Catherine and Mike are SO excited for the arrival of their first baby!  I first met them a few years back, and had the absolutely overwhelming pleasure of photographing their wedding and witnessing an all around fun day at the Edgewater Hotel in downtown Seattle.  I couldn’t have been happier for them when I heard about Catherine’s bump… and boy is she cute as ever!!

Thank you guys so so much for having me over (allll the way across Ballard… go Ballard!!!).  Can’t wait for the phone call saying that its time to schedule part two ;)  And special thanks to Mike for hanging in there… chewing nearly two packs of watermelon flavored Hubba Bubba gum for one silly picture is a tough job!

I’m so glad to finally be back to posting again!  Amy and Brad were married in April (yes! April, and now it’s, well, July!).  Amy grew up in Ketchikan, and Brad in Michigan.  Brad came to KTN as a member of the coast guard, and as they got to know each other, well, the rest is history!  Barbie and I arrived in Alaska a week before the wedding, and Amy had the pleasure of playing tour guide to us while we helped her prep for the wedding.  So many beautiful places to see (post Part III will probably finally happen, oh, say, September ;)!  The weather was absolutely, uncharacteristically gorgeous (still a little chilly, snow on the mountain caps), but the morning of the wedding, Ketchikan was back to it’s usual April self with the big drops of rain, non-stop.  From the stunning custom jewelry (Heidi Hull Designs) to the candy bar (we all love candy!) to the handmade black and white ring bearer’s pillow, Amy managed to create such a bright and modern wedding from a somewhat isolated location.  Here are some of our favorite images!

LOVE that she wore snakeskin print pink shoes on her wedding day!  Barbie saw these in Seattle and snagged them for Amy, knowing that she’d be instantly in love with them- she was!

We took the tram from their hotel on the top of the mountain down on to Creek Street, the old part of town built entirely on docks (actually, all of Ketchikan is built out!!)

The cutest ring bearer to ever be rained on!

Have umbrellas, will travel.  We brought these with us from Seattle, good thing!  All is well until the rain travels down the umbrellas onto the poor guy/gal standing inbetween!

One of the traditions in the Norwegian culture is to be blindfolded, spun around, and then the bride has to cut the cake (made of sweet Almond flavored pastries).  However many rings she cuts through is how many children they’ll have- since they already have one uber cute daughter, looks like they’ve got three to go!

Gremlins are not just characters from 80’s movies.  They’re real.  And they live in my office.

I’ve been a little MIA the last few weeks, and boy have I missed blogs (reading and writing), phone, email, friends, and being a member of society.  So here is the lesson of the quarter, my clients, photographer friends, and random visitors.  Because what’s the point in having unfortunate things happen if the only person to learn from them is yourself?!

1. BACK UP YOUR FILES.  THREE TIMES.  This is called triple redundancy.  In the olden days of the 1990’s we could put our negatives in a nice archival box in the top of the closet, and unless our town was blown up or engulfed in fire, they were safe.  I yearn for those days.  

Have you ever heard the old saying, “It’s not a matter if IF, but WHEN?”  That is so so true.  In the last few weeks, I’ve talked to a lot of other photographers about this, and was shocked at how many haven’t integrated solid backup plans into their workflow.  The discs in your hard drive spin so so incredibly fast (imagine hundreds of times faster than a record), so any little bump to your computer, piece of dust, miniscule power spike, or little slimy Gremlin can shock your system into the afterlife.  If not used for a long period of time, the lubrication can dry up, causing your hard drive to seize.  And of course, electronics are targets for theives.  And then there’s viruses if you have a PC.  So you need to back up to an external location.  Here are some great ideas that we all (or should) practice, without all the techie mumbo jumbo (call me if you want the specifics…):

-cd/dvd/blu ray: solid state media is very dependable, but is also prone to it’s own ailments, such as disc rot and scratches, but an inexpensive media nonetheless.  Your data can be safe anywhere from 3 years on up, depending on your choice of media (hint: you get what you pay for!)

-external hard drive: you should sync your hard drive to back up to another external hard drive of the same size.  And then take it offsite to your friend’s house.  Or lock it in the basement.  There are tons of programs that can automatically do this for you (try SilverKeeper, Retrospect, Bounceback, Carbon Copy Cloner, ect).  You can purchase a portable external hard drive (I’ve got a couple of Seagate Drives that I mail back to myself when I’m shooting on location in another state) for around $100 just to back up your computer.  You can also get some great hard drives and daisy-chain them together (need to have at least 2 firewire ports on each, though).  Or, if you’re really brave, set yourself up a desktop NAS RAID or a network RAID (I won’t even go there…. but in case you’re curious, I went the NAS route and since the software wasn’t fully developed and tested, it was totally incompatible with my Macs and was locking me out of my own files!).

-online backup: great solution if 1. you own a pc  and 2. don’t have terabytes of data to back up.  Try companies like Memeo, it’s an incredibly great deal for a huge piece of mind!

2. WE LOVE INSURANCE.  As a business owner, insurance is a must.  I’m sure that if you know me, you know about the woman who backed into my parked NEW CAR last week, or the slippery rocks, tidepools, and equipment episode in Alaska.  My business insurance even covers the recovery of lost data.  I had a hard drive go down last month, even though it was a mirrored RAID set.  Very safe, because one drive immediately backs itself up to another disc whenever you make a change, but again, Gremlins, so BOTH drives went down simultaneously.  Just thinking about how many hours of production I’d lose during wedding season trying to reload all of my dvd’s (not to mention the hours of recent photoshop work we’ve been doing in preparation for album printing!) made me want to cry (actually, I did, a few times).  Enter Drive Savers, my nights in shining armor!  They were able to scrape every last file off of my old drives, for the modest price of $4000.  What a nice ring that number has.  But I guess it would have been easier to revert to that secondary hard drive that was diligently backed up each week, now wouldn’t it??

