#6

We just added terabyte #6 to the "stable" of hard drives here at MNP. For those of you that aren't photographers or nerds, a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. All together we have about 8.5tb of total storage and its seems to grow by a couple of terabytes every few months. We've shot about 2.5tb of images in the past year and we have everything backed up twice on hard disk and also on DVD. I've done tons of research on the best way to store images and the concensus seems to be this way... lots of drives, a second backup of the images on another physical drive and a third on DVD or CD.

When I was first starting out I searched and searched for answers to my questions and although I found a lot of photography related help, answers to questions about storage, workflow and just the day to day business of being a photographer, were not as readily available. Now I'm getting questions from other photographers just starting out about issues they're facing so I thought I'd start posting about stuff like this in hopes to possibly help someone out.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Photo Road Trip

After about 6 months of non-stop weddings its time for a break. In a few weeks my friend Trever and I are going to head out on a week long road trip up the west coast, the only objectives being to relax and take as many pictures as possible. I was trying to map it out tonight and it looks like we'll be driving about 2500 miles round trip. We'll be hitting 3 major cities, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, and just taking everything else as it comes. We're going to try to plan it out so that we have wi-fi every night so we can blog images from the day.

If anyone would like to get together for dinner or lunch in any of those cities just comment or shoot me an email. I'd love to meet some of you guys and talk business, photography or whatever.

I can't wait. I'll have more details as it comes closer.

Makenzie's new habit.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I have a fairly healthy addiction to Starbucks. They say the first step to getting help is admitting that you have a problem. Well for the last year or so every time I've gotten Starbucks, Makenzie has always asked to have some. She's just wanted to drink some of mine but she's always liked it. Whether it was a sweet toffee nut latte or the super strong quad-grande latte I frequently consume, she's always liked it. A few months ago she asked for her own and so I took her inside and got her her very own short decaf cinnamon dolce latte. The barista's face was priceless. I'm sure they get lots of 3 year olds coming in there for hot chocolate but the latte surprised him. Anyway now she's hooked. We don't let her get them a lot but fairly regularly she's my "drinking buddy".

This morning I walked back to our room to tell Cyndie I was going out to get a coffee and Makenzie asked for a "cinnamon coffee." How could I say no. When I got home and gave it to her she just looked so cute I had to take a couple pictures.

Michelle and Otis' Wedding

Michelle and Otis got married at the AMAZING Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. I've mentioned Michelle several times here on the blog, she's an awesome Wedding Coordinator that I've had the pleasure of working with several times. As you could guess this wedding was off the proverbial hook. Incredible venue, beautiful couple, insane details. Here are a few of my many, many favorites from the day!

I want to say a special thanks my awesome friend and wonderful photographer, Tiffany Aicklen, for driving all the way down from Visalia to help me with this wedding.

Nike+

I spend an inordinate amount of time behind a computer. This is one of the hazards of my profession. Well about a week ago my friend Fred, who is also a photographer, decided that he was going to do something about it. So he challenged me and a bunch of other photographers to a 30 mile race. Everyone has an iPod Nano and the Nike+ system and it will track your runs and display them to the rest of the group. I'm totally out of shape but I'm also extremely competitive so I went out last night, right when the race started, to get a head start on the competition. I also ran this morning and have run about 7.5 miles so far. I'm in the lead right now but I have a feeling I'm gonna get some competition pretty soon.

Film from the Salton Sea

I picked up my film today from the Salton Sea. It was cool to see... not near as cool as the black and white stuff but still cool. So here are a few. If you go down a few posts you can check out some of the digital images I shot. Aside from the few pictures I used textures on I think they're pretty similar. Which do you like better? I'm up in the air.

Crazy!

Its probably not the safest thing but I'm blogging in traffic. Look what just happened! The truck just burst into flames. I'm on my way home from a really fun Thursday wedding. Look for images from it soon!

Oh My Gosh.

My good friend/teacher/mentor/all-around-great guy, Mike Colon, just shot Usher's wedding! Wow. The story is on his blog. He got the call to shoot it and was on a plane in a matter of hours to Atlanta where the wedding was. Wow. You can see more pictures in this week's People magazine.

Good friends... Good times.

After working a few hours this morning we drove to Leather Craftsmen to drop off prints for Alicia and Blakes album and then down to Carlsbad to spend the day with our good friends, the Aicklens, who are on vacation. We spent the day surfing and having a great time. I'm outside waiting to take a shower now and am just amazed at the beauty. I love living here.

my new toy

I put the blackberry out to pasture today. Out with the old, in with the new!

Back To Blogging.

I'm going to get caught up on everything I've skipped so here's the first of many to come. This was a really fun and different engagement session in Thousand Oaks. Amanda and Joe were a ton of fun to hang out with and I can't wait for their wedding. Their coordinator is the incredibly cool Angel Swanson, one of my favorite people to work with. Here are a few shots from their session. We had the best light ever that night!








A little sun flare...

No flare...

I love this series.  So fun.