Today’s installment of our 14 of 2014 – portraits. I shoot a LOT of portraits. Corporate portraits, editorial portraits, athlete portraits. I love shooting portraits. Probably one of my favorite things. Here are 14 of my favorites from 2014.

This image of Guy Pope was shot for Barron’s Magazine, one of my favorite clients. I love shooting for them as they allow a lot of creativity and look for photos that are not your typical images. For this shoot, we trekked into Forest Park with a cart full of lights and I love the way it turned out.

By now, everyone knows who Marcus Mariota is. I shot the 2014 Heisman winner a couple of weeks before the season opener for a feature in USA Today. Later images from this shoot were also used on the cover of Athlon Sports the week he won the award. He was probably the nicest athlete I’ve ever shot and I’ve shot a lot of them.

Headshots are something we spend a lot of time shooting. I love shooting them. Here are a couple of favorites.

Late in the year Advocate called me up to shoot some photos of Timbers Midfielder Darlington Nagbe, loved how this shoot turned out.

The World Beard and Moustache Championships might have been my favorite shoot of the entire year. I was hired to shoot images of the event and convinced the client to let me  shoot portraits of winners backstage. The resulting photos were shared over 5000 times on Facebook and Twitter and used in websites, newspapers, blogs and TV shows all around the world.

Trailblazers superstar Damian Lillard during media day before the season.

I liked this photo from the Milwaukie High School baseball team shoot I did back in March.

Another fun shoot from the Multnomah Athletic Club. They wanted to feature members in an article for the magazine about Timbers fans. This image ran on the cover.

A more recent shoot from one of my favorite clients, The Broadway Rose Theatre. This shot was for a promo for an upcoming show.

A portrait for a story about the Meyer Memorial Trust in Portland.

Another promo shot from the Broadway Rose.

A photo from a shoot for Super Lawyers magazine. Another great client that I love to shoot for.

And finally, a shoot from a headshot session. I liked the light and mood on this one.

Thanks for checking out of favorite portraits photos from 2014. Stay tuned for the final installment of our favorite sports images coming soon.

It’s that time of year. Quite possibly my favorite time of year. As each year is happening live so to speak, you don’t realize the significance of events or photos until the end of the year when you look back. It is always one of my favorite things to do.

2014 was a big year for us. Personally, I set a goal to complete 10 triathlons and accomplished that goal in October. For 2015 my personal goal is to finish an Ironman 70.3, which I will do in June. My family also had a big year in 2014. My wife gave birth to twins in November just before Thanksgiving. These were not your average twins though. My amazing wife spent her year as a surrogate for a gay couple from Israel. It’s something she has always wanted to do, so finally, she did it. We did not know them before the process started and met them in September 2013. I would now consider them family. It is an amazing experience to help a family have children. It was by no means an easy pregnancy for her, but she (and we) are so glad she did. The babies are beautiful and the Dads are going to make great parents. I look forward to seeing them grow up from afar and hopefully one day we will be able to go to Israel and visit.

Professionally, 2014 was an amazing year here at Mitchelldyer Photography and we owe that to all of our wonderful clients. I come to work everyday and never feel like I am working. That is the way it should be! We spent a lot of time in some really cool places photographing some really cool people and events this year and it is always so hard to pick our “favorites” every year. Narrowing down over 150,000 images to just a few blog posts of 14 – our favorite wedding photos, our favorite portraits and our favorite sports images is no easy task.

For today, we start with our favorite 14 wedding photos of 2014. Each of these images may or may not be our “best” but they are our favorites. It might be the location, the light, the story behind the photo, the couple, a million reasons why. Be on the lookout in the coming days for our 14 of 14 portraits and sports photos, but for now, enjoy the 14 of 14 – weddings!

2014 took us to Lake Tahoe twice this year. And I am glad it did. Easily one of my favorite places on earth, Lake Tahoe is beautiful. At Eric and Stephanie’s wedding in late September we were treated with an amazing sunset at the end of the evening.

One of my favorite local venues is Mt. Hood Ski Bowl. What a cool place to have a wedding. To get there, your guests need to take a chairlift to the ceremony. But it is worth it, the view is stunning.

Plus, when it’s over, the best way to get the bottom of the mountain is the Alpine Slides! How cool is that?

One of my favorite moments of every wedding is when the bride and groom walk up the aisle for the first time as husband and wife. And I love this image of Jonathan and Christin. You can see the happiness everywhere.

