Last Saturday I had the pleasure of shooting a very fun, unique wedding held by an equally fun and unique couple, Adam and Ashley Phalen, in Santa Monica. The wedding and reception were held at the Santa Monica Bay Woman’s Club, a cool old building dating back to the early 1900s. The couple are both very creative – Adam is a sound designer at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City while Ashley is a sushi chef  -  and put a ton of effort into making practically all of their own decorations, from the place mats to their very own logo, a pair of AA batteries, representing their names. They had a great group of family and friends present and everyone had a great time. In addition, they were fortunate to have the lead singer of their favorite band, The 88, play live for their first dance after striking up a conversation with the lead singer at a gig on the Sunset Strip. They had been planning on having a friend sing one of their songs and when they told him he obliged to sing it himself. Very cool.

In other news, this is a good time to announce that sometime this week I’m launching a new website focusing on wedding photography, headshots and other photography services I do for private clients. I’ll soon be adding videography to the list as well. The site is http://www.dzpvisuals.com if you want to check it out. It will also have its own blog focusing on that end of my business.

Last week was quite fashion-heavy, with Thursday spent doing an all-day editorial fashion shoot up in Simi Valley and Friday night spent shooting the final night of Fashion Week L.A. at the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Blvd. Both were done in collaboration with my friend Erika Stanley for her fashion website, SNOBStyle.tv, and will appear there soon. I’ll be sure to add links when they do. Although the editorial shoot came first I’m posting the Fashion Week images now, as it may be awhile before the first shoot publishes. We’re also hoping to publish it in a new upstart magazine, SoCal-Scene, with which Erika has recently become affiliated. More on that later.
For this event I stayed away from shooting the standard, down-the-runway shots in favor of shooting more of a behind-the-scenes piece. It was the second of two nights of Gen Art’s Fresh Faces in Fashion show and featured a variety of designers I’m not personally familiar with. I was really just curious to check out the scene. Fortunately, Erika was able to get me a backstage pass to facilitate this and I came away with some decent images. I surely outshot Ashton Kutcher at least.

Not much going on here. A couple weeks back Erinn and I went for a walk around the Fashion District and ended up not too far away on Broadway downtown, where the Goodyear Blimp was hovering overhead. Just a few pics taken along the way. I didn’t shoot a ton in the Fashion District, but the colors were great. I’m looking forward to going back on a more crowded afternoon.

Sumo Dan is U.S. Heavyweight Sumo Wrestler Dan Kalbfleisch of Burbank, Calif. I met him while shooting a sumo wrestling tournament at Venice Beach a few months back and tucked his name away as someone whose portrait I’d like to shoot someday. I finally got around to asking him a couple weeks ago and he invited me to come out to the “Dohyo of Dreams” the following weekend for a tournament they were having in a guy’s back yard in Garden Grove. He also invited me to stick around and shoot the tournament. Excellent timing! I gladly took him up on the offer and drove down to the D.O.D. with Erinn the following Saturday so we could work together on a story about the tournament. I’m behind on editing the tournament shots, but will post them and a better description of the event when I finish my edit. For now though, here’s Dan in front of a garage decorated with a big white sign that reads “Dohyo of Dreams” and a bunch of smaller signs with the names of previous year’s tournament winners posted along the top.

The last leg of our east coast trip had us driving inland to New Providence, Penn., for a visit with Nonnie and Proxy, my aunt and uncle. We were lucky to arrive the day before Proxy’s 86th birthday and be there the next day to celebrate. While we were there we had a few fun adventures including chasing down a pair of 510-ton 7-story-tall steam generators that were making their way along country roads at 3 mph en route to their new home at Three Mile Island. The generators were built by a company in France and transported overground on 26-axle trucks owned and operated by the Fagiola company of Italy. We caught up to them at an intersection in Lancaster County, somewhere in the middle of their 20+ day trip from Port Deposit and joined a number of local spectators who had come out to witness the spectacle. Another fun adventure we had was being rescued by an Amish gentleman named Eli after getting hopelessly lost in a giant corn maze shaped like the state of Pennsylvania. The adventure started out hopeful as we quickly collected stamps representing Lancaster, Allegheny and Erie counties, but grew more and more hopeless as we failed to find our way to Centre and Bradford. Finally, after passing Eli for the third time, he took pity on us and showed us the way. Along the way Erinn and Nonnie got in some time on the playground at least. One of the best parts about visiting Non and Prox is the food. The feasting began the first night with a trip to a crab shack where were scarfed down a couple dozen blue crabs, joined by my Uncle Mike who made the trip up from Arlington, Virginia. There was also a trip to a goat farm to buy some fresh-as-is-possible-to-get-it chevre. And on our way out Non loaded us up with bags and bags of their gourmet pretzels, which they sell at craft shows throughout the northeast with their business, Pretzelphoria. Check them out at pretzelphoria.com! It was a fun end to a great trip.

