One thing I love about shooting in a studio is that you have complete control over the elements.  Light, wind, etc. are all controllable, and that makes it that much easier to get awesome shots like these senior portraits I took for Jaqueline back in July.

Been a busy year, and I’m finally catching up on blogging shoots from the past 6 months.  Look for a lot more over the next few weeks.

This is probably one of my favorite shots I’ve taken this year.

I haven’t been blogging as much as I should be lately.  Life has been crazy.  Between weddings, portraits, and corporate work, I’ve been working non-stop for what feels like forever.  I’m still planning on going back and doing blog posts for all the weddings I shot last year, but most of them won’t be full posts simply because I don’t want to fall behind on all the awesome ones I’m shooting this year.

I had the pleasure of shooting this wedding with my good friend Angie, owner of Todd Studios Photography.

This is the story of Katie and Mike’s beautiful fall wedding.  I had been looking forward to this wedding for quite a while because Katie is a wedding planner (and a damn good one at that if I do say so) and runs her own wedding coordination and planning company, Simply and Forever.  Any photographer that has worked with a good planner will agree that they are worth their weight in gold when it comes to making the day go smoothly.  She had every last detail figured out, and the day went as smoother than we ever could have hope for.

We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day.  It was an unseasonably warm Saturday in early November.  The trees still had some leaves on them giving us some beautiful orange and red colors throughout the day, and we didn’t have to worry about bundling up while we were outside getting our shots.  The weather especially worked to our advantage around sunset, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

We started the day downtown at the Westin St. Louis with the girls getting ready…

In case you didn’t realize this about me, I am in fact a guy.  I like to think I dress well and know a fair amount about men’s fashion, but women’s fashion, on the other hand, is completely foreign to me.  Katie had this really cool pair of Kate Spades.  When we first arrived, I commented to Angie, “Oh, those shoes are really cute.”  To paraphrase, her response was “Uh yeah…… those are Kate Spades.  You bet your ass they’re cute.”  I’m slowly but surely learning more about what is “in” in the world of women’s fashion.  I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing….

Once everyone was ready, we headed to Concordia Lutheran Church in Kirkwood for the ceremony getting in some quality time with Mike and the guys beforehand and of course, a little more time with the girls.

So remember earlier when I said the perfect weather especially played well into our plans?  Well here’s why.  You don’t typically want to ride a giant metal, electric wheel atop a building downtown when it’s wet, cold, or windy.  Although I doubt wind or cold would’ve stopped these two.  Despite being somewhat scared of heights (well not so much the heights but the falling from said heights), we went to roof of the City Museum in Downtown St. Louis to ride Big Eli, a 4-story ferris wheel several hundred feet in the air with a view that you have to see to believe.  This was definitely one of the most challenging sets of photos I’ve ever had to take (to any photographers reading this, I highly recommend having two bodies as you don’t want to be switching lenses when you’re swinging in a little cart 300 feet in the air), but it was definitely worth it and I absolutely love the results.

After a short party bus ride, we arrived at the reception at the Westin St. Louis for some drinks, dinner, and dancing.

As I’ve said before, I don’t have this blog just to show people my photography.  It’s also here to let my clients, potential clients, and pretty much anyone else out there get to know me better.

I have a lot of hobbies.  I play guitar and flute.  I love biking.  I’m thinking about getting a kayak (still not sure on this one yet).  One hobby that I have been getting more serious about in the past year is brewing beer.  I was inspired to start brewing when I first tried Schlafly’s amazing pumpkin ale.  Schlafly is the second largest brewer in St. Louis (you may have heard of those other guys that make more beer on the 1st of January than most other breweries do in the whole year), and their beers are absolutely amazing.  Until I moved right down the street from their brewery a year and a half ago, my beer pallet was pretty much confined to AB products.  The first time I walked through the doors to Schlafly Bottleworks, my eyes were opened and I was introduced to the world of microbrews.

It was then that I decided I wanted to try my hand at making beer.  I have since made gallons upon gallons of beer.  Some have been great (my Pumpkin Ale and the APA I’ve got aging right now), and some have been not so great (that Amber Ale that I added the wrong finishing hops to).  While not all my beers are perfect, it’s definitely something I’m becoming very passionate about.  So passionate, in fact, that I’m starting to seriously think that in 15 years or so, I’d like to open my own brewery.  Because of this, my friend Justin and I decided that we need to start documenting our brewing with pictures while we’re young so that when we’re 40, we’ll have some vintage shots to put up around the brewery.

