All In

I kicked some serious butt at the casino today....I was whopping up on the table and ended up taking home $522! At one point I won 11 straight hands....half of which may have been bluffs. Damn it was fun.

We only play good in the sun

So I've come to the conclusion that our sfotball team only plays good in the sunny warm weather. When the sky is gray, we can't hit for crap and our defense makes a ton of errors, when its above 70, we hit all over the place and make every play....we won last night and we are 3-3, back at .500 once again. Of course the usual took place, Mike struck a guy out (how the heck to do strikeout in softball???), DaMetz made a play at the plate, and we scored 11 runs. we had one bad inning were we made like 5 errors and gave up 5 runs, but other than we pretty much shut them out the whole game, three times they had a runner on third and could not score. Our defense rocks!

Last Weeks Wedding's

Last weekend was a very, very long weekend spent shooting some very cool and very long weddings. Saturday started at 8am and went until 10:30pm. It was a traditional Cambodian wedding, full of lots of tradition, clothing changes, food and a whole bunch of people speaking a language I could not understand. I still do not know what was said the entire day, but it was fun and unique. The above image is the proofbook cover from that wedding....this is the cover from Sunday's Wedding:

Also fun, it took place in a little town near Crater Lake called Prospect, then we went to Crater Lake for some photos and finally the reception was at the Diamond Lake lodge. It was nice to be back in Southern Oregon, were I grew up....all of the locations for this wedding were spectacular and the people were great too. Made for a very enjoyable day. I got up early on Sunday and flew down to Medford, were I hired my mother, who lives in Klamath Falls as an assistant for the day. She picked me up at the airport and proved to be a pretty decent assistant too. After the wedding we went back to her place in KFalls and I flew home the next morning.

Baby Go Home Kitty

I'm in Klamath Falls at my Mom's house right now after shooting a wedding last night at Crater Lake.....my Mom has a cat that just showed up on her doorstep and she kept saying to it "go home kitty".......the cat never went home, but the name "Go Home Kitty" stuck. Well a few weeks ago, Go Home Kitty, had some kittens.....this one was my fav, I named her "Baby Go Home Kitty"

Know any good lawyer jokes?

So 40 lawyers need their photos taken.....I'm running out of funny things to say to get them to smile.....but today I finished up the job...almost...one guy was out of town and I will have to go back to shoot him and a couple of group shots....but for the most part it's all done.

More....

Another Day, some more portraits of attorney's.

Lawyer Portraits

I just got a job from a pretty large law firm here in Portland to shoot portraits of all 40 of the lawyers in the firm. They want them to have personality and not just be boring studio head shots. So each shoot is in a different location with different backgrounds, environments, etc. This guy was fun. Brought is over sized skateboard and his dog to be in his shot. 9 down...31 to go....

Great Weekend At The Beach

Finally, I had a weekend off. I marked this weekend off a long, long time ago so I could have a break before it got super crazy with shooting weddings, which the craziness begins this week (5 weddings in the next 12 days!) The original plan was to go camping.....but the forecast looked bad, so instead we rented a 2 bedroom condo and Jenn, Jordyn, my Mom, Sisters, Baylee and I all went to the beach from Friday to Monday. It was a blast and the weather was great too! Granted, I spent most of Saturday and a few hours Sunday in the Casino playing Poker, but for me, it does not get any better than that! The photo above is the sunset Sunday night, this was the view from our condo. I left all my cameras and shit at home because I really did not want to think about shooting any photos, but when this happened I kind of wish I had them, but my litle Powershot 410 did a good job. This is Jenn and I on the deck of the condo last night:

This is me giving Payten, Baylee and Sydney a sand castle building lesson:

Here is Jordyn just chillin on the beach:

Lexi had a blast too. Although she was so tired from running on the beach and throught he water that last night and this morning, she would not go on the sand, just looked at me like "are you crazy, I'm going to sleep".....A great relaxing weekend, wish I could do it all the time:

Jordyn takes over PGE Park

I had to shoot a portrait down at the park this morning so I took Jordyn with me. She had a good ol time, just crawled all over the field while I was shooting.

Look out! She's now mobile.....

