free tickets to the Buick Invitational!

I have a few extra tickets to the Buick Invitational golf match if anyone wants to go. I would hate for them to go to waste... so let me know (via email or comment) if you want them. The last two days are Saturday and Sunday. Tiger tees off at 8:50 on Saturday. I'm thinking about going Sat or Sun... anyone want to go with me?

Bethany, my dad and I went today. Here's a couple snaps.



And a pretty nice mullet also. :)

my 25th birthday!

Thanks so much everyone for the phone calls, emails, myspace messages, instant messages, text messages, blog comments, letters, and and even verbal "in person" happy birthdays! Haha. It's quite amazing how many different ways one can go about saying happy birthday!

I had an AWESOME day, packed full of fun stuff. Come to think of it, these first 23 days of January have all been amazing. By far my favorite year yet... :)

My wonderful wife Bethany gave me two of the coolest gifts ever! I've always loved thoughtful gifts that require a bit of thinking and time to prepare, and she did just that this year! I'll do another post later with pics of the stuff she did, it's so cool.

Anyway I started off the day at 5AM by blending a yummy strawberry, banana, blueberry, and marionberry smoothie. So good. Then I headed off before sunrise to the Torrey Pines golf course where the Buick Invitational is happening this weekend. These past few days I've been assisting a Golf Digest photographer getting photos of Tiger Woods. It's fun to say I was "hangin with Tiger" on my birthday... but in reality I was just "in his presence" along with hundreds of other fans... :) Here is a little snapshot I popped off while he was teeing off above the beautiful pacific ocean.
After a nice day at the course I had lunch with a couple really cool photographers at the delicious Las Olas mexican restaurant in Cardiff. Yum.

Then I got home and actually snuck in a little nap with Bethany, which I haven't done in years and I always forget how nice it is! Bethany planned out some fun things to do like go to the movies, out to dinner, and shopping at my favorite store REI, which all sounded really fun, but on a whim I decided that a nice little bike ride to Carlsbad and a stop at my favorite Pizza/Beer place Pizza Port sounded too good to resist. Mmmm. We are gonna do the movies and shopping tomorrow I think...

So that is the quick rundown (with lots of details left out) of my 25th birthday... Thanks everyone for making it a great one!

A few more snaps-

oh yes

me in my new audi R8... ok ok so maybe it's not mine... but i got to drive it around for a night. 420 horsepower, 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, 187 mph top speed. wow.

vegas for the weekend...

I'm heading off to the Vegas desert for the weekend to help my Peter with a photoshoot. Peter always gets the coolest photoshoots... this time he's photographing the beyond sweetness Audi R8 for Winding Road magazine. I might even get to drive it... :)

PS> I didn't take the shot above... I snagged it from here.

First photos in La Ventana

I just started looking though some of my photos from La Ventana Mexico and these are a couple of the first photos I shot there, on January 1st. We had been traveling all day from Michigan to Mexico in planes, buses, cars and trucks! Our flight in Michigan left at 6AM and we arrived to our place in La Ventana at 10PM, which equals about 18 hours of traveling with the time changes and things. So we were pretty exhausted. Bethany went straight to bed and I took one look at the moon and knew I wasn't going to bed!

The best combination is when the moon is full and you have a really warm night... because I threw on my trunks and played around shooting on the Sea of Cortez beaches till the wee morning hours. So much fun.

So during this photo I had an interesting experience. I was walking through the frame with a flashlight during the 15 minute exposure (you can see the flashlight streak in the pic) and then I was just standing there knee deep in the water, and I feel something slimy slide across my leg. Hmmm, what could that be? Seaweed? A small fish? Uhhh, no. I shine my light down and it's a 3 foot long underwater snake!!! It scared the crap outta me because I was not the least bit expecting a snake! I did some research, and it turns out it's called a Tiger Snake Eel. And of course being the little boy I am, I grabbed a couple sticks and moved him up on shore to get a better look. I didn't have my digimon camera so unfortunately I didn't get a photo. But there are some really cool videos I found, check em out.


More photos from Mexico coming soon!