Who cut the cheese? These guys did! I like it when weddings take on traditional with a little flair and having a cake made out of different types of cheese was a cool idea for a winery wedding.

Sometimes, my worlds collide and it is marvelous. Before the final Timbers match of the year, two longtime supporters decided to have a wedding with 3,500 of their closest friends in the Timbers Army. 3,500 people chanting “Lets get F*&@ing Married!” is something unique for sure. I love photos full of interesting people and emotion and this one has all of that!

Often times I have no idea what I am going to do when I am shooting. That’s one of the things I love. Just showing up and looking around and making a cool photo with what I have in front of me. That was the case when we went downtown in between rain showers. I wanted to make a cool shot with this wedding party and the church near the Portland Art Museum worked out great.

I love this image during the getting ready process that shows off Kasia’s hair and eyelashes and earrings, etc. A quiet moment – the calm before the storm.

Remember what I said about emotion? I love it! And this is pure happiness right here.

A couple of my favorites are from Ashley and Oryan’s wedding at Edgefield in May. They often go there and one of their “things” is a selfie on the bench in the garden, so we recreated that for the wedding as well. Since 2014 is “The Year of the Selfie” it only seemed fitting to include it here.

Swords. Need I say more? I also like the lighting setup in this image.

I pride myself on being able to light dark venues and make great images no matter how difficult and the Treasury Ballroom is probably one of the toughest places to shoot in, but I love this image of Amber and her dad dancing. Happy people make happy photographers!

I hope you enjoyed some of my favorite wedding photos from 2014. Looking forward to a great 2015!

This week is awards week for college football and Marcus Mariota is likely to win pretty much every award there is, including the Heisman. A couple weeks ago Athlon Sports came to me for a photo of Mariota for the cover of this months magazine, which came out today.

TD Magazine called us a couple of months ago to take photos of Kevin Carroll for their latest issue. We had a great time with Kevin, who is an author, speaker, and a blast to work with. We shot his portrait here in our Portland studio. Here’s the clip from the photo shoot and magazine spread.

It is fall here in Portland and that means cloudy weather and colors everywhere. It makes for some great outdoor corporate photos. Here is a business headshot we shot this morning for a long standing law firm client here in Portland.

Last weekend we shot Christin and Jonathan’s autumn wedding in a century-old church in Forest Grove. See more from this wedding here in a sneak peek album.

The Just For Men World Beard and Moustache Championships crowned 18 title winners, highlighting the best and boldest examples of facial hair from across the globe on Saturday, October 25th, 2014 in Portland, OR. (Craig Mitchelldyer/AP Images for Just for Men)

On Saturday we shot the Just for Men World Beard and Moustache Championships for Just for Men, the event’s main sponsor. It was a fantastic event. Other than the action on stage, I wanted to really capture the faces of the competitors so I setup a small studio backstage and shot portraits of many of the winners and interesting characters that I saw. Here are some of my favorites:

The event was a huge hit, especially here in Portland. Contestants competed for the gold in one of 18 different categories ranging from the delicate Dali to the gravity-defying Full Beard Freestyle. The overall champion was Madison Rowley who was the winner of the Garibaldi. (First photo on the right). Category specific champions included Daniel Lawlor who wowed the judges with his perfectly groomed Freestyle Moustache and Andrew Shuler whose Full Beard Natural charmed the crowds.

To determine the winners, the judges were asked which contestant’s facial hair best enhanced his overall appearance, style and personality. In the freestyle categories the judges were asked to consider originality and creativity as well.

As I suspected would happen, many media outlets have picked up the images, because who doesn’t love cool beards?! The Today Show ran a few images online and on the show this morning.

A couple of weeks ago we got a call from Advocare looking for a photographer for a shoot with Portland Timbers midfielder Darlington Nagbe. I was happy to shoot it as I’ve worked with him many many times, not only as the Timbers photographer, but I also hid in the bushes while he proposed to his now wife Felicia, shot maternity photos for them and shot photos of his new baby as well. I’m kind of the Nagbe personal photographer, so I was happy to shoot some cool photos for his latest product endorsement. Advocare sent a video crew up from Dallas and we rented out the Portland Futsal faciltiy on 17th Ave in SE Portland, which is the perfect facility for a photo shoot like this. This is one of my favorites from the shoot.