Stephany's Portraits
Stephany is a stunning young woman we have been photographing for years on the volleyball court. She's starting her Senior year and had us come to Hercules, CA to photograph her.
The session was really a lot of fun - Jason, who usually helps out on sessions - was out of town so I enlisted the help of Stephanie's father and brother to hold reflectors and such. It was a real family effort and the images turned out wonderfully!
There was so much to choose from that, in the end, I couldn't help but make up several collages.
Stephany has one of THE most expressive faces I've photographed in a long time and I could have done an entire session simply capturing goofy stuff. There were lots of laughs and a great time - I may offer to photograph her again for free just because it's so much fun. To say she "hams it up" for the camera is a REALLY big understatement. :)
Some unusual work for us.
Most of the time, we're people photographers. But the fact of the matter is, I love creating photographs - it doesn't matter what the subject is, as long as I'm having a good time and the results are nice. I'm just happy creating images.
I've made mention of my love of landscape photography before. Well architectural photography falls into that same category for me - it's an urban landscape. I've often spent entire nights wandering around photographing cityscapes at night - Curry Village tent cabins when working in Yosemite National Park as a teenager, the buildings of Paris, France when I lived there for a while, Chicago, Illinois when I visted for a business trip and even Pordenone, Italy when I went to Europe to photograph a volleyball tournament.
I've even made it an occassional habit to sneak into the late night pictures I take for a kind of self-portrait. :)
Night or day, I really enjoy photographing our state capital building. I've been photographing it since I really got into photography and I've since photographed it with medium format and large format cameras, printing images in our black and white darkroom or hand made cyanotypes in the backyard. It's a beautiful structure and the detail in it is incredible.
So, naturally, I've made it a habit to photograph it when I get new cameras. This time, shortly after purchasing a very high resolution camera and some graduated neutral density filters, I took them out to play and these images were the result.
The sunset that night was quite pretty and I enjoyed myself for a good two hours. It was a very fun change of pace for me.
This year I also tried my hand at some indoor photography. A good friend of mine is a contractor and he had just finished basically rebuilding an entire home. His is a small outfit, so it was a large project for him and he wanted some photographs so he gave me a call.
This fireplace/patio was another project he had completed, so I photographed that for him as well.
I know that the housing market is particularly rough at this time. If you are in real estate, or know someone who is, nice photographs of the property can go a long way to helping generate interest.
Keep this in mind and give us a call if we can be of help.
Joe & Melody
I had the pleasure of photographing Joe & Melody's wedding recently.
Joe is the older brother of Andrew, whose wedding to Collette I photographed in 2004. So when Joe and Melody contacted me early in the year, I was excited to photograph for them.
Joe & Melody elected to see each other prior to the ceremony to have their formals & family pictures taken. We always leave this as a choice to each individual couple and are happy to photograph prior to or after the ceremony.
They spent a quiet few moments together, just enjoying each others company and anticipating their upcoming marriage.
The ceremony itself, which took place in El Dorado Hills, was well attended by family and friends to celebrate their union to each other.
Of course there are many more beautiful images, but I have to stop sometime!
Kelly & Marc
This is another wedding that can trace my involvement back to volleyball. Kelly's Dad, Bob, is the former coach for Nevada Union High School (he just retired this year) and asked me to come out and photograph Kelly's wedding with Marc.
This one was a bit unusual in that the first time I had ever met Kelly was on her wedding day in her wedding dress! Normally (if I don't already know them) I've had a chance to meet a couple a few times, photograph an engagement portrait, get the low down on the wedding day, etc. However, Kelly & Marc got married just TWO DAYS after our crazy busy volleyball season ended and we had never been able to get together prior to that.
The wedding day went very well - the bride & groom looked great and there was a ton of family and friends there to witness their union. Kelly had a gorgeous gown of raw silk with a boquet of white and yellow roses. Both Kelly and Marc are former college swimmers, so it makes sense that they had their wedding at the Arden Hills Country club, which is a well known training facility for swimmers.
Heather & Austen
Heather is the older sister of a Holly, a young lady we photographed as a volleyball player for many years. We've become good friends with Nancy, Heather & Holly's mother, and were thrilled to be invited to photograph Heather's wedding.
The big challenge for this wedding was that we were also at a volleyball tournament at the same time! ... Well, we were supposed to be. The very reason we took our break from wedding photography several years ago was because the weddings we were booking wound up being right in the middle of our volleyball season and we had run into several date conflicts that were stressful (to put it mildly!). So, we typically decline weddings during our volleyball season (January - June). But we are so fond of the Jacobus family that we agreed to photograph Heather's wedding and even thought we were in the clear - the wedding would be on an off weekend between two tournaments. Then we sat down to meet with Heather and found out the wedding was the very same day as the beginning of one of our major tournaments! But, we looked forward to photographing for Heather and Austen so much that we decided to give up that day of the tournament and photograph their wedding.