Watch Out! She can now move at speeds I've never seen before. Video here.

More from this week

Here is the proofbook cover from yesterday's wedding, feel free to let me know what you think.

Wedding Photo of the Week

This week's wedding was at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport. I gotta say, renting out the Aquarium for a wedding is a cool idea...they had run of the place. We shot some cool photos in the shark tunnel too, but I like this one the best, the sun went down and they climbed up on a rock. It was perfect day at the beach today too....sunny and not too cool. I have a lot of good shots from this one, so look for more to come soon.

More from the Crane Project

This evening I left the Beavers game a bit early when I saw that the sunset was going to look cool and went into the Pearl District to shoot some photos of the cool buildings down there for the Crane Building Project. This is a neat looking building that the Streetcar runs past...the Fremont Bridge is also seen on the right.

This is a view from the Broadway Bridge looking into the Pearl...

A condo in the Pearl that had the sun setting on it just right.....

As I was driving over the Broadway Bridge headed home, I saw this, so I looked int he rear view mirror and no one was behind me, so I stopped my car in the middle of the bridge rolled down the window and shot this....

Day at the park

Today was a nice day, a good day to go to the park and let the dog run around take some cute photos of the kiddo. Here Jordyn's relaxes in the shade, well, almost, i put her partially in the sun so I could get a cool photo :)

Here Jordyn enjoys a nice ride on the swings.....

And here she is standing up on a tree looking over at me in between eating the bark off of it.....

Back at .500

After a dissappointing loss last week, the Mitchelldyer Photography softball team rebounded with a 16-13 victory. The highlight of the game was again our good defense plays, mostly Doug at Shortstop, he was awesome. Lewis was great on the hill, striking out the same guy twice...LOOKING! Wow. We are now 2-2.

Graduation

Andrew Wisely of Aloha peeks outside while waiting in line for the Aloha graduation to begin with Stuart Wilson (right).

I have not shot a newspaper assignment that was not sports or a portrait in at least a couple of months, so I was pretty happy to get this one...when I worked for the paper, I HATED shooting graduations, but since this year I did not have to shoot 10 of them, I was more than happy to do it. I was even happier when I arrived backstage and they had a door wide open with the sun setting right through it. I just sat back and waiting for him to step into the light.

Quick and Dirty

This is a quick and dirty portrait I shot for the Clackamas Review. It was one of those things were I had another shoot 20 minutes later so only had about 5-10 minutes to setup and shoot this one....I hate that....anyway, so this is what I came up with. I wanted to get the pins in there somehow, so we walked down to the end of the alley on lane 16, there is a 2-3 foot wide walkway and I set up a speedlight right in front of him and bounced it off the nice white wall to my right. With more time I would have lit the background up with a gel or something or would have gone when they had night bowl (black lights) going, but with newspapers sometimes you do not get that luxury, for what it is, this will work.

Self Portrait

This is a photo i snapped of myself while waiting for the fireworks to start...playing around with time exposure and self flash :) Yes, I was that bored sitting on a rooftop waiting for the pretty picture to come.

Wedding Photo of the Week

Thought this was kind of funny, bride having an eye torture device used on her (those things freak me out) while trying to talk on the phone.

Crane Building Project

I have been hired by a company that is buying this historic building in the Pearl District to document the building and the neighborhood/views, etc. The building is just run down and houses a rag warehouse, but they are going to renovate it and make it into something really spectacular. My job is to make it look good as is so they can lure investors. I will be going to the building 10-15 times this month so this is a pretty big project for me and I am looking forward to the challenge.

One of the biggest things they will add to the building is 2 penthouses on the roof. They wanted some photos to show what the penthouse views will be like so tonight I went up onto the roof and shot some scenics. It was also good timing because the Rose Festival kciks off tonight and there were fireworks too!

So this is the view from the "penthouse" with the nice fireworks to make you want to spend that 2 + million dollars for the best space in town.

Super Size Smile

Jordyn has a regular cute little smile, and then she has a super sized freak smile. It only lasts for a about a second when she does it, but I've been trying to get it on film for a while....finally today I got it. Damn she is cute.