We met up in one of the fields near  their home to make some portraits of them doing what they love to do together: bird-watching. The sun was golden and glorious as we got started.

Out alone, with each other, doing what they love to do. One thing, of course, led to the other…

Wait…did you hear that?

What? What’s going on?

Don’t you see it?! Over there!

ZOMBIES!!

The rest is just too horrible, much too soon to talk about. The rest of the story, in pictures, after the jump. 

Watch. Just watch.

(Stop the slideshow and head back to the beginning with the back arrow to get the full effect if it’s already started. There’s no way for me to make it wait for you to start it. Lame, I know)

It’s a good thing someone was prepared for a leisurely stroll through the woods.

P.S. Before you say anything, yes, this idea was completely inspired by this shoot (which is also awesome). And hey, seriously, someone has to demonstrate how to really prepare for the zombie apocalypse. Shovels and knives work in a pinch, but there’s a better way to live when zombies are on the loose.

P.P.S. More images from this session, including some thrilling zombie dance moves, can be found over on my Facebook page.

What’s that? You didn’t know we had one? We do. It’s here. Come on over and join the fun! We post more images of more recent work over there, so check out what we’ve been up to!

Also, while you’re there, check out the daily portrait session special. Every day this week (9/12-9/17), we’ll be offering a different discount or incentive to a limited number of sessions that book that day. Check back every morning to see the new deal and get on it! Now is the time to plan your holiday portrait session in order to get images and cards back in time to send them out.

See you over on the Book!

(and, just because posts are prettier with pictures, here’s a couple from last fall)

Many more, after the jump. 

Ah nuts. I lost track of which ones I’ve posted and which ones I haven’t. Here. Just watch this.

And if you want to see even more, you can find them here, on my Facebook page. Come on over and say hi.

The way he combines the light trails of light painting with traditional (I should have put that in quotes) portraiture astounds me. Light painting is pretty darn cool to begin with, but when you mix that with people, it starts to get downright epic.

So, on Saturday, I thought I’d give it a try. A handful of photographers and I got together in Wamego to check out the 4th of July carnival and see what sort of trouble we could get ourselves into. It seemed like exactly the kind of crowd to try out light painting with.

I knew the basic principles: Put your camera on a tripod. Use a slow shutter speed, a low ISO, and a small aperture. Use a hand-held light-emitting device to either create trails of light or to illuminate the subject.

What I didn’t know was how tricky it was, exactly, to get things to work out the way you want them to.

And so, I present to you, what I learned about how not to paint with light.

First, make sure your light is bright enough.

Here, my iPod Touch, which is pretty darn bright in a dark room, wasn’t nearly bright enough to leave a light trail.

Second, to leave a thick trail, the light must be not only bright, but large.

Here, I was using the super bright LED flash on my friend’s smartphone. It left a great, crisp, bright trail, but wasn’t nearly as big as I was looking for.

That’s about the time we realized that my friend Terry, who had lent me his phone, had also brought what he called a “very cheap ring light,” which consisted of 20 or so super bright LEDs arranged in a ring that attaches to the front of the camera’s lens. It has its own battery pack, so they’re really bright and can stay on easily for a long time.

Perfect.

Which leads to my third lesson learned: Don’t wave your super bright light in front of where your face will be, or else your face won’t be there at the end.

The green lights in this came from the ring light’s battery pack indicator lights. I really love how each light on the ring light leaves its own trail, which crosses and twists around the trails left by the other lights. There’s such depth and texture to it!

So, the next thing we realized was that, no matter how bright the flash on the subject is, if you’re not standing there for the whole exposure, you’re going to appear as a ghost because the background will already have been partially exposed. You have to have the subject stand in place the whole time the shutter is open.

For this one, I opened the shutter, walked out to our straw spot, triggered the flash, and walked out of the frame. Notice how I’m nearly transparent? That’s because when I wasn’t there, the floodlights for the basketball court continued to illuminate the background and expose the sensor.