It was worth it. Heather and Austen were a blast to photograph, and the images - well I really like them. :)
The wedding was in Berkeley with the reception at the Claremont Resort - a beautiful location with a century before last feel to it.
The ladies were a lot of fun to photograph as they got ready for the ceremony. There was a lot of excitement and laughter.
The ceremony was in a very pretty mission style church not far down the road and Heather was absolutely stunning in her gown ... Austen looked pretty good too.
There was one unexpected adventure during the day - I got stranded! Jason was photographing this wedding with me and borrowed the key to get some gear out of the car. I was in the middle of photographing and didn't think ask for them. He started photographing and forgot to give them back. That wasn't a problem until Jason left on the trolley car that took the wedding party back to the Clairmont, leaving me stranded in the parking lot of the church!
I think I'll start carrying an extra set of keys in my camera bag ...
Brianna's Portraits.
Brianna is now a graduate from Granite Bay High School. We regularly photograph the volleyball team there and Brianna knows several other Seniors we have photographed, so she had her yearbook photograph done through the "school approved" photographer and came to use for some fun stuff!
We photographed downtown in Old Sacramento, by the river and at the Capital. It was a fairly windy day, so Brianna's hair was going everywhere - which made it both a challenge and a lot of fun.
Our session was fun with a lot of giggling and laughter - so I just couldn't resist putting this one together ...
The Big 2008 Update.
So I know that it looks like we haven't been doing much since the last site update in November, but that's what happens when we get into our club volleyball season - it's usually really crazy and this year was no exception!
Because of our heavy travel season and the amount of volleyball work that we do, we manage all of that photography through a separate site - and that has seen plenty of updating! There have been quite a few updates there, along with hundreds and hundreds of finished images posted throughout the season highlighting collages purchased by our clients.
However, we've also been quietly continuing our portrait, wedding and landscape work, even in the midst of all of our volleyball craziness.
So far, this year we have been busy photographing portraits and have continued with our weddings. Though, by many studio's standards, we've photographed very few this year (only four to date for the year with two more on the calendar). We've been having a great deal of fun photographing weddings this year and it's been a blast to get back into them. We definitely plan on marketing our weddings more for the 2nd half of each year. So, if you know of anyone looking for wedding photographers, we'd sure appreciate you sending them our way for a look!
We've also been busy with some Senior Portraits as well as children's portaits and are looking forward to many more of those. Quite a few high school Seniors have expressed interest in having us photograph for them and, as the weather cools a bit and colors begin to change, I expect to get very busy with those as well.
We've also managed to sneak in some landscape photography and I plan to continue with that as much as possible. I even splurged (big time!) and purchased the current market leader in 35mm digital cameras (a full frame, 21 megapixel beast which is really fun to use) as well as a 44 inch wide, museum quality printer to use in fine art and landscape work - I plan on having fun with the two of those!
The Kolkka-Keene Wedding.
Christine and William, Fran, Ron and every one of the Kolkkas and Keenes - thank you so much for sharing the wedding day with us!
We were honored that you asked us to experience and document the day and we had a really great time doing it.
As you know, this was a special wedding for us because it was the first wedding we have photographed in which we had also photographed the bride while she was a club volleyball player. We look forward to doing many more.
We've prepared a few images of the day to share with you while we get the rest of your images ready.
Enjoy!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone - I hope you have a wonderful holiday.
Our family spent it together at my parents home and we had the wonderful fortune of spending it with an uncle and cousin of mine that we hadn't seen in quite a LONG time.
Earlier in the week, I snuck out of town for a few days and visited a friend of mine in Yosemite. As a photographer, most people would automatically assume 'AHA! You must have gone to photograph the park.' Actually, the truth is I mostly lounged about and watched movies. I know - shameful. :)
However, this morning, as I was leaving the park, I did have the great pleasure of some beautiful morning light and frost in the valley and just couldn't help myself.
So here are some Thanksgiving portraits of Yosemite Valley.
I'm an unreformed, closet landscape photographer - it's something I've really enjoyed since I was in high school. However, these days I rarely get the chance. This was a real pleasure. The valley was very quiet, the air was wonderfully crisp and cold. I even had a very unexpected encounter with a buck and several does as well as a coyote that went trotting on by me. It was so quiet that I could hear leaves falling from trees across the river from me!
One of these days I'll make a point of doing this more often ...
Meet the Fuhs Family ...
Well we had a great time on Sunday - we got to get out into the sun with a great family, the Fuhs.
We've been photographing volleyball for them for ages - we found out since 2003 or so!
Laureen called us recently to have us do a family portrait for them and we met the family (a pleasantly rambunctious group!) at William Land Park at about 2pm Sunday.
Jason and I had been there early to scout some locations and we settled on one just near the pond by the golf course.
All told, we spent about an hour photographing and laughing.
(If you look closely, you can see Michelle (in the blue top just to the right of mom) is also in the fourth Elk Grove team picture below! :)