So, I have a wedding I am shooting in late June for a couple, Dominique and Cody, who lives in Las Vegas. Her family is in San Diego which is where the wedding will be located. They have a one year old son who is absolutely adorable. Since they live in Vegas, it makes it tough for them to get here for an engagement session which they didn’t really want anyway, but they haven’t had any photos done of their son. Last week they were in town for his one year birthday, so I suggested we do a shoot with him in place of an engagement session. Being a new dad myself, I now know how valuable those pictures will be later. They change so fast!
We got an hour one evening and met at Lake Poway, where we had a great time running around trying to capture him looking at the lens. He was all over the place…certainly no time to plan and set up a shot, so I am glad my auto focus works really fast. Doing pretty much anything we could to get his attention, I am sure we looked pretty funny to the others in the park…but that is part of the fun with child photography. Here are a few images of Tristan’s afternoon at the park…

April 12th marked Jen and I’s five year wedding anniversary! For the occaission, we went to Catalina Island for a few days. What a cool place. It was exactly what we needed although there wasn’t enough time to do everything we wanted, but…is there ever enough time when you are having fun? That gives us a great reason to go back. We stayed at a place called Hamilton Cove which is a condo complex built into the side of a cliff. We had a spectacular view off our balcony as you can see from the first two pictures in this series. We were lucky to hit it in the off season, so the rates were reasonable and the place came with a golf cart, way cool! That really made things nice to get around, as Hamilton cove is about a 10 minute cart ride to Avalon, where everything happens. Quinn was great the whole time! We took him for a swim for the first time…I think we are going to be spending A LOT of time at the beach with this guy. He loved the water!
I also experimented with some photography techniques. Avalon Harbor, at sunrise, was a perfect place to stitch a large panoramic picture together. The panoramic image below is 8 different images stitched together in Photoshop CS3. Doing this with a wide angle lens makes for a very interesting image. I also started fooling around with HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging. The third image down on the left is done this way. By exposing several different images for both the shadows and the highlights and layering them together, you can make a beautiful image in which you don’t lose the highlight or shadow detail…all of the information is right there, details across the whole range…very cool! I haven’t quite realized the full potential of HDR yet, but I will certainly be experimenting more with it in the future. I think some HDR portraits could be pretty awesome looking.
By the last day, I think Quinn was pooped from hiking, swimming, riding around in the golf cart and all the walking around…as you can see from the last image…haha!
Thanks for looking…

Last week, I had a great family photo shoot with Zak, Heather and Aubrey. We met at Windansea Beach in La Jolla on a fairly windy afternoon. The light was a bit harsh, but I think the photos turned out quite nice. They are such a beautiful and photogenic family, it would be hard to take a bad picture of them. New babies are a challenge, but I usually don’t have a problem making a fool of myself to make them smile or at least look in the general direction of the camera. Aubrey was a trooper, especially for being only 4 months old. She is cute as a button. I tend to like and look for the moments between the poses. To me they are a bit more interesting than a static posed shot. Below you will see my style is more of a lifestyle kind of photography. But there always has to be a few posed shots here and there to frame. This was a fun photo session….thank you Zak Heather and Aubrey!