, and I sang Michael Jackson, Elton John, and Mariah Carey songs at the top of my lungs. But then I felt the need for some coffee.
If you’ve never traveled between Charlotte and Charlottesville, let me tell you…it is BORING. There’s not much in between. I finally found a McDonald’s and decided their coffee would do. I’m kind of a coffee snob, but you gotta do what you gotta do. The line inside was crazy long and wasn’t moving, so I hopped back in the car and kept going. A few miles later, I found another McDonald’s. They were out of coffee! Unbelievable! Hardee’s was there too, but I was scared to try their coffee.
It was getting late and I was getting bored. So I did what anyone else would do to keep themselves awake…I took out my camera! I decided that since it was taking me forever to get home, I might as well have some fun.
First stop, the Piggly Wiggly! I always think of Driving Ms. Daisy whenever I see one of these stores. Love that movie!
I kept my camera out and took a few shots while I was driving to make life interesting. I figured it was good practice. If I can take some decent shots while I’m driving in the dark, surely I can take even better pictures when I can see what I’m doing! Warning: Don’t try this at home.
Self portrait. I look great, don’t I? Lighting is courtesy of the map light in the ceiling of the car.
Finally, the road started looking like this below. I knew I needed coffee, and fast.
Thankfully, I found a Sheetz in Lynchburg and knew that their coffee was mostly safe. I hopped in and grabbed my cup!
Fueled up, I was ready to finish my trip. I also knew that I was going to be going through one of the worst parts of the trip where lots of deer like to hop out into the road and it was nearly midnight! But I was up for the challenge. Sarah called one last time to tell me she was off to bed and to remind me to watch for deer. If my life was a movie, that certainly would have been some foreshadowing!
At any rate, you can probably guess what happened next. You’re right! I heard “Beat It” on the radio again! It was great, I love that song. No really, I did hit a deer. I was literally 10 miles from home. Right outside of Charlottesville. I promise, my camera was not out. The picture of my coffee was the last one I took. I was being cautious. It was surreal.
I was the only car on the pitch-black road. I had seen beady eyes on the side of the road along the way, and had even slowed a few times to let some deer cross the road in front of me. But I was on a highway and I was generally traveling about 60 mph. Finally, out of nowhere, I see the front of a deer in full sprint crossing into my lane from the left. I hit the brakes, and BAM! As quickly as it appeared from the darkness, it’s lifeless body slid back across the lane and disappeared into the darkness. I pulled to the side of the road, stopped, and stepped out into the silent black.
I couldn’t see the deer across the street at all because it was so dark. I checked the front of the car and I couldn’t find any damage. Strange. I climbed back in the car and headed for home, driving extremely slow, and thanking God for keeping me safe. I knew how fortunate I was to have not experienced a worse accident. I then realized that my left headlight was a little lower than the right, so I found a gas station and this is what I saw.
It’s a pretty big dent and I’m not sure what will have to be done to fix it, but like I said, I am so thankful it was not worse! So yeah, yesterday was one of those days.
I’ve been getting quite a few questions recently from other photographers on who designed our portfolio site. So I thought it might be useful to create an FAQ post on that topic! If you’re not interested in this topic, feel free to skip today’s post and come back soon! Here we go:
Who designed your main site?
Up until a little over a year ago, I was designing my own website. I did everything from html templates to trying out flash templates to creating a site on Wordpress. I found that I was spending more time on that than shooting and I wasn’t very happy with how it was looking because, well, I’m a photographer and a wanna-be web designer, not a real web designer.
I then faced a choice of how to make our site. We didn’t have a ton of money to throw into it (who does?), but we wanted it to look good! I settled on either bludomain or showit. I know there are a bajillion other ways to do it, but those two companies are widely used and are geared towards service for photographers specifically. They both have their pros and cons, but we decided on bludomain simply because it was a one-time cost (outside of the low monthly cost of hosting which I was already paying for our blog).
Bludomain is a great solution if you’re looking for a quick setup. You basically choose a template, create your site by uploading images and filling in the text boxes. Their support is good and they install all of the technical stuff on your server for you. The drawback for Bludomain is that you really have to choose your template wisely because there isn’t much customization once you buy it. So be careful and fully understand what each template does and doesn’t do before you jump in if you go with them!
Now, having said that, we are hoping to switch to Showit in the near future. If you haven’t checked them out, you really should. It costs $39/month for their pro subscription, but you can find some coupon codes around to make it a bit cheaper. The guys at Showit are amazing and are working hard to make their flash sites searchable by search engines (which is commonly used as a protest against flash pages) and viewable on smart phones like the iphone (which is actually somewhat doable with showit now). With Showit, you can also embed your whole site on facebook and tag clients in the site so that it shows up on their wall which will bring more people to your site.
We created a free showit site a few months ago and we love it! The free version is a good first step, but you can’t have your own domain – it has to be yourdomain.showitsite.com which doesn’t look that great in my opinion. BUT if you’re starting out and have no money to spend, this is a GREAT option! Going with showit does take a bit more setup and can be a little confusing if you’ve never designed anything like this before. They have templates you can use, though, to help you get started and there are designers that will design the site for you for a fee. The software is free to download so it’s worth checking out to see what you think!
I hope that helps a bit. I know there are so many options when you’re looking to start something like this and it can get quite overwhelming. Let me know if I can help in any other way! I’m not the expert on the topic, but I’ve always found it helpful to get other photographer’s ideas and opinions so I’m here to help as well!
In keeping with the long-standing, two-week tradition of foto Friday, here is another one of my favorite images! Shot at Paul and Lorena’s Miami wedding in November, this photo proves that the family that rocks together, stays together! These two are incredibly talented musicians and provided some fantastic entertainment at their own reception!
I shot this at ISO 1000 with my 35mm 1.8 lens at f5.0 and 1/40. The slow shutter speed and relatively small aperture allowed me to get plenty of ambient light in the foreground from the chandeliers and sconces while the stage spots lit the band. I didn’t use any on-camera flash, but had my off-camera lighting set up in the back of the stage facing the camera to provide rim lighting and a bit of depth to the stage.
Now that Jill and John have had the chance to see all of their wedding day images, it’s our turn to share them with you! Their wedding was such a treat – I truly enjoyed editing these images in part because there were so many memorable images – from a beautiful reception with lots of fun dancing to the most dramatic bouquet toss we’ve ever seen! Enjoy!
