After spending a great weekend in Carmel (pictures soon), I drove down to San Diego to attend the OneLight Workshop on Tuesday. OneLight is a workshop taught by Zack Arias on maximizing the potential of one-flash lighting. He started this workshop with this Edward Weston quote:

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don’t know what to do with it.

Hard-core, eh? Yeah, this workshop was all about nuts and bolts, f-stops, apertures, shutter speed, control, control, control. It’s actually kind of fun being around a bunch of photographers throwing out all these geeky numbers and stuff. I cannot recommend this workshop enough to any photographer who really wants to have more control of their gear and want to be inspired to learn as much about light as possible. Here are some of my shots from the day - some of them are natural light and some of them are flash lit.

For those curious, our awesome clients for the day were 2000 Olympic Archer Karen Scavotto and singer/songwriter Josh Damigo.

Last weekend, I tagged along with my friend Dexter Lo down in San Diego for this portrait session at Grape Day Park.

I’m having to jump all over the place in terms of blogging because I’m realizing that some things are just easier to blog than others. =) Before the WPPI events, I was actually in downtown Las Vegas for the Antiworkshop with awesome instructors and some amazing photographers from all over the world. One of the workshop activities was being given a list of techniques and situations to capture, going out with a team of photographers and really cool models, and then putting together a collection to show. I got to shoot with Emily, Alli, and Scott, and here are some of my pictures of Mark and Yessenia (who rocked, by the way).

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On a personal note, I learned so much from Doug, Chenin and John Michael on this trip. It’s incredible to grow and develop as a photographer… and even better to do it alongside other passionate photographers. When I was going to yoga, I had an instructor who would say “You learn the skills and techniques so that you can then fully express.” I think of that often when it comes to photography. All the stuff about lighting, shutter-speed, f-stop - they are all just means to new avenues of expression.

Did y’all miss me?! I haven’t posted in awhile because I was in Las Vegas all last week, and got back yesterday. For a city as modern as Las Vegas, they aren’t very generous with internet connectivity… plus with everything going on, I didn’t really get a chance to stop and blog. Anyway, so there are a few things coming up that I will be trying to blog about, but I’ll just start with this.

There is a big convention held by Wedding & Portrait Photographers Int’l (WPPI) every year in Vegas around this time. There happens to be a 16×20 print competition each year that photographers from all over the world submit for scoring. Prints that score above 80 points receive an Award of Excellence get hung in this really cool gallery for people to walk through and see a lot of great work from a lot of different photographers around the world. Two of my prints made the gallery, and it was incredibly humbling to see my work hung next to amazing artists and pioneers such as Joe Bussink, Marcus Bell, Jerry Ghionis and Jesh De Rox. I really want to just thank my clients who let me do this kind of work.

Here are my two prints that won 2008 WPPI Awards of Excellence:

Alrighty folks. After much teasing (I don’t believe I’ve ever done two teaser blogs for an engagement session), here are some of the highlights from my session with Alex and Joanne. It’s always cool going through a session because it’s like getting an opportunity to relive the events. With those sentiments comes the feelings of what I want to express as I post-process the the images to their final presentation. This was really an amazing experience, and with the weather being the nicest it was all week in both Santa Barbara and Monterey, I got to work with some beautiful light as well as amazing clients. [Photo/Techy note: the Monterey session (with the plane) was taken in the morning. With the cold air, I love the morning light right now.]