Justin came over yesterday afternoon to brew a Vanilla Porter with me.  This is our first really dark, high-gravity beer so I’m not expecting it to be perfect.  As with anything, I’m sure it’ll take a few tries to get it right.  Regardless, I’m sure we’ll enjoy the fruits of our labor plenty when it’s finished in a few weeks.

Here’s the Vanilla Porter, still basically just water and sugar from the grains at this point, getting ready to boil.

I don’t know what it is about this shot, but when I look at it, I can smell all the dark malt and chocolate grains that went into this batch.

I was trying to get Justin to ignore the camera so I could get a shot of him actually doing something.  Didn’t work out so well.

A lot of time I’m so busy editing other people’s pictures that I never do anything with my own digital shots.  To remedy this, my mom got me an Instax camera for my birthday.  Obviously not the highest quality images, but there’s something very quaint and  simple about the pictures it produces.  Plus, there’s just something about watching the photo develop right in front of you.

As I said in my last post, in anticipation of my first wedding of 2010 I was planning on going back to the weddings I shot last year and doing blog posts on them all last week. Well,  I ended up having a couple last minute shoots last week so I didn’t get to get all the blog posts up.  So my new (and more realistic goal) is to get them all done and posted in the next two weeks before I blog the wedding from this past weekend.

This was one of my two June 2009 weddings.  The reception was at the beautiful 1904 World’s Fair Pavilion in Forest Park.

As per all my 2009 weddings, this one was shot for Todd Studios Photography.

2009 was my first year shooting weddings.  I had been wanting to get into it for a while but wasn’t exactly sure how to take that first step.  Photographing a weddings is like nothing else.  You have to know your equipment like the back of your hand.  You have to be able to anticipate everything before it happens and be ready to capture it both accurately and artistically.  That’s why so many people who get into shooting weddings with no experience leave lots of unsatisfied clients in their wake.  There are some photographers out there who jump right in and do great right off the bat, but they are definitely few and far between.

It’s my opinion that the best way to get into shooting weddings is to work as a second photographer for as many weddings as it takes until you feel comfortable taking the reigns.  Sometimes getting that good second shooter gig is even harder than transitioning into working as the primary photographer.  I sort of lucked into my work as a second shooter.  As I was first really starting to pursue getting into weddings early last year, a photographer friend of mine had just met Angie from Todd Studios.  Angie had just purchased the studio and was looking for people to hire as seconds.  My friend put me in touch with her, and I’ve shot several weddings and become great friends with Angie since then.  She’s really taken me under her wing (despite being two months younger than me), and I can’t even begin to express how grateful I am to her for that.

Next Saturday is my first wedding of 2010, and it can’t come soon enough.  January and February are extremely slow months for most wedding and portrait photographers.  I’ve been taking this time to go over all my weddings from last year to see what I did that I liked and, more importantly, what I didn’t like.  Between that and looking at dozens of other photographers work both online and in magazines, I have been getting stir crazy not being around weddings.

Since I just recently launched my blog, I never did blog posts for any of the weddings I shot last year.  Over the next week leading up to my first one of 2010, I’ll be posting my favorite images from some of the weddings I did last year.

Here’s to a great 2009 and an even better 2010.

For Julie’s senior pictures, we met up at Laclede’s Landing right at the riverfront early in the morning.  I love shooting down there because of the beautiful architecture and cobblestone streets.  In addition to all that, there was a ton of fog in the air which gave us the opportunity to get a look much different than a lot of the other senior pictures you see out there.

After getting a bunch of awesome shots down at the riverfront, we headed to Steinberg Ice Rink in Forest Park.  Julie’s been an ice skater pretty much her whole life, so getting a few shots out on the ice was a no-brainer.

I had an awesome senior portrait session this past Monday.  I’m almost finished editing the session, but I love this shot so much, I wanted to post it right away.  Look for the full post later this week.

After putting it off for some time, I’ve finally got my blog up and running.  I’m still learning all the functions of WordPress, so the look might change a little while I’m getting settled in, but don’t expect any radical changes until around the end of 2010.

My main goal for having this blog is to let everyone get to know me better through my photography; to help you experience how I see the world.  I’ll be posting new content at least once a week and will also make any announcements about specials and giveaways (like free portrait sessions) here as well.

While I primarily shoot weddings and portraits, I will be posting anything and everything from my life on here.

I hope you enjoy…