So, that meant we needed someone other than the photographer to be the subject. For that, we coerced forced gently persuaded Julie, one of the photographers who came out for the fun, to stand in as our subject.

For this frame, I attempted to draw angel wings and a halo around her. Besides the fact that I drew the wings upside down, I also learned that you have to get out of the frame before you trigger the flash on the subject.

Once we figured all that out, good things started happening. The good stuff is right after the jump.

Here’s Julie and her husband, Dusty. Terry was doing the painting on this one.

And here’s Beka, another photographer who came out to play, and her husband, Jared. I was painting on this one.

After a few successful portraits, someone wanted to try writing people’s names with the lights. This presented its own set of challenges and lessons to learn.

First, you have to write backwards in the air. I don’t have any illustrative images of this because some of the attendees, who are a lot smarter than me, figured it out on their own.

Also, handwriting matters. A lot.

Here, Beka was trying to write my name, but didn’t turn the light off and on between letters, so it ended up a bit funky and hard to read.

She got it on the next one, though.

I think we decided it’s much easier to write in all capital letters. That’s just a theory, though.

Next up was Julie. In trying to write her name, I learned that screen real estate is very, very tight.

Terry also learned that you have to wait until the painter is out of the frame before you trigger the flash.

Eventually, I got it, too.

Pardon the ghost legs–apparently I wasn’t writing each letter fast enough.

Last, but not least, Beka.

We were old pros by then.

So, that’s what I learned Saturday night. I’m looking forward to seeing what else we can do together, now that we’ve gotten some of the tricky technical bits all figured out.

If you’d like to see some of the other images I made that night, hop on over to the full album on my facebook page, here.

Have you ever done any light painting? Any tips to pass on? Feel free to post images or links to images below. I’d love to see what you’ve done!

One of the things I love best about the 4th of July is the chance to get my camera out and photograph fireworks. There’s a lot of tutorials out there on how to take good pictures of fireworks–you can find them if you look. One of them you might find is the tutorial I wrote last year on a different technique for capturing the pyrotechnics using a long exposure and a focus shift.

This technique breaks with the traditional method of capturing fireworks by creating a dynamic change in the point of focus during the exposure. This change in focus creates incredible, abstract images of color and light.

Here’s what I put together last year using this technique.

The technique is quite simple. Here’s how you do it:

All you need is a solid tripod, an SLR camera, and a long lens. For me, I use my 100mm lens on a 40D, which is the equivalent of a 160mm lens.

1. Try to set up as close to the fireworks as you can. You want to fill your frame with the fireworks, so get close, and use a long lens.
2. Shoot in manual. You can’t let your camera try to meter for these constantly changing bursts of light–either it won’t be able to keep up, or it will try to properly expose the pitch black night sky, completely blowing out the bright light from the fireworks.
3. Use your lowest ISO. For me, that was ISO 100. You’ll be doing longer exposures, so you want the least amount of digital noise possible in the final image. You might even consider turning on your camera’s own long exposure noise reduction option for this.
4. Start with a shutter speed around 1 second. I used 1 second for all of the images I shot last year. At that shutter speed, I found that an aperture of f11 or f14 worked well to produce well exposed images. You can experiment a bit with this, perhaps trying shutter speeds anywhere between 1 and 6 seconds.
5. Use manual focus. Make sure you flip that little switch on your lens from AF to MF. This is where the magic happens. After you press the shutter button, you’ve got about a second or so to change the focus during the exposure. Large changes in focus work best. You can start with the focus set up close and shift it towards infinity during the exposure, or you can start at infinity and move it back up close. Try both. Try going from one end of the focus range to the other and back during the same exposure. With focus at infinity, the light from the fireworks will produce sharp lines on your image. With the focus up close, the light creates soft, colored balls or stripes of light. As you shift from one end of the focus range to the other, you produce incredible, abstract images of color and shape.
6. The last step is something to keep in mind the whole time you’re exposing and shifting focus: don’t rock the tripod.

When I found out she was coming back, I told her I wanted to do some portraits of her and Liam, and the best time we could find was right after the ceremony. Since the ceremony was scheduled at 5, we arranged for me to arrive at 5:30.

