Everyone has New Year’s resolutions. Updating my blog more often is one of my resolutions. So today I am updating my blog with a few photos that I came across as I was backing up the last years worth of pictures on my multiple hard drives. This isn’t really intended to be a “best of 2010″ collection of photos or anything close to it. Just a random smattering of some of the good stuff I’ve come across so far.
Hopefully this will be a resolution that I stick to beyond next week and if so, I will get a lot more pictures up and posted.

“How can I help”, you ask? Well, if you see something on the blog you like, don’t like, agree with, hate, etc. then be sure to leave a comment. I know people click on and visit the blog, my site statistics tell me that much. But if I see that people are engaged at all then I will be more motivated to keep it up.

Enjoy the pics, I sure enjoy making them!

A few months ago I posted a cool little video that showed some really cool timelapse photography by a really cool guy named Dan Eckert. I thought maybe people would thing I was really cool too if I could make a really cool video like Dan Eckert. It would make me even cooler if I talked a little bit about how I made this video rather that just show it. This way if anyone else wants to be cool like I have officially just become, feel free to shamelessly mimic me shamelessly mimicking someone else. Here is the video, be sure to make it full-screen.



You like that stuff right there? I hope so. Leave a comment if you did. If you didn’t like it, uhh, just quietly grumble and move along, thank you.

If you’d like to find out exactly how to make this kind of video there is a great tutorial over on AdoramaTV by my buddy Mark Wallace . If you are only mildly curious how this was made, it is pretty simple. You take a bunch of photos of the same thing over a long period of time, then you play them all back really fast.

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a parent of twins. Double the diapers, double the feeding, crying, sleep deprivation, and did I mention double the diapers? I have three wonderful, amazing kids of my own and readily admit that after the first month having each I have decided not to have any more. Obviously that hasn’t worked for us so far.

After hanging out with these two little dudes I have decided that if you are going to raise twins, you had better hope they are as awesome as these little guys. Seriously, I have never seen babies that fuss so little. It made photographing them really easy too, all I had to do was look at them and they would smile at me. Like this one below, my lovely assistant and wife, took the picture because when my face popped out from behind the camera he would grin like he was looking at a clown, okay maybe something less scary than a clown. We’ll just say that my goofy face was working better than anyone else’s so you get to look at the back of my head a bit now.

Sometimes I just have to post something completely unrelated but because it is so full of awesomeness it simply has to be shared. I envy the patience and effort that this chap puts into not only shooting thousands of gorgeously delicious still images but editing and composing all that into these videos. Wow, just wow.

You’re gonna want to hit the little fullscreen button for this one.

Oh yeah, and let it buffer first if you are on a slow connection for best results. Enjoy!

The photographer is Dan Eckert and I think he’s cool. You can check out more of his videos over on Vimeo. I recommend it.

Nisa & Qa’ed make a great couple. They have a history that goes all the way back to when they were kids and Qa’ed picked on her and pulled her hair (obviously he had a crush even back then). Another thing they have going for them is such a great support group. It was really cool to see what awesome families they have; each family welcoming and accepting their new family members as if they were there all along. Thanks you two for letting me tag along at your reception!

Arizona summers bring a lot of cool things: gorgeous sunsets, monsoons, barbecues, 4th of July, summer break from school for the young ones and even the occasional vacation. All those cool things aside, summertime typically isn’t very cool here. Take yesterday for example, it was only about 105 degrees outside when we started this senior portrait session. Doesn’t sound too bad does it? Well, I’m not a meteorologist or anything but I saw that the heat index was more like 116 degrees out there. That’s just downright nasty, gross and definitely not cool. Anyway, now that everyone knows I’m not a fan of the heat let me show you something that is cool, a few frames from the portrait session.

… just thought you’d like to know that. You know, in case you were wondering you could just look at these pictures and see how cool sleeping babies really are.             

Have you booked your high-school senior’s portraits yet? Come on now, they are going to graduate and move away, like, tomorrow. What are you waiting for?
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Here’s a few cute pictures that I took a few weeks back in up in Snowflake. I love blue eyes.

Okee-dokee. If you have been following previous posts here your homework is due now. You should know whether or not your camera can handle the heavy lifting required for HDR photography, you should have a tripod and most definitely, you oughta be about ready to quit reading my rants about this and get started. Perfect.  Only one little problem. In order to do any kind of fancy-schmancy HDR processing you have to have some images to work with.  So that is just what we are going to do:  go make some images.

Its probably going to take a few days for me to get things going on my end, round up my entourage and all that, but in the very near future we are going to go out on the town. This is your formal invitation to join me on your maiden voyage into HDR photography, your vision quest, walkabout, coming of age party, or whatever you want to call it.

All you have to do now is figure out where you want to go and when.

Here are your choices for where, we will figure out the when part soon.

• Mesa Art Center / Downtown Mesa
• Downtown Phoenix
• ASU Tempe Campus
• ASU Polytechnic Campus
• Old Town Scottsdale
• The airplane museum at Falcon Field Airport
• Somewhere else, you pick

I could have added a poll here to make it easier for you, but I’m going to make you work harder than that. Yes, you have to post a comment below. You will need to click on the ‘Read more’ link at the bottom to see the comments section.

Another thing, this is an equal opportunity event. If you have never taken a picture in your life you will be just fine. If you’ve been shooting for 20 years and just want to come hang out, that is awesome too. Everyone is welcome, just BYOC – bring your own camera.

Click on the image to see what this turns into.