A few finished albums.
With our return to wedding photography, has come a return to wedding album design. When we took our sabbatical from weddings a few years back to concentrate on our growing volleyball photography service, one thing I knew I would miss about weddings was the opportunity to design albums. So, I came up with our Senior albums to fill that void.
I am happy to once again be photographing weddings and designing albums for them - I had a great time designing these books. I tackled them in order of when we photographed the wedding, that meant I was doing the largest and most challenging album first. In fact, the photography from the wedding was so extensive, that I actually created two albums for this wedding - one solely of portrait work, and one the story of the day.
I'm presenting only a few page spreads from each finished album here. Each image is two pages. (There will be a very thin split down the middle of each for binding.) If you would like to see the full designs, click on the links to galleries below.
Heather and Austen Verst were married on the 14th of June in Berkeley, California.
Kelly & Marc Cavallero were married on the 5th of July in Sacramento, California at the Arden Hills Country Club.
Joseph & Melody Najera were married on the 12th of July in El Dorado Hills, California.
All of these will be gorgeously handbound in custom, black leather albums. I can't wait to see them when they are finished!
Cisco Grove - in search of Fall colors.
Well Fall is here and the weather is definitely cooling. Obviously, this time of year stands out for photographers who like to photograph landscapes. The vibrant Fall colors add wonderful splashes of interest to images.
A number of years back (2002) when I was still photographing film, I was on my way back from a family portrait in Reno and I saw this blaze of color along the side of the freeway. I took the nearest exit and it turned out this place was just west of Truckee called Cisco Grove and, unlike the rest of the forest in that area, is not populated by evergreens so it gave off this wonderful explosion of Fall colors. I spent an hour or two photographing and headed home, and I've been meaning to get back up there in the Fall ever since.
But, until this last Sunday, I've never made it.
Ryan and I hopped in the car and took the hour and a quarter drive up the hill. Fall is definitely making itself felt, but the full spectrum of colors is not quite there yet. Still, I spent some time there with my girl and we wandered around a bit and made some images. Nothing truly spectacular, but it was a nice evening. Again, just like Taylor, Ryan felt the effects of the cold before I did ... I suppose it probably had to do with the fact that she had no socks on and was wearing sandals.
Ultimately, I did get a few images worth sharing. I hope to make it up again soon and catch the colors in greater intensity.
And, of course, I had to include a portrait of my lovely assistant, in all of her bundled up glory.
Taylor Japhet - Nevada Union HS Senior.
Taylor is another of our volleyball buddies. It turns out we've been photographing her since she was in 8th grade, which I find amazing. (It's really crazy how fast the last 7 years have gone by since we started our studio). We've photographed her playing club volleyball, playing high school ball for Roseville Highschool and for Nevada Union where she is playing her second season after having moved to Grass Valley last year. We even got to photograph her State Championship match for Nevada Union last year.
So, after all of that, we were really happy to be asked to photograph her Senior Portraits for her. After photographing her as an athlete for so many years, it was great to see her outside of volleyball and get to create portraits of her as a beautiful young woman.
Working with her was really a lot of fun - Jason and I photographed and got to hang out with Taylor and her mom, Tosha, as well as meet Taylor's boyfriend, Zach, (who made into more than a few pictures) and meet Zach's mom, Laurie.
We photographed at Empire Mine which is BEAUTIFUL. I've never photographed there and was simply blown away by the grounds. It's a State Park near Grass Valley that is immaculately maintained and is a portrait photographer's paradise. I actually could have kept photographing for hours, but there comes a time in each session when the novelty of being photographed wears off - that time for Taylor was about the time her lips started turning blue from the temperature drop. It wasn't cold, really, but then I have plenty of insulation on me so it only felt "cool". In contrast, trim, athletic bodies aren't so good at holding in heat!
Taryn Wright - Montana State Setter
I always enjoy these kinds of assignments. The other night I went out to Sac State to photograph the Montana State team. Their setter is sophomore Taryn Wright, who is the daughter of Alynn Wright, the coach for the St. Francis High School volleyball team (and also a coach for Force Volleyball Club).
