On occassion I get hired to photograph PSA’s (public service announcements) television commercials. Today was the first for The Alliance of Automobile Manufactures. Basically these are wonderful promos encourging people and making them aware of all of the new safety features in our cars and how important it really is to buckle up.

The campaign is headed by my friend and client Mr. Bill George CEO of Nibus Marketing, Inc. of Sacramento.

Here are a few images from our first day shoot.

The only cool thing from the show was Ellen DeGeneres, the sound effects choir and the dancing shadow people. Talk about your boring 3 1/2 hours of sound effects, foriegn film crap! How many people here ever go see a foriegn film??? Don’t even know who any of these people are?!

The other thing that ticked me off was seeing our old VP Al Gore come on stage and try to be funny. The guy first was not funny, what he was, was about 50lbs overweight! And BORING!

 Working people frequently ask retired people what
> they do to make their days
> interesting. Well, for example, the other day I went
> downtown and went into a
> shop. I was only in there for about 5 minutes and
> when I came out there was a
> cop writing out a parking ticket.
>
> I went up to him and said, “Come on, man, how about
> giving a retired person a
> break”? He ignored me and continued writing the
> ticket. I called him a “Nazi
> .” He glared at me and started writing another
> ticket for having worn tires.
> So I called him a “doughnut eating Gestapo.” He
> finished the second ticket and
> put it on the windshield with the first.
>
> Then he started writing a third ticket. This went on
> for about 20 minutes.
> The more I abused him, the more tickets he wrote.
>
> Personally, I didn’t care. I came downtown on the
> bus, and the car that he
> was putting the tickets on had a bumper sticker that
> said “Hillary in ’08.” I
> try to have a little fun each day now that I’m
> retired. It’s important to my
> health.

 We dont rush our clients anymore when it comes time to get the final order into us as what they do or dont want in their album. Here is a wonderful couple we had so much fun with, during their San Francisco engagement shoot all the way up to their wedding in the Sierra Foothills last September. Just a quick thank you to Kerry and Mark Lydell who came along and helped me out and got some really creative extra shots I would have never thought of.

There finished album will be a 50 page 11×14″ Flush mount album by Kingston Albums.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THEIR WEDDING ALBUM DESIGN

Oh gee wiz…life is really hard sometimes?!

2007 is the Year of the Pig (or Boar).

Kung hei fat choy! Chinese New Year is on 18th February 2007. It will be the Year of the Pig.

This year new is particularly special as it is The Year of the Golden Pig, when a Pig year combines with a Fire element year – this happens every 60 years and heralds an extremely lucky and prosperous year. The Chinese believe a child born this year in The Year of the Golden Pig will be blessed with a carefree, wealthy and loving life!

To all of my Chinese friends and clients, I wish you much happiness and Blessings this year.

For my wifes Birthday last September she said she would like another Maltese (Tammy) to keep our two year old happy since our nine year old didn’t want to play that much anymore. My family loves animals, we’ve had dogs, cats you name it, my whole life, but this little girl takes the cake! She comes to bed with us crawls under the covers between the two of us, puts her head on a pillow and falls asleep every night looking at me! Every morning like an alarm clock at 5:18am she wakes me up by standing on my arm and scratching me to get up and put her outside to do her deed. I’m a 50 year old man, when did I loose control to a 3lb little dog?! HELP!

 Canon 5D, 85mm 1.8 lens shot using Priority @ 500 ISO

I’m thinking about adding this monster lens to my system this year. Its a Canon 400mm 2.8 IS L Lens, I have seen these going for around $4000-$4600 used. Oh, and it weighs in around 14lbs. I figure, I need to stand out from all of the wedding guests, since now-a-days so many are showing up with semi pro gear, I need to look like a pro, so I guess I will really look more like a Ball and Chain with this oversized piece of glass! LOL!

Here is a wedding I shot back in September 30, 2006. I just finished the album layout and design for my client. They made their choices of which images they liked and emailed me back their selection around the first week in November. After shooting another half dozen weddings I finally had a chance to work on this over the past 2 weeks. Its a community center in Roseville, California with about 150 guests. Enjoy!

Click here to watch The Web Show

I had the pleasure of assisting and helping shoot a wedding up north in Petaluma, California with my good friend Clark Woolsey the other day. It was a 12 hour shoot with a wonderful Godly couple and wedding party. The countryside of Sebastapool, California was so pretty, every turn we made we saw photo opps. It was like going back in time to the 1800′s and the 1950′s too. Clark had photographed for this family before and to assist him is like watching an artist at work! He has a completely different style than how I shoot and has been the only photographer I have assisted in the past 20 years. It was really hard for me to just let go and let someone else be in charge, but after a short time I realized how much fun it was for me to just shoot from the sidelines and not be under any pressure. Here are some images that I captured for Clarks clients. Hope you like them, they were my first ever taken with all of my new Canon 5D cameras and lenses. I shot almost the entire time with NO FLASH, the 5D is an amazing camera and I was amazed on how it captured such low light shots just perfectly with so much ease. If you’re wondering how tall I am from the second photo I took of Clark shooting the girls, that’s my new idea of a sky-cam, I have a 5D camera on a Mono-Pod 12 feet in the air with a 15mm 2.8 Canon Fisheye attached shooting with the 10 second timer on the camera. I also used it for the ceremony when the bride was coming down the isle, you can see the entire church full of guests, totaly an awesome shot that normally a video crew at the Oscars might do.