Two Rings Bind Them: Matt and Rhonda at Green Pastures!

Sometimes you meet people who just treat you like you are the center of their universe. It was said that Bill Clinton was this way. When meeting him, people would say that it was like there was no one else in the room and that you were the most important person in the world for that brief meeting. This was how both Matt and Rhonda were. On first meeting them they just seemed to be quite possibly the friendliest people we had ever met and seemed to care so much about us, our kids, and the mudane that normally most people don't really care about. I really wanted to shoot their wedding to see what kinds of people they had as friends.

But I had another bride who had contacted me first about a wedding in Houston on the very same day as Matt and Rhonda's wedding. She hadn't met with us yet and only seemed kind of serious about hiring us, but I honor whoever contacts us first. So I sent out a kind of odd feeler to see how serious the Houston bride was. I sent her a very funny email that basically said that I was going to set up a cage fight between her and Rhonda to decide who could hire me for her wedding and that she had to let me know if she was really interested in hiring us. I never heard from her again. I didn't think it was that weird, but I've been told by some of my photographer friends that I may have pushed it a little too far. I guess I won't be able to set up any bride cage fights again. Oddly enough when I shot Matt and Rhonda's engagement pictures a couple of months back, I told them what I had sent to the other bride and Rhonda looked at me, flexed her arms and said, 'I could have taken her.' I supppose I chose the right couple after all.






Their wedding was like a movie. You know the gushing chick flick where everyone is hugging and kissing and is absolutely amazing and wonderful and every shot you take is fabulous. It rained during the ceremony, but it didn't dampen the spirits of either the bride or the groom and they just smiled at each other, at the guests under umbrellas, at me and Christina. The pictures don't show a hint of the rain that was falling either. If people weren't holding umbrellas you would have never known.




The bride and groom ate by themselves up stairs at Green Pastures and insisted that Christina and I join them for the fabulous feast. We obliged and graciously thanked them.







They danced and danced and hugged people right and left and eventually hopped in a limo off to their honeymoon.

Young Seniors: Rose!

Today was one of the first uses of our home studio for a senior portait. It went fabulously! Rose was happy and peppy and ready for anything! She had a great sense of style. Back on the West Coast, we shot a good 50 seniors a year and just about every other senior would request to be photographed on 'the couch.' 'The couch' was a 50 year old white vinyl covered loveseat that we had inherited from my wife's grandfather in Los Angeles several years back. When I had first seen it at the grandparents house, it was in a small dark room used as an office and it was sticky. I had always afraid to sit on it because of that. One day, they were getting rid of a bunch of their old stuff and I suddenly looked at it in a whole new way: it was free! All I had to do was fit it in my little SUV and drive it 700 miles back home. It was mine! HAHAHAHA!




Rose was the first person to request to be shot on 'the couch' in Austin and........I didn't have it at the house. It was at my office where it was covered with pictures. With a wild look in my eyes, my mind started tripping and we decided to grab the couch and take it outside for the outdoor portion of her shoot and make some cool pictures with it outside. It was fabulous!

Workshop in the big D

I've learned a lot from shooting. I've learned a lot from seeing other peoples work. I've learned a lot from reading. But I've never felt like the heavens opened up and changed my work at workshops designed to sell you digital effects tools for way too much money. This one wasn't any different. I checked out a workshop by a guy named Doug Gordon in Dallas who was a big name in the New York wedding photography world, of whom I'd never heard of but my wife, the keeper of all information that I can not recall, had and she showed me who he was. For six hours he was obnoxious, profane, spoke with a very New York accent and basked in the light of his own glory.......and did I say obnoxious? In between sizzling his fingers on his own butt and proclaiming multiple times that, "it had been a while since he'd had a white boy," Doug Gordon imparted little tidbits of knowledge about his business and how to do things better. He seemed a strange combination of the character Fat Bastard from the Austen Powers film and me. The workshop was about the sexy side of wedding photography. As he spoke I kept expecting him to exclaim, "I'M DEAD SEXY!" But alas those words never quite escaped his mouth. He talked, shot some pictures and then talked some more, then tried to sell us stuff. Typical workshop.

Overall I had a good time and it motivated me to continue pushing the limits with what I do and make images that are unforgettable. Below are a few images I shot of his models then tweaked with my own tweaks to make the images similar to his final output at the end of the day. In the end I didn't buy his magic doodads and instead invented my own. I sell mine a little cheaper. Check out the Cheap Tricks section of our website to see what our Tweakers do. I'M DEAD SEXY!

ENGAGE! Carolyn and Alex!

In August Carolyn and Alex got married in Houston, but chose me to finish the job and photograph them in their wedding clothes in Austin after their wedding photographer neglected to shoot very many pictures of the two of them at their wedding. Maybe I'm confused about all of this stuff, but aren't the bride and groom the most important people at the wedding?