I have been photographing Taryn for years now - all throughout high school - and for the last several years I have been creating gift collages for graduating Senior athletes at St. Francis high school. These are collages of the athletes in action which are purchased by the team and are presented by the team as a thank you gift to each graduating Senior. I got to design one for Taryn a couple of years ago, but haven't been able to photograph her since.
Taryn's always been a great setter, and a lot of fun to watch - very energetic and expressive - and photograph. I got a ton of great images of the entire team, but here are a few standouts of Taryn ...
The match was a great one - it went back and forth a full five sets, but Sac State pulled through in the end.
Next up is Alynn's son, Chris, who is a soccer standout for New Mexico. He'll be playing at Sac State on the 7th of November.
Sheldon team pictures updated.
While processing the images from the Sheldon team shoot, I was not happy with how the Varsity team picture turned out. It was the result of missing a slight posing gaff which caused the entire group to be lopsided in the final image. Technically the image wasn't bad - the exposure and color was good, it was sharp, everyone's eyes were open and it represented the team. However, our goal is to provide the best images possible - we would want to be happy with them if we were a player or parent - so I emailed Randy, the coach, and scheduled a reshoot of the Varsity team picture.
The shoot itself was simple. I scouted a location close to the gym so that their practice would be disrupted as little as possible. This turned out to be just down the hill from the gym, overlooking a treelined field. We found a shady spot that I could light and was luckily facing into the wind (it was REALLY windy that day - this spot would not have worked otherwise).
I setup the lights, did a quick test and got the shot.
All in all, it was quite fast ... and definitely worth it. Much better this time!
East Nicolaus in action.
So a couple of weeks back I headed up to East Nicolaus High School to photograph their teams in action. Unfortunately, I misread the directions and - as a result - missed JV game.
This time I made it. I also brought with me a printed sample of some of the team pictures we had recently taken. They went over very well - even the basketball and football players who were there supporting the volleyball team came over to have a look and enjoyed the images, so hopefully we'll be doing more work the the East Nicolaus athletic programs in the future.
I had a bit of geeky photographer fun photographing the match - I photographed much of it with a camera that is clearly overkill for most volleyball images. The resolution is 21 million pixels, which offers enough information to make some extremely large prints. The sensor in the camera is the same size as 35mm film which (when speaking of sensors) is quite large and allows lenses to perform as they were designed to, and one lens in particular has suddenly become even more of a favorite of mine when it comes to photographing volleyball. So, even though the storage space requirements are incredible, the downloads and image processing take longer and the resolution is mostly unused, I like the look of the images, so I'll probably keep shooting this combination. :)
What that means for any parents or players is that the images will look particularly nice as finished prints ... even very LARGE finished prints.
JV ...
Varsity ...
A cloudy Fall day.
This weekend, while my daughter Ryan was out with her grandparents, I was working on admin in the office when I got a call from grandma that went something like - "You HAVE to get outside - the sky is beautiful!".
It was one of those perfect Fall days - the temperature was just right and the clouds had rolled in to spice up the sky. I finished up some work, loaded my gear into the car and headed out to one of my new favorite areas - Sutter County, home of East Nicolaus. I drove out a ways, chasing the clouds and sunlight and wound up turning off of HWY 99 on Riego Road to do a bit of exploring.
One of my favorite images of the day was this one of the downtown "skyline" from the farmland north of the city.
I spent a couple of hours wandering around, looking for images and enjoying the day and the sunset.
Having photographed the area north of the city a couple of times now got me thinking about starting a personal project I may take up - documenting the city and areas around it. Considering how quickly Sacramento has expanded over the last 20 years, I thought it would be interesting to document the undeveloped land around the city so that, in the future, we do not forget exactly what we had once it's been replaced by more tract homes and malls.
From the archives.
I was organizing files on my FAR-too-large collection of harddrives recently when I noticed a pattern - I tend to visit Yosemite in October. I happened across a few images from trips to Yosemite that I liked and had been meaning to pull aside for printing and noticed that, though not photographed in the same year, they were all photographed in October.
This makes sense as it's about that time that I would usually have finally made the time to take a few days and get out of town.