I got there early and checked out the grounds of the courthouse, then went to find Lynette and Liam. When I got inside, I discovered that they hadn’t actually been married yet because the judge had some concerns. You see, Liam is deaf, so the judge wanted to make sure that adequate interpretation was available and get everything set. In the end, it was decided that Lynette would interpret for him, and that’s about the time I arrived. So, I was able to come in and capture the ceremony as well.

It was a very intimate ceremony, with just Lynette and Liam, his best friend and best man who flew in with them for the ceremony, and Lynette’s family.

Lynette’s daughters and sister served as her bridesmaids.

I absolutely adore this image. I didn’t even notice when I was there that as Lynette was hugging her oldest daughter, she was signing “I love you” to her. So sweet.

After the ceremony, we went outside to get a quick portrait of the wedding party before sending everyone else on to the reception. The light was coming through the trees so nicely, we had to stop and get a couple of the happy couple as well.

Once we sent everyone on, Lynette, Liam and I made our way around the courthouse, finding some fun locations to make portraits in. It was a very interesting experience working with Liam–it was so easy to see his love for Lynette, even though I couldn’t understand a word he said. We had a great time from the get go.

We managed to grab the very last few rays of sun streaming through the trees and made very good use of them.

There’s much more inside, after the jump.

How beautiful are these two people?

I absolutely love this next series. I loved seeing how they interacted together, and the light was to die for!

We moved around to the front of the courthouse next, and Lynette and Liam wanted to make sure they got at least one portrait of them with an American flag in it. There were flags hung on most of the light poles along the street, so that wasn’t too hard.

Lynette and Liam, congratulations on your wedding! I’m so thrilled I was able to be there with you and to capture the first moments of your new life together. Thank you for allowing me to witness something so special. The only thing that would make this even better is having you guys move back to Kansas, close to us again. We miss you! =]

We started out early, me and the ladies, hanging out at the Manhattan, Kansas, Holiday Inn’s Bridal Suite, getting everyone’s hair and makeup done. While waiting for her turn, Ashley wrote a note to accompany a gift for Ben.

And got a little present from him in return: the ticket from their first date. Yeah, he’s kind of sentimental like that. And Ashley loves it.

While Ashley was waiting for her turn, I grabbed a few frames of some of the important details:

Reception shoes:

Ashley’s turn!

One of Ashley’s precious flower girls, watching everyone swirl around her.

Ben had to get ready, too. Though, admittedly, it was a much simpler process.

There. Done. Back to Ashley.

Ashley, real quick, before you get your veil on…look over here.

Awesome. Thanks.

Personal aside: Since I began photographing weddings, I have become ever so much more appreciative of what my wife goes through when she dresses up. Love you, babe. Back to the show…after the jump.

The finished product:

I absolutely love photographing weddings at the Holiday Inn. There is such amazing light in the lobby there. Of course, we had to make some portraits there before we left (which made me all the more excited to go back there for a friend’s wedding, knowing how cool it would be to make some portraits of my own kiddos while they were all dressed up)

After their first look and some portraits at the hotel, we took a quick trip across the street to the campus of Kansas State University to make use of their buildings (and warmth!) and make some more portraits.

A big thank you to Kathryn Mayes, of Everyday You, for making the trip out to assist me, for this getting these next 2 images:

Next, we went over to the All Faiths Chapel there on campus at K-State to get ready for the ceremony.

While I was photographing the groomsmen with Ben, Kathryn pulled Ashley aside and did this:

The girls:

The guys:

The details:

The ceremony:

Kathryn’s view:

This one too:

Ashley and Ben had an awesome candle lighting portion of their ceremony, where the Maid of Honor and Best Man helped everyone in the audience light their own candles.  It represented how each of us is to let our light shine for others to see, so the light can spread to those around us.

Kathryn caught them at the back:

And I got the close up action:

Mr. & Mrs!

Off to the reception! K-State Alumni Center grand ballroom, here we come!

