theLAB day 2

Sorry I've been gone! After the workshop I went out to a friend's lake house in Oklahoma for a few days to recoup from the LONG, LONG days of the workshop and flew back late Saturday night to shoot a wedding on Sunday. I'm back now though and have plenty to show. We'll start with some images from the workshop we held last week in Texas.

Day two was all about couples. We had an engagement couple and a bride and groom to shoot as well. Both couples were awesome to work with and the location was just amazing. I'm going to go through everyone that attended later on but I can't say enough how great a group we had. Wonderful photographers, amazing people. It was such a great experience.

I took a few more pictures this day but still not too many. I guess I was talking too much. Here are a few of my favorites.








Tomorrow I'll put up some images from our shoot on day 3. Check back for that!

theLAB day one

We had an awesome day today and had an incredible shoot with some really great models. It was the Egan show at the shoot today with him showing how he works with his clients during a shoot. Check his blog for some images. I hardly shot because I was helping out and answering questions, but I did take a model and a group at the end to work with and snapped a few.

Here's Fred working hard.

The group shooting our models.

Like I said, I didn't take too many shots but here's a few of one of our models, Mandy, who was just amazing to work with.

theLAB is here

Tonight begins theLAB. We have a great group of photographers coming from across the country and Canada and I can't wait to get started. I'm going to try to post every day during the workshop to show what's going on and hopefully also highlight some of the awesome photographers attending. Should be a fun week!

Jacqui and Bryan

Here are a few shots from a shoot I had last week. I love California in the spring.

My baby's back.

I got a call from Canon yesterday and today I went to pick up my camera. I'm so impressed with Canon. I've heard that they really take care of their pros but fixing a camera in 2 days (when they estimated 10) is awesome. So tonight I thought I'd give it a test drive and shoot a few pics of my beautiful bassets, Copper and Penny. Aside from the shutter sounding totally different it seems to be back to normal.

Steve and Kari

Last weekend I met Steve and Kari in Solvang, an incredible town in the beautiful Santa Ynez Valley. We spent a couple hours hitting their favorite wineries and even stopped by the spot where Steve proposed. I had a great time guys and can't wait for the wedding!

Bummer

This is not what a shutter is supposed to look like.

I had a shoot in LA yesterday and about half an hour into it my camera made the worst noise and quit working. I opened it up to see that my shutter was blown. Thank God I brought backup equipment. Well, I'm off to Canon to get my shutter replaced.

Edited to add:
Well the good news is the folks at Canon were super nice and helpful and even put a rush on it so I can have it before I leave for Texas next week. The bad news is it cost over $600. Wow.

McCain

Ok here's the first of many posts to come. Last week I shot an event where John McCain, the GOP candidate, spoke. He was actually very engaging and pretty interesting... something I wasn't really expecting. The event was planned by my good friends over at Simply Mumtaz.

I got there about 45 minutes before the event was supposed to start and took my place among the rest of the photographers. A few minutes later I got permission to go to the second floor and shoot from there which was awesome because I wouldn't have to jockey for position, trying to get a good shot. So I went upstairs and set up.

I sat there alone for about 20 minutes when five LAPD officers came up and immediately started harassing me, searching me, searching my equipment, threatening to take my cards, asking for ID that proved I had permission to be there. Instead of finding out if there was a problem they assumed there was one. Once I proved to them (several times in several different ways) that I was allowed to be there they told me they needed my seat for surveillance and put me over in the corner where most of my view was blocked by columns. Look, I know you have to protect politicians but, come on, let's be professional officers.

I hope this doesn't get me on their bad list.

Ladies and gentlemen, John McCain.



There was tons of press there... here's CNN's setup.

And here's how channel 14 rolls. Bringin' the heat!

I'll be back.

I know its been a long time. I was in Texas all week getting things taken care of for the workshop coming up and since I've been home I've been going non-stop. Shooting, meetings, and the best part of all... doing taxes. I'm on my way to Solvang here in a couple minutes for an engagement shoot and I promise to get those up quick. Things are going to settle down somewhat over the next few weeks so I promise to blog a lot more.

I'll leave you with a picture. What could it mean?