I have got to get myself a uniform like this for special occasions! It just screams, "I am important and should be listened to!" At least that's what I was hearing the whole time I was shooting these too.


In one of my many odd statements to help them relax and laugh and smile, I told them how I am the Jack Bauer of wedding photography with my bizarre antics and running around and yelling. To make my point hit home I yelled at the top of lungs, "DROP THE GUN!" on the Capital Grounds in my best Jack Bauer impression. This was not one of my brighter moments as Alex pointed out to me that the state troopers at every entrance and roaming around the grounds probably wouldn't take kindly to my very good quality Jack Bauer impression.

Thirty Months Later....

I have some other projects that I do outside of Photography, but most of them tend to never get completed because of one reason or another. I have a Mini DV tape that's been sitting on my desk for 30 months now from a HD project that I shot in Hollywood, I have yet to digitize it and edit it.

As is my style with everything, I am very spontaneous. I like new adventures. I'm the type of person who will call someone I know 1000 miles from home and see if I can stay the night 2 hours before I'll be there. This has happened a couple times with my old friend Josh. He says that no one from the old school visits him very often so it's always fun to drop in on him and go out on the town and eat around LA.

A couple of years ago, my brother and I moved my mother to Texas and called Josh asking if he had a 40 foot parking space in front of his place 2 hours before we would be there. He wasn't really expecting us. You can tell that he was thrilled to see us as he took us to Burbank's Fuddruckers

We've been out to visit many times and out to shoot with the 24p HD digital cameras that his employer has a couple times as well. It's the same model camera that Star Wars: Episode 2 & 3 were filmed with. Our fist HD experience was us being goofy for the camera to see if we could figure out how they worked. Our second experiment was actually scripted, though very badly by me, and a volunteer cast and crew came out of the woodwork to make it happen.


Josh got a roughed-up make over by a professional make-up artist.


I don't remember this guys name, but he learned his part half way through filming on the car ride to our location. He played a very fine russian fellow.


This guy was an Emmy nominated make-up artist who was just about to ship off to work on Pirates of The Carribean 2 & 3 so you can imagine how good this guy really was. I think we gave him $20 for lunch though he was a friend of a friend and was really just doing it for nothing. He's working on Josh's old room mate, Drew who provided most of the wardrobe by emptying his closet into his car.


Another woodwork volunteer. He's basically holding onto an $80k camera, $40k lens and a number of other attached devices that probably cost more than my car. He and another guy donated their experience as grips and camera operators and actors when we ran short.


Lunch time on set with Drew and one of the mystery people who I can't remember the names of.

It was a fun project. We spent about 4 hours of prep the night before the learn the basics of the camera and did the entire production in about 8 hours.

TWO RING BINDS THEM: Natalie and Ryan at the Gage Hotel!

Man! It was incredible. It was like being on a cruise ship in the high desert! Natalie and Ryan had one heck of a party out in Marathon at the Gage Hotel. Just about everyone who was going to be at the wedding came a day early and all ate together after the rehearsal at probably the largest rehearsal dinner I have ever seen. They were so kind as to remember I was a vegetarian and provided me with what I have to consider to be the most amazing plate of food I have ever had. Well, at least until the wedding day. I will be traveling back to this hotel to see what wonder this chef can wow me with in the future!




The day of the wedding a 40 mile an hour wind was roaring around the hotel and in the distance a storm was pounding the hills. On our drive out to marathon the previous day we had encountered a storm like nothing I'd ever seen before. We drove into it and there was so much water falling from the sky that it ceased to be rain and became a raging wall of water driven by the wind to the point that we stopped on the freeway and could not see past the end of the hood. The wind had been shaking the car and I was looking out the window in fear trying to see if I had just accidentally driven into the tornado, but could see nothing so we waited there for a few minutes next to the only thing we could see; a lone road sign shaking and rattling in the wind. After a few minutes the subsided enough for us to start moving again and it is hard to explain how happy I was to be away from that fierce example of just how powerful a storm can be. So, as I looked at the hills on the wedding days, I could only imagine how much they were being brutalized by the storm. Thankfully, the storm never showed up and it was absolutely perfect as the wedding began and a beautiful ceremony.






This wedding was DJ'd by the bride and grooms Ibook and it was great music that kept people dancing until 10 p.m. when the bride and groom surprised their guests with a gigantic fireworks show. These weren't bottle rockets.....The were the big monsters that you see at the city show for the 4th of July. It was a great grand finale to the wedding!

DESTINATION: Marathon

It was a long drive through bugs and white-out rain storms to get to the glory of Marathon, Texas and the fun oasis of the Gage Hotel. Marathon is a ghost town apparently due to the fact that I-10 was built and diverted all of the cross country traffic away from US Highway 90. It was like watching Cars and seeing Radiator Springs in person. The glory was gone except for this fabulous hotel where we were shooting a wedding the next day. After unpacking, Christina and I wandered around the tiny town and shot a few pictures. Everything was run down and desolate.