Last Post of the Year

2006 has been a great year. So many great things have happened and I'm really excited to see what next year has in store. Friday I went down to San Diego to shoot Lynda and Jae's engagement pics. I'm not shooting their wedding as they are getting married in Korea but it was still great to get to know them a bit and hang out in the amazingly beautiful Balboa Park.

Annie M. Events

This year I've gotten to work with some great Coordinators the weddings I've been a part of. I've talked about my good friends Simply Mumtaz Events several times here, well they introduced me to another Event Planner/Wedding Cordinator, Michelle McFarlane, who hired me to shoot a wedding in September. It was an amazingly designed, flawlessly executed wedding, with impeccable style at the Hyatt in Huntington Beach. I've gotten to know Michelle over the past few months and I can tell you that she is going to be amazingly successful. She just launched her new website so go take a look at it and if you need a coordinator or event planner give her a shot!

San Juan Capistrano Engagement

Last week I was contacted by Christina. She's busy planning her wedding coming up in February and luckily I was available. The only thing is her fiance was in town from Seattle where he's doing his residency and he isn't going to be in town again to shoot their engagement photos. So we had to get them done over the weekend. The shoot was originally scheduled for Saturday afternoon but mother nature did not cooperate. It was cold and raining so we decided to cancel it and keep our fingers crossed for Sunday. Luckily the weather was perfect so we met in San Juan Capistrano to shoot some down by the train depot and then we headed to the pier in San Clemente. They were so much fun and kept each other laughing all the time. Here are a few of my favorites from the shoot.

I love the lens flare in this one:

We're back!

Wow, it was so hard having the site down for 2 days. I've got quite a bit more bandwidth available now so hopefully that won't happen again anytime soon. Well... check back soon, I shot a great engagement session today and I have a bunch more stuff to share with you guys this week.

blessings,
Michael

The site's down!

It sounds funny, but if you have to have a problem this is an AWESOME problem to have. I've exceded my bandwidth for the month so my account has been suspended. I'm going to try to get this straightened out by tomorrow (Friday), but we'll see how long it takes. This is one bill that I'm excited to hear is going up. Since August my web traffic has gone up 120X. Maybe my math is off but that's a 12,000% increase. This means tons of people are checking out the site and blog and that's awesome. We've had thousands of hits this month and TONS of people downloading the slideshows. Hopefully this doesn't last too long. Keep checking back, lots of things are happening.

blessings,
Michael

Vendor Reccomendation

Now that the wedding season has slowed down I really want to start sharing with you guys some of the awesome vendors that I got to work with this year.

A few weeks ago I was asked to photograph the opening of some artist's lofts in North Hollywood. It was a pretty big deal. North Hollywood is going through an urban rennaissance of sorts and apparently the opening of these lofts was a landmark in the process. The opening promised to bring in lots of people and press so my good friends at Simply Mumtaz Events were hired to put together a killer event. They decided that because it was the opening of the artist's lofts they would bring in all kinds of artists as entertainment for the event. There were living statues (those people that stand really still and look like statues), 5 painters painting a 30 foot long mural, a really cool, yet, kind of freaky ballet dancer, a sculpter sculpting a bust of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (who was the guest of honor and the ribbon cutter) and some really great music.

I know a lot of you guys are probably thinking, "I thought he was going tell us about vendors we could use for our weddings." Well I am. I know most of you probably won't need living statues for your weddings butsome of you will want some entertainment for your cocktail hour. At the loft opening there were two guys playing some AWESOME classical/jazz guitar. Joe LoPiccolo and Marco Tulio provided some awesome entertainment that was classy and not intrusive... the kind of music that you can mix and mingle to without being distracted but its extremely entertaining at the same time.

If you are looking for some entertainment for your wedding, party, or event, give him a call.

Time to catch up

First of all let me apologize for my two week blogging hiatus. Apparently my last few weddings caused quite a stir because I had about 10 times the traffic on my website and blog in November than in any previous month. So much traffic, in fact, that I was dangerously close to exceding my allotted bandwidth for the month so I refrained from posting for the last two weeks.

Well its a new month, the bandwidth issues have dissappeared and I shot a sweet wedding on Saturday... so, back to blogging.

Saturday's wedding was at Disney's Grand California Hotel. It's an amazing hotel with Arts and Crafts architecture and a ton of great places to shoot. Ryan and Christy were so much fun and planned an awesome wedding with TONS of little personal details. They also did one of the coolest things I've ever heard of. Realizing how fortunate they are they asked all the guests at the wedding to, instead of bringing wedding gifts, bring toys that they donated to "Toys For Tots".

Here are a few of my favorites from the day. Click here to see the whole sildeshow.