Ben’s ring has three words engraved around the outside of it. Clearly, it needs three different images of it.

After the first dance, Kathryn and I stole Ashley and Ben away for a few portraits on the incredible Grand Staircase outside the ballroom. Kathryn got a great one from up top:

We didn’t do too bad down at the bottom, either.

We didn’t keep them out too long, though. Didn’t want them to miss out on too much of the fun out on the dance floor!

Ashley and Ben, thank you so much for allowing me to witness not only the beginning of 2011 with you guys, but also the beginning of your lives together.

While we were waiting for the wedding photographer to finish doing the bride and groom portraits, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind me making a few portraits of her. Amazingly, she agreed! I was so happy that she was willing, because the Holiday Inn has some amazing light and great locations. I’ve shot some wedding receptions there before and have never been disappointed.

We spent all of 13 minutes, and I made less than 70 frames, but am so happy with the results. I don’t normally share personal images on here, but since these were not your run-of-the-mill family snapshots, I figured it was okay. So, if you’ll indulge me, my daughter:

My very favorite ones of her from this mini-session (plus my other two kiddos), after the break.

My wife brought our younger two kids later, but she arrived early enough for me to make a few frames of them as well. I spent a total of 90 seconds with our son and 2 minutes with our toddler.

I gave this little girl a square on the floor to stand on, and she actually just stood there!

Two weeks later, and I got to hang out with Zoey at her home and at nearby Anneberg Park. I spent nearly the whole time laughing and playing with this adorable, energetic, Wiggle-loving little girl.

Everyone, meet Zoey:

Zoey is the typical 2.5-year-old toddler: shy at first, but curious enough about the rabbit on the top of your camera that she will eventually come out of her shell and play.

Besides, she loves her little pink sunglasses.

To see more, check out the full post:

After hanging out in the living room, watching the Wiggles, dancing, and having a blast, we moved into the front bedroom to take advantage of some killer light and decorating.

There were some quiet moments.

And we had some smiles, too.

Back in the living room, there is a gorgeous rocking horse that Zoey’s dad made her from scratch. By himself. He even did all the leatherwork on the saddle. I was blown away. Check out how cute this thing is! Do you see that Rocking-Z brand? Awesome!

Of course, Zoey had to change into her cowgirl duds for this next series.

We went outside for a little bit, and despite the cold and snow on the ground, we still had a great time playing peek-a-boo in the playhouses.

Thank you, Zoey, for all the fun we had. You have a lovely family, with lots of new adventures ahead of you in North Carolina!

A couple weeks ago, I got the opportunity to drive up to Fairbury, NE and help out a good friend (and even better photographer), Chris Hsieh of La Brisa Photography, as he took on the monumental task of shooting a wedding with 13 bridesmaids and 13 groomsmen (!!!). I packed my gear and drove up, happy to face the crowd and watch Chris work his magic.

Lonnie and Annie were such a great couple to work with, so happy, full of so much love (as evidenced in part by how many people were in the wedding party), and thrilled to be marrying each other. I had a blast getting to know them and all their family and friends.

Chris asked me to show up at the church around lunchtime and assist mostly with the portraits and ceremony, so I got to focus mostly on capturing some of the amazing details and people that surrounded Lonnie and Annie that day.

Enjoy!

Annie with her mom, helping her get ready.

Checking out the finished product in the mirror.

Here’s a better view for you.

More wedding gorgeousness after the jump.

Oops…we forgot just one thing. Rachel, Annie’s sister, gave her a hand.

Annie and her cousin have matching tattoos in memory of their grandfather, who served as a police officer in Omaha. The tattoos say “granddaughter” in Czech.

Let’s not forget about Lonnie, patiently waiting to see his beautiful bride for the first time.

No matter where we took them, they rocked it!

Exhibit A: the alley.

Exhibit B: the church.

Exhibit C: under the canopy.

Lonnie and Annie, all the best to you guys out in California! Thank you for allowing me to witness the beginning of your marriage along with all of your loved ones.