After I shot my first few rolls of film, I did a little experiment. I sent one roll to my local lab, Oscar’s Photo Lab, in San Francisco, and I sent the rest to Richard Photo Lab in Los Angeles. Richard Photo Lab is easily the most well-known film processing lab in the country today,…
Film vs. Digital. It’s become clear that it’s no longer a matter of technical quality or megapixels. Digital is the norm of the industry. In many ways, it has “won.” But there are still a select few photographers who shoot 100% film even today, in 2011, and they are standouts in the industry. Jose Villa,…
Is there anything more beautiful than getting back to the roots of what drew you to something in the first place? For me, shooting film has been an incredible journey back and a total jolting leap forward at the same time. Shooting film is humbling. You have to get back to basics in your technique,…
And now we wait. Yes, I shot film. Real, tangible, old school film. I’ve been seduced by film photography. I love everything about its look, the buttery softness of the highlights, the beautiful colors, porcelain skin tones… everything. So after attending Jonathan Canlas’ Film is Not Dead platform class at WPPI, I had a new…
Earlier this month, I taught the final workshop of our four-part series. It was a live portrait shoot with two wonderful models, Henry M. Chu and Shannon. We were rained in and spent most of the session in a loading dock, but with all the awesome participants, I think it turned out just fine. First,…
This weekend, the fabric swatches will manifest as tablecloths and linens, the myriad glass containers will be gathered into perfect little vignettes, the splashes of coral will be replaced with gorgeous blooms. All of these mockups and ideas will be transformed into a wonderful styled shoot. It’s a true collaborative event involving several several amazing…
If you can shoot in a big square box, you can shoot anywhere. I told them from the beginning, the theme of today is going to be resourcefulness. We were rained in. It was our final workshop in the 4-part series, and we were supposed to do a live shoot with models and the whole…
Tens of thousands of photographers in Las Vegas? It must be WPPI, the annual Wedding & Portrait Photographers (International) convention. This was my first time at WPPI, and I was prepared to be completely overwhelmed and hoping to be inspired. As it turns out, inspiration trumped overwhelmed-ness, and all in all, I had a great time….
Just wanted to share a couple images from our last workshop here in Mission Bay, San Francisco. This one was all about culling and editing, and we started with an exercise in narrowing down images to tell the story of a day– what I do as a wedding photographer for every single wedding I blog!…
I don’t think I will ever stop getting pre-wedding jitters or being anxious the day before a wedding. But it’s a good kind of nervousness that reflects the weight of responsibility on my role as a photographer, and I think it aptly keeps me in line. It matters to me that I don’t screw up,…
I waited and waited, and it took several weeks– longer than usual, I was told– but one day after I received Connie & Tony’s guest book in the mail, I got a giant box with this precious cargo inside: my sample wedding albums! For size comparison, you can see Connie & Tony’s 12″x12″ guest book…
I am halfway through teaching my workshop series for beginner photographers. Part 1 was titled Photography Foundations, and it was all about the technical side of photography– aperture, shutter, exposure, and all the goodies. Part 2 was this past month (January) and we covered all sorts of goodies about composition (rule of thirds, balancing voids)…