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,…
They told her they were having “guy time,” and the three of them, Mark, Joe, and my brother Albert, ran off to conspire at the beach, leaving her behind with Nikki for the day. Shelly imagined the boys were hanging out a bar somewhere, watching the game. She certainly didn’t suspect this. She was on…
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,…
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….
Sometimes, it rains. Literally, metaphorically, sometimes we have to adapt and change our plans. With some things going on in Silvia’s life and forecasts of rain for the week, we seriously considered cancelling the engagement shoot. But I am so very glad we didn’t. It became a reprieve from the rest of the world, a…
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!…
You might not see the silly side of them right away, poised as they are as the lawyer and the police officer. But give it just a little bit of time and the right conditions, and their playfulness comes right through. They’ll laugh together and be goofy together, but they’ll also cry together and they…
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)…