Laura and Jon | Engagement Party

Laura is a friend and coworker of a friend of mine and she hired me to shoot her engagement party. My finance works Saturday's so I brought my good friend Mike along with me instead to assist and second shoot. We were both extremely impressed with the party, everything was set up beautifully and everybody was super friendly. Laura and Jon were especially welcoming and great people to be around. We really had a great time shooting this event.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the party.















Great hats! I especially like Jon's little top hat!




















I have to confess, this paella made me INCREDIBLY hungry!






Is there ever a reason not to have tiki torches at a party?

Mochi | Pet Photography

This is my first crack at pet photography, not including the random shots I take of my two cats around the house. This set is another from the free photo shoot Facebook blast I did a few weeks ago. Ryan and Chrissie are good friends of ours and were second to respond. They were actually the first photo shoot I ever did back when I shot an engagement session for them about 3 years back. And now again they're another first of mine by graciously allowing me to take photos of their beautiful dog Mochi.

Mochi was definitely a handful but a really fun dog to shoot. I got a nice little workout chasing her all around the dog park. She's definitely full of life and a really awesome dog to be around. We forgot to bring treats which made the session extra challenging, but we managed to get her attention with funny noises and twigs. Here's some photos from the session.



Mochi definitely thinks shes a large dog.








It's a doggy jailbreak!


















There were a lot of weird noises coming from my direction to get Mochi to look towards the camera.




This was a twig Chrissie used to get Mochi's attention.

Grilling at Mike's with my new Rokkor 58mm f1.2

Nothing all that exciting about this. Some of us were bored so we decided to hang out with a BBQ, some beer, and a deck of cards. A typical but always fun night.

But what made this night a little different was that I got to extensively play with my newest toy, the Rokkor 58 1.2. Shortly after I got my 5dm2 and paired it with the 24-70 2.8L I quickly realized that I needed something a little smaller and lighter to carry around when I wanted to pack light. I decided early on to look for old manual lenses so I could get the most bang for my buck. I always use the center point for focusing anyways so having to manually focus a lens wasn't that big of a concern for me. After much research I decided on the Rokkor 58mm f1.2 even though it would require me to perform some surgery to get it to mount properly on my Canon. I would also lose infinity focus unless I wanted to shave my mirror, but this would be a minor inconvenience for me because I don't plan on focusing to infinity much with this lens anyways. The huge aperture caught my eye obviously but what really swayed my decision was the bokeh that I saw in images online. It was the creamiest, nicest looking bokeh I've ever seen. And I have to say after getting to play around with it at Mike's it didn't disappoint, it's a bokeh master. I'm very pleased with my purchase so far.

Here are some shots with the lens.