… according to one web site.

81% Geek

I’ve been looking forward to Rhona and Chris’ wedding for as long as I can remember. And as I expected, they were an awesome couple to work with on their wedding day. They both started their day with me by getting ready at Pasadena First Church of the Nazarene. After they finished with their last minute preparations, Chris and Rhona arranged for a private moment where they saw each other for the first time. They arranged this time since they wanted to take their creative photographs prior to the ceremony so they could have more time for photography and not spend time away from their guests at the reception.

After their first look, we left the church in a stretch Hummer limo. Our destination was the Los Angeles Arboretum. Before I continue chatting about their day, I should first mention that it was crazy hot yesterday! Let me put this in perspective. By the time we arrived at the Arboretum, the temperature gauge on my car read 106 degrees! That being said, everyone persevered and we were able to put together some really great images even though we were forced to stay in the shade and reduce the wedding party’s movement due to the extreme heat.

After the creative photo session we returned to First Church of the Nazarene for the ceremony. And let me tell you–that church is hugemongous! After the ceremony, we took a short drive over to the Monrovia Historical Museum for the reception. Here are a few of my favorite photographs from the day. I hope you enjoy them!

I was digging through some more of my old files and came across this portrait of Pasadena City College professor Dr. Robert Zeuschner. What many of his students may not realize is that he also loves to play and collect acoustic guitars. This is a photograph I took of him back in 2004.

I was thrilled to photograph this vintage wedding last Saturday. Lauren owns a company called Timeless Vixen that sells vintage clothing to customers around the globe. Several of her clients include famous celebrities. Todd gets in the act too! As you’ll see, they brought that experience to their wedding planning. If you look closely you’ll see Todd wearing a vintage tuxedo; it was his grandfather’s!

They both got ready in separate suites at the Pasadena Hilton. Before we left the hotel for the ceremony, I spent a few minutes in the lobby with Lauren capturing a few photos. It turned out to be an ideal setting for some really colorful portraits. From there we moved on to St. Rita Catholic Church in Sierra Madre for the ceremony. After Lauren and Todd exchanged their vows, we drove back to Pasadena and City Hall for some creative fashion forward portraits. To finish the day, we drove to Old Town Pasadena and Castle Green for the reception.

Two of my favorite wedding photography locations in Pasadena are Castle Green and Pasadena City Hall so you can only imagine how much I was loving life on Saturday! Here are just a few photographs from their wedding day.

With wedding season now in full swing, today I was “forced” to purchase a Synology Disk Station DS508. I already have more than 9 terabytes (9TB) of storage on hand, but I’m still running out of hard drive space! In order to guarantee that I would have enough storage space for the thousands of wedding photographs I process each year and archive every photograph I’ve taken in the last 5 years, I made the decision to purchase another NAS.

The Synology Disk Station is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device that behaves like a “mini server” and is populated five 1TB hard drives. Each of these hard drives work together like a single large hard drive. This particular NAS is the fastest on the market and also supports RAID 5. For non-technical readers, RAID 5 means that even if one of the five hard drives fails, I won’t lose any data! This technology provides me with an extra layer of security when storing your most important photographs. I guess I should also probably mention that 1 terabyte (1TB) is the same amount of storage as 1,000 gigabytes (1,000GB).

Anyway, I get excited when I make this kind of purchase. Isn’t the black box really pretty! I guess that’s one of many reasons why some people think of me as an unreformed computer geek!

Camille and Aaron’s wedding was held last weekend at Holy Angels Church in Arcadia followed by creative photography at the Los Angeles Arboretum in Arcadia. To close out the day, Camille and Aaron had their reception at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Universal City, California. It was a beautiful wedding day with over 330 guests in attendance! As Camille’s wedding photographer, I’m certain I didn’t see her stop smiling at any time!

Late last week Kent called with an inquiry about my availability. He wanted to book me for a fine art portrait session for his wife. What sets this story apart from others is that only two days from now, Janine is having a double mastectomy. Kent and Janine wanted to book a session in that hope that I would document her figure in my artistic style prior to her surgery. As you can see from some of these examples, I asked Kent to join her for several photographs to help illustrate his support during this difficult time. In addition to Janine’s portraits, I asked Kent to pose for several photographs on his own. As of this writing, they hope to return several times after the surgery to document in phases her continuing battle with cancer–a battle I know she can win.

Today I photographed the four seasons (Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall) and the Goldilocks & the Three Bears. Someone’s been eating my porridge and it’s just right! Sometimes being a product photographer is really super fun!

My associate photographer Vanessa Stump took these photographs (of me taking photographs) back in December. I’m posting them now because she finally found time in her super busy schedule to process these images! Thanks a ton Vanessa!

For photographers interested in my gear, in this photograph I’m using a Nikon D3 and Nikon 200-400mm f/4 lens mounted on a Really Right Stuff B55 ball head mounted to my Gitzo 1345 carbon fiber tripod. You can find many other photographs from my Kauai, Hawaii photo safari if you visit my December 2007 blog archives.