The trip between Maine and PA was bookended by a couple of interesting septuagenarians we think should someday meet. The first, whom we met in Boston, was my friend Meghan’s landlord and downstairs neighbor George Jovellas. George is an artist and has an incredible old studio behind the house where he keeps his paintings and a lot of other random stuff. He’s really a good painter and from what it looks like is an institution of sorts in Arlington, which is just northwest of the city. After a tour I asked if he was interested in shooting a portrait. He readily agreed and quickly decided that putting on his bowler hat and holding a giant fish would spruce it up a bit. I have to agree. The second was Erinn’s grandmother, with whom we stayed in New Brunswick. She’s not pictured here, but her living room is. Like George, she has the knack for collecting things. She’s a lot more organized though. In between those encounters we made a trip to Walden Pond, and the East Village, where during our 3-hour visit we had an encounter with Barack Obama’s motorcade, which shut down Bleecker Street as he made his way back from lunch with (we believe) Bill Clinton. He was in town to make an address on financial regulation at Federal Hall on the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. I got a pretty lame photo of his car going down the street, but I did get a slightly better one of a bunch of police milling about after the event had passed. It’s incredible the amount of preparation and resources that go into something as simple as a lunch meeting when POTUS is involved. The streets were shut down for a full hour before he came down the street and people had been there standing guard on the street corners since the night before, according to a police officer we talked to. He also complained that he’s been doing this duty for presidents for years on their various trips to the Big Apple, but has never actually gotten to see the president, as his job is to face the crowd. Those photos are after the jump.

I’m not done posting from the Maine trip and a few other things that happened after, but I thought I’d jump ahead and post some images from a big event here this past weekend. Saturday marked the opening of the new Venice Skate Park, a $3.4 million project 12 years in the making. This was a monumental event for skaters here in Venice, aka Dogtown, the place where modern skateboarding was born. If you’re not familiar with the story, I highly recommend checking out the Stacy Peralta documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” which traces the history of the Zephyr surf team’s transition into the Zephyr skateboard team as they reinvented skating by incorporating surfing maneuvers and the surfing lifestyle to the once wholesome but staid sport of the 1950s. From that group came legends like Peralta and Tony Alva, the sports first to achieve rock star status, which lead to the next generation of superstars like Tony Hawk. Many of the original members and team founder Jeff Ho were in attendance, though I don’t recall seeing the two guys I mentioned. However, the importance of the realization of this park was evident by the huge crowd that turned out for its unveiling. I had a great time standing alongside everyone as skaters took turns dropping into the giant bowl while others watched along its rim. As this is only a block from my door, I’m looking forward to stopping by on a regular basis to check out the scene. Hopefully it won’t always be as crowded as it was Saturday though!

None of these pictures are actually from Bar Harbor. It’s just fun to say. Following my visit to Sebago I joined Erinn at her aunt and uncle’s place in Town Hill, Maine, which is right on Mt. Desert Island next to Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor. Although I wish we were there to see the leaves turn, it was still a beautiful time to be there. On my first morning we tried to get up to be out in Acadia for sunrise. It’s supposedly the first part of the United States to see the sun at the beginning of each day. As I said, we tried, but it proved to be too early for us. We were up around 5:30 and out the door by 6, but by the time we were in the park the sun was 10 degrees off the horizon. Ah well. Next time. We still had a great time hiking up a hill called the Beehive and on cliffs next to Sand Beach. In the middle of the day we took a break to play with her aunt and uncle’s pet bunnies and to prepare a delicious lunch of fresh Maine lobster, which Erinn’s uncle bought off the docks for only $3.99/lb! I understand that’s a bit lower than the lobstermen would like, but we thought it was incredible. After cooking them up on the back deck we made up some lobster rolls and chocolate chip cookies and went up on top of Cadillac Mountain for a picnic. Amazing. We also had fun picking and eating fresh blueberries right off the trail. Can’t wait to go back!

In early September I joined about 40 other Aurora photographers for the annual photographers meeting at Sebago Lake, Maine, about half an hour west of Portland. The gathering takes place on the western shores of the lake at Camp O-AT-KA, a boys camp owned by the family of Aurora photo editor Peter Dennen. The meeting is designed to allow contributing photographers and the Aurora staff to get to know one another, as well as to discuss the state of the stock photo industry and the company’s place within it. There were also one-on-one portfolio reviews with editors from PDN, Sports Illustrated, Aurora Select and former National Geographic editor Rich Clarkson, who is pictured after the jump telling one of many entertaining stories to the attendees in the cozy central lodge where most of our official gatherings took place. After the scheduled meetings the group had time to enjoy the lake and socialize over some fine local beer. There’s something about both of the Portlands that makes for great microbrews. There was plenty more too, including great meals prepared by the camp staff (check out that paella!), tug-of-war, soccer, swimming and jumping over campfires. While I didn’t do that, I did make sure to take a few dips in the lake. The water was cold, but refreshing and calm and not so bad once you were in for a minute or so. It was getting out that hurt. Overall it was a great and worthwhile trip and I was glad I got the opportunity to meet the staff and so many fine photographers.
I didn’t really take a lot of pictures there, but here are a few I liked, starting with a fly that landed on a fellow photographer’s head as we were arranging ourselves for the official group picture. This trip kicked off 10 days of travel around the northeast with Erinn, who was at her aunt and uncle’s place up the road at Bar Harbor during the three days I was at the meeting. More photos from the rest of the trip will follow.

It’s been a long time since I posted, but I thought before putting up some new images from our trip east I’d put up some good news I received today. The fine folks at Aurora Photos, who represent a number of my images, passed along a link to their blog featuring a post mentioning that one of my images from Saut D’eau was printed in Wanderlust, Britain’s premier travel magazine. Woohoo!  More images from the series are available on my main site. Stay tuned for some new images from Maine, Boston and PA in the coming days.