We live in a beautiful world

I've been sitting inside my place for the past few days doing general business stuff and editing photos like crazy... Thats pretty typical when I return home from a month long trip. Being cooped up really gets to you after a while, but it's so nice that we are blessed with such beautiful things like sunsets that just give you a big sigh of relief... Ahhhh. So nice.

Anyway after sitting on the computer for 10 hours straight I looked out my bedroom window and saw this sunset happening over the ocean... So I sprinted to the beach a few blocks away to get a better view of the sun dipping below the horizon. SOO beautiful.


And I kinda liked this isolated cloud in the sky just a few minutes later. :)

Back in business!

This blog has been broken (ya I didn't know blogs could break either) for the past week, but now after many wasted hours and $75 paid to recover the archive files that blogger deleted... It's fixed!

If you have a blogger blog and your still in the old "beta" mode, I have one word of advice... back up all your files before you switch to the new version! That way there is no risk of losing everything like I did. But if your blog is hosted by blogspot, I'm not sure if you can even do that...

Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas!

Well we are now in the final phase of our adventures away- Amarillo, Texas! Wow, this place is something else. I have decided that everyone here does mainly 4 things- eat, go to the movies, go to church, and get married! They aren't kidding when they say everything is bigger in Texas! The food portions at the restaurants (mostly steakhouses and BBQ) are huge, the move theatre's are huge, the churches are not only huge but it seems like there is 2 churches for every one person! Weddings seem to be a huge deal in Texas too, because there are wedding shops everywhere.
Texas is great fun though. Although I could never live here (too far from the ocean!) I really enjoyed visiting because the people are sooo warm and nice, and I love their accents!
Anyway Bethany and I shot a cool wedding here on Saturday, just two days after the La Ventana Wedding! I'll get the slideshow up soon!
Ok that was a big tangent... This post is really about the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo that is super random and has no point at all, except for people like us to just wonder what the heck it's all about. Apparently there is a Amarillo millionaire named Stanley Marsh 3 who is super weird, so he just decided to put these Cadillac's in the ground at an angle, and there the Cadillac Ranch was born.

Here are some pics from when we went to see it last night...

My good buddy and old college roomy David Esler lives here in Amarillo, and so we got to stay with him, which was super fun. Check out his portfolio... he's insanely talented!


Bethany being all artsy with her new Holga camera that I got her for Christmas-

Congrats Sasha and Christina Kraev!

The wedding slideshow from Sasha and Christina's wedding in La Ventana, Mexico is up! Check it out by CLICKING HERE!

It all turned out so great, which wasn't hard to do for us because Sasha and Christina are a beautiful couple and the setting they got married in was absolutely INCREDIBLE!!! So if anyone else wants to hire us for a destination wedding like this one let us know!!! :)

Here are a few pics that I really like, and don't forget to check out the slideshow HERE!

going back to the old ways!

When I was in college my favorite thing to do was go out all night long and do super long exposures while I "painted with light". Painting with light involves setting up the camera on a tripod and keeping the shutter open while I run around inside the frame and pop flashes and/or wave around a flashlight on things inside the frame. The results are super fun to see because you really never know what it's going to look like!

So a few nights ago in Mexico there was a full moon, awesome clouds, and it was really warm out so everything was perfect to have some fun shooting all night long. Well, until 3AM at least.

I only have time to post a couple shots so here are 2 of my favorites... This is NOT PHOTOSHOP! :)

La Ventana Mexico!! Muy Bien!

Were are now in phase two of our adventures away, La Ventana Mexico! We got here on the first day of 2007, what a way to start the new year. 80 degrees out, sunny, 73 degree water, and beautiful everywhere! I've been taking TONS of photos so I'll try to update the blog soon!
The wedding we are shooting is tomorrow and the rehearsal is in a couple minutes so I gotta run!

This is where the wedding reception is going to be tomorrow! So beautiful.

Playing around with my new underwater housing, so fun!

This little restaurant across the street has the best mexican food! Tacos for a buck, beer for a buck, and from 5-7 is happy hour with 30 peso ($3) JUMBO margaritas! Bethany and I had a couple...umm... each... and were going back tonight for some more! Yum.