Bride On The Run: Megan!

Megan is my drama queen bride. Boy, does she know how to pose. But I noticed something was a little bit off. She wasn't as bubbly was she was when we did the engagement shoot with Josh. I thought maybe she was only happy when she was with her beloved. Halfway during the shoot she confessed that she had been horribly ill and hadn't been able to eat anything for three days. I can't believe she didn't call me to reschedule. What a trooper!

Bride On The Run: Estella!

Estella is one the of sweetest and shyest people I've ever met. She looked absolutely gorgeous and after doing some nice portraits we went into fashion overdrive.

Media Terrorism

There was a fire at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, Calif. a week or two back. The most notable part of the headline was that a section of the Back To The Future Set was destroyed. I've been on the tram ride through there a couple of times and experienced the little false town square which they turn into a whole host of things for different productions. I'd never heard of a Town Square until I moved to Texas and visited Georgetown where I found a surprisingly similar town square with a courthouse in the middle. It's certainly something from the Heartland of America because I'd lived all of my life on the West Coast and never seen anything like it.

Reading further into the story I discovered that one of the things that damaged in the fire were 40,000 to 50,000 film, tapes, and other original media from shoots by NBC or Universal though nothing was destroyed permanently because the media giant had a duplicate site elsewhere.

There has been a war waging recently among the media users and media creators. The war is for fair use of media by the user. You as a user do not have many rights when you purchase a DVD or CD. The rules are defines by lawyers at this time. Lawyers who define the law by suing kids and anyone else they feel will be high profile enough to get attention and scare the public in. Of course this is done in civil court because the laws of course are only interpreted by those lawyers to include what they are suing for. Sure stealing is wrong. But how about ripping music to MP3 from your own CDs? According to the digital millennium copyright act of 1998, if you change or remove encryption to 'rip' a DVD to your computer you are breaking the law.

I think the fire at Universal studios was not an accident and was actually a message to the entertainment world to back off and let people use their media how they want. This isn't the world of yesterday when we all had records and could only play them on record players. There was no way to make them work in a CD player.

Blank thought

At first it was the criminals. That's all fine and good. Nobody needs any criminals. Then it was the troublemakers. That's good too if everyone has the same definition of troublemaker. Then they came for those who were saying things that somebody didn't like. The upstarts who may have been thinking a little too much I guess we could do with a few less of those around. Then it started to change. The gypsies suddenly vanished. Who cares. Nobody liked them anyway. Then the Jews started to vanish. They came to the door and the Jews went. It wasn't my door so I turned the other way as I had with everyone else who had been taken. It wasn't my door they came to. A nagging voice in my head said perhaps I should care. The voice was ignored until they came to my door and I found out that it was illegal to be me. My very thoughts weren't even my own. They had to be controlled. They were dangerous.

Today we see our rights being taken. Daily, someone in the government decides, for the safety of the public, what we are no longer allowed to do. Sadly, so few in our country care about rights so long as they are being placated by something, entertained, inebriated, or generally confused to the point where they can no longer act. I saw on a bumper sticker a few days ago that said 'freedom isn't free'. But I think that it's more appropriate to say that freedom is gone. The Constitution is no longer of the people, it is defined and redefined by lawyers who wish to change just one thing or another to fit their personal, political or employers whims. We barely have the freedom that was sought after by the pilgrims escaping England for tax and religious relief. We are taxed heavily and our religious freedoms are being turned into hate crimes. Our world concerns itself with itself, worshiping celebrities, false gods, money, power and forgets that which is truly important: God, family, freedom. Don't forget what's important as you sit in front of your X-Box or iPod and are distracted from the world around you. Eventually they could be knocking on your door asking for that iPod. You would care then.

Engage: Amber and Brandon!

I'd have to say that Amber approached the engagement shoot with a bit more enthusiasm than Brandon. But like many skeptical grooms before him, after the shoot he couldn't believe he actually had fun.

They came with great ideas of their own as well. Amber couldn't wait to literally attach a ball and chain to Brandon's leg. Then they wanted to do an homage shot to their favorite recording artist, Guaranteed. All I had to work from was a shot on the back of their point and shoot camera they took of his music video on their TV. But I nailed it much to their delight.