3. I DON’T CARE WHAT THEY SAY, YOU WILL NOT BE “ONLINE AND READY TO GO IN MINUTES.”  I think we all know about this one, the feared SOFTWARE UPDATE.  You spend the time and money updating one key program or operating system, and it sets into motion some sort of ridiculous domino effect so everything else either needs new drivers or just plain isn’t compatible.  Funny.  So very funny.

So there we go!  I think I’ve got all of my bad karma out just in time to enter our industry’s busy season… I think I’m due for a streak of good luck for a long long long time.  

Anyone know what the lottery jackpot is up to these days?  I think I’ll go buy a ticket.

There’s nothing like getting together with a bunch of great folks in your industry and having a great time when you love what you do.  A couple of weeks ago, something like 20 or 30 other photographers and I traveled across the water in the wee hours of the morning to meet up at historic Fort Worden to shoot until we dropped. I dragged some of my clients with me, Arica and Eddie, (okay, maybe not DRAGGED… maybe they wanted to go!) and we all romped around the fields, rocks, barracks, bunkers, and beaches and had a grand old time before passing out in one of the 100-year-old Officer’s houses that you can rent on the park grounds.

If you’re not familiar with the one of the latest trends in wedding photography, it’s to have your own fashion session a day or a week or a month or a year after your wedding.

In the industry, we’ve taken to calling them “Trash The Dress” sessions although our aim is not to trash your gorgeous couture wedding gown that you saved your weekly allowance for since you were 8 years old, but to go somewhere and make some really fun fashion inspired images that you normally wouldn’t be able to make on your wedding day because of time or location constraints. (and your dress will survive, unless you decide to go for a swim in a swamp!)

If you’d like to book a session like this of your own (whether you’re up for wearing your wedding attire or just pulling some fun duds out of your closet!) contact me so we can schedule something for you- summer is tight (as it’s prime wedding season!) so dates are limited!!!

Special thanks to Steve Smith for heading up this whole event-we all had THE greatest time and can’t wait for you to plan the next hoedown!  Wink wink!!

Granted, this is June, and we shot this engagement session in April, but taking today’s weather into account, it could have been just yesterday!   Seriously though, when are we due for some summer?!

I’m really looking forward to Darcy & Matt’s wedding at the lovely Farm Kitchen this next November.  Darcy, taking time out of her busy grad school schedule at NYU, and Matt, taking a few days off from the bustling life of being a chef at one of Bobby Flay’s happening spots Mesa Grill, flew over from New York one rainy Spring afternoon so we could make some fun images and spend time getting to know each other in the industrial and edgy district of Georgetown (oh and I’m sure they also did some wedding planning and friend-seeing while they were here too!).

With the help of wedding and event planner Michelle from Married and More With Michelle, they are planning a green wedding at one of our favorite venues,  The Farm Kitchen, with special emphasis on in-season organic foods.  As miss Michelle puts it, “Think country rustic meets chic and modern with a Green twist.”  I can’t wait to taste the yummy food- I’m a sucker for good {veggie} cuisine!

I guess on the flip side, there are always puddles to splash in on the way back to the car… OR maybe it’s the perfect spot to make your own rockstar album cover in front of ;)

Troopers. That’s what I comes to mind when I think of all of my wonderful wedding clients who powered through our engagement and getting to know you shoots this April! If I didn’t know better, I would say that it rained the whole month straight, extra hard when we’d have a shoot scheduled just because some cosmic force thought it would be funny to pour down on all of my clients and I!

Meghan and Kevin are another pair of troopers that I’ve got for clients. Their wedding is set for a {hopefully!} sunny warm afternoon in July, right before the 4th. I’m excited to see what Meghan is planning for us all- I do know that the look and feel will be slightly turn-of-the century, especially with the Skansonia Ferry for the venue. I love the old bar and shiney wood floors, plus the views of downtown are just gorgeous at night!

On the other hand, I think luck may have been on our side- had it been a nice sunny afternoon, we would surely have been spotted by one of Kevin’s students- we shot around the University of Washington where Kevin is a professor (and my old stomping grounds as well!)

Ahhh yes, the joys of shooting during Seattle’s lovely spring weather.  The sideways rain, the whipping wind.  But we still had a great old time- it was all worth it by the end (and you’ll see why in a second!)

They have two dogs.  They’re both super talented doctors- she’s an OBGYN and he’s a pulmonary specialist.  They are coincidentally my neighbors (Go Ballard!).  So naturally, we romped around our stomping grounds, starting at Golden Gardens, then back up to Ballard for some pics around the ‘hood.

I love interesting wall patterns (what photographer doesn’t…)- a big shiny gold star to the first person (not named Ian or Megan) who can name where this wall is in the comments field!!!  You KNOW you know where it is if you’ve had a night out at the hip bars or shopped the boutiques!

Then we headed inside Conor Byrne for a couple of beers to warm up and dry out.  Actually, this particular favorite Ballard hangout is unusually special (other than open mic night on Sundays, of course! See everyone there next Sunday at 8, right?!?!): it was the site of their first date.  And then right across the street (hence our image of the street corner!) the Tractor Tavern was the site of their proposal-he was too excited to keep his plans to himself and blurted it out during a show (gotta love boys when they do stuff like that!)

Their wedding this summer is going to be so fun and laid back, yet naturally beautiful and elegant- the lovely and talented Michelle Engvall (of Married & More With Michelle) is planning some fun things for the party at the Golden Gardens Bathhouse (but of course! “Go Ballard,” remember?!), complete with an Irish pub band to keep us singing old Irish folk tunes!