Last night the Portland Timbers soccer team played the Seattle Sounders of the MLS in a US Open Cup match. It was an exciting matchup because the Sounders used to be in the same league as Portland before jumping to the MLS this year and the two teams, and their fans, hate each other. And by hate, I mean that Timbers fans cannot even say the word “Seattle” or “Sounders”. The atmosphere was amazing. A possible preview of what is to come when the Timbers join the MLS is 2011. PGE Park was sold out for the first time since the team began play in 2001. Fans were lined up for 2 blocks around the stadium for standing room only tickets 2 hours before kickoff. I found this guy wandering around on Morrison St. I cropped up on purpose. His awesome suit showed a bit more than we all wanted to see, but his love for the Timbers shows through. I will admit, I was not the biggest soccer fan, but you should go and give it a shot, it really is fun. Be sure to sit in section 107, that’s where the true fans and all the crazy’s hang out. Good times to be had there for sure. Click on an image below to see some of my photos from the game. The image of the fans with the flags was shot by my intern Liz. Nice job Liz.

Yesterday in the studio I did a shoot for a dentist website. We used actual patients who had work done as our models. We also had my favorite make-up artist Nicole Wagner in the studio. I love working with Nicole. She is so good at what she does. We wanted the photos to have fun feel, not a standard boring headshot, more like the models were just having a conversation and oh by the way have super nice teeth and I think we accomplished that.

I’ve always thought it would be fun to shoot some portraits at a carnival, so when Erik called up and said they wanted to do engagement photos at the Rose Festival, I was all over it. We had to reschedule once when the fun center shutdown due to a nasty storm, but the next day it was perfect. Still a little cool and possibly rainy so the crowds were small, making my job much easier. First we rode the carousel, I used a Canon speedlight with a pocketwizard attached and just held it in my left hand to the side on real low power while shooting at a 20th of a second to show motion.

Later on, after winning some prizes and riding the Ferris Wheel, I shot this portrait with a 85mm f1.2 lens @1.2. Once again I used a speedlight and pocketwizard to fill a little light in and make them really pop.

The best quote I’ve ever seen attributed to Twitter was from this really great Time Magazine article, “….is that it makes a terrible first impression.” This is so true. At first you think, what the heck is this and why the heck do I need it? I thought the very same thing. But I have come to love Twitter and what I call “the power of Twitter”. Once you get onboard, it really is amazing what can be done, what can be found, how fast the information super highway moves on Twitter, etc, etc. For example, I was stuck in traffic on I-205 and one quick twitter search let me know there was a bad accident 5 miles ahead, in real time so I could get off and find a new route. I have jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon and am now bringing it to this blog as well. You may have noticed the “Twitter Feed” on the side of the blog. This will update my tweets (usually 1-3 or so a day). Sometimes its crap I am sure you will not care about like, “I’m at Denny’s with my kids” or “Just ate a big fat piece of delicious wedding cake”, but sometimes it will be links or information or “twitpics” of stuff that you might find interesting or breaking news, maybe something that is not worthy of an entire blog post, but good info, etc. It is just another way I am trying to keep in touch. If you have not already, follow me or leave me your twitter name in the comments so I can follow you and enjoy this new feature on the blog. PS – be sure to read the Time article. Good stuff.

Also, a couple other housekeeping things:

You will also notice that the images on the site will display even larger than before, up to 1200px wide when you click on them.

The archives have been placed into a drop down menu. I have been running this blog since December of 2004, that is a lot of posts, the months list had just gotten too long!

I also added a calendar so you can click on a specific date if you choose.

A tag cloud. This is mostly for SEO purposes, but you can click on a specific tag and see all the posts relating to that topic.

A “recent comments” link on the right so you can see who and what posts are getting comments.

And finally, the “Email this post” button is now functional again. It was disabled after updating wordpress to version 2.7 and has now been fixed. Feel free to use that function or the “Share This” function at the bottom of all the posts to email, facebook, twitter, linked in, etc, etc, any post you find interesting.

Very exciting news to announce! Last week I officially opened an office on Mission Viejo, CA. The plan is to go to the OC once a month for all kinds of shoots/meetings/etc. I am very excited about the opportunity to expand my business into a new market. I am sharing the studio space with a really great wedding coordinator, check out her blog. If you know of anyone in SoCal looking for a photographer, send them my way. My number in the OC is 949.333.0909.

I mentioned 3 times now how great this church in Mt. Angel was. I was very happy to see some nice dark clouds when I pulled in. I had this image in my head before the day even started. After the ceremony, before heading to the reception we spent 5 minutes making a cool image. Pretty simple setup, 3 Canon speedlights (2 550Ex’s and 1 580EX) hooked up to Pocketwizards. The main light is on half power and about 5 feet from them. The backlight is on full power and about 5-6 feet behind them and then a 3rd light was positioned low at about 1/4 power to fill in the shadows on the lower part of the frame. Just got lucky when the wind kicked up at the right time. Setup to complete, about 5 minutes. Here is the setup, intern Liz working the fill light:

I have been a bad blogger of late. I got totally slammed and blogging was not high on the priority list. My bad. I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again anytime soon! Here are the proofbook covers from a couple of great wedding’s May 30 and June 6. I’ve already partly blogged about both of these, but wanted to show you some more photos. Above, Sarah and Jeremy’s wedding was in a cool little church in the middle of nowhere near Salem. I am not sure how they even found it, but it was cool. Right next to a graveyard too, so of course we shot some stuff in there. Nothing says “happiest day of your life” quite like a cemetery right? Then after the reception we headed to a dive bar in Salem to sing karaoke. Good times.

Like I said, I have already blogged about it, but this church was very very cool. I will be doing another post about the setup for the portrait in front of the church here in a bit.

Shot an engagement session tonight at La Jolla Cove in San Diego. After getting a sunburn all day long, of course, the clouds roll in at sunset, which worked out to our advantage. Great rocks on the beach, great backgrounds and a little bit of dramatic lighting…I could get used to shooting on the beach all the time.

Sometimes you have a plan, in this case, shoot engagements at Mt. Tabor Park, but sometimes, you see a much cooler spot on the way to the planned spot. As we were driving up the hill to the parking lot of the park, I saw this awesome field. Flowers, trees, steep hill, etc and thought,that would make a cool photo. So after we shot at the planned location, we went back and then the rain started making the light perfect and I had them walk up and down the hill while I stood on the top of my truck for a better angle. I like it.

Miriam is a chef. She has been living in Ireland but is from Mexico. Not too often you get to speak with someone with a cool spanish-with-a-little-irish-mixed-in accent! Anyway, in Ireland she was on a cooking TV show and needed a new headshot for an audition for a reality show here in Portland so she came into the studio yesterday. Here is a shot I liked. If you or anyone you know needs a new headshot for your business, for your model portfolio or for any reason at all. Give us a call.

She is lit with a large octabox, a 10 degree grid, a reflector, a strip light and a background light.