So I ran across a these images and - as it turns out - I have just the printer to print them on. This past July I invested in a beast of a printer, the HP z3100. Each of those prints on top is 14x21 inches - I can now print single images up to 44 inches wide and as tall as I like! I hope to put it to use creating custom banners and large prints for the athletic programs I work with, but also purchased it for my personal work, which I have some hopes of getting in to galleries some day. This is a museum quality, archival printer capable of prints which - under accelerated aging testing - last more than 200 years prior to fading or color change under ideal conditions. This is extraordinary for the color printing industry and very exciting for small operations like mine. Color prints of this quality and longevity have never been achievable.
The printer is so large that it just fits in the corner of my office (which - because we travel so much and photograph all on location - is a room in my home, i.e. - not very big). If I need to get to the shelves behind it, it's on castors and I roll it out of the way.
The print quality is amazing - I've never see anything like it. I printed a few images and am really enjoying them.
The walls in my office are currently bare of prints - we replaced the floor and furniture this year and painted the walls and I've yet to hang anything. So one of my Fall projects is to decorate these walls!
Team pictures in the sticks.
So Jason and I took a drive out to East Nicolaus the other day.
It's a location that really feels like it's in the middle of no where - in the most pleasant sense. I like it out there. The funny thing is that it's not all that far away, but it feels like it. It's only 15 miles from downtown Sacramento - about three miles further than I live right now. The difference is the entire route I would drive to downtown from my house is packed with houses and shopping centers so there is no break from "civilization" as you drive.
Out in East Nicolaus, probably fully 10 miles of the drive is in fields and farmland so you get a sense of being "away" while actually being next door.
Anyway, this is our first year photographing the East Nicolaus volleyball team - Chris and Alecia, the coaches, are friends of ours and they just took over coaching the teams this year, and they called us when they got settled in.
I wanted images that really popped and looked great, but I wanted a sense of the country in the images too. The families of many of the students are farmers and live from what they grow in the land, so I wanted the images to feature a sense of the location. I'm very happy with the results!
We setup right on the edge of a grass field adjacent to the school. The road was probably only ten feet behind the team. They were on the top of a small knoll which sloped down behind them. In order to hide the road, I took all of these pictures while lying in the grass with the camera as close to the ground as I could get it!
I really liked the way the clouds and the field behind the girls combined, but wanted to light the girls in a way to make them stand out against it. So I used a technique I was practicing over the summer - I cross lit them, using the sun over their shoulder as an accent light and a flash as a main light. I wanted the light soft, so I fired the light through a translucent umbrella and moved it as close to the girls as possible. This gave a really nice soft light and allowed for a very distinctive look.
The clouds were moving quickly that day, which added its own randomity and difference from picture to picture.
All in all, I'm very happy with the results!
Helping Meagan
So I got a call the other day from my friend Meagan with whom I photographed Eric and Soma's wedding in August. Her assistant had called at the last minute to say that she was ill and would not be able to help that weekend, so Meagan asked if I could come out.
I had been mulling the possibility of a visit to Yosemite to hang out with John, a long time friend of our family who lives there, but helping Meagan won out, so I found myself in downtown Sacramento this weekend photographing the wedding of April and Matt.
I attended the wedding more as an assistant than a full blown second photographer, wearing the hat of setting up lights and scouting portrait locations, not photographing much of anything but details until the ceremony itself started.
One interesting thing about the location - the Embassy Suites - is that it has an indoor atrium from ground to top floor which leaves the interior of the hotel open and is ringed by floors of rooms. The ceremony itself was on a second floor patio, which extends into the atrium and can be looked down upon simply by going up any number of floors and looking out over the railing. So, after having established some images of the ceremony, I left Meagan to photograph from there and moved up a couple of floors to play with that perspective difference.
The Embassy Suites is actually quite a nice location for a wedding or reception - downtown Sacramento offers some very nice scenery, including the bridge, old Sacramento, the river and the grounds of the hotel themselves, I photograph in the general vicinity quite often, but this was the first time that I had photographed a wedding at that hotel.
And of course, as a photographer, there's nothing more fun than asking the wedding couple to take a ride in the glass walled elevator and ask them to make out so that you can get a few pictures! (As Meagan knew the couple and I did not, I played the peeping top from across the lobby while she rode in the elevator with the wide angle - you can see her in the lower right corner of this image).
All in all, it was a great day - working with Meagan is always fun.