jp blog

just hanging out with mel+mike at the orange show in houston…

a postman transformed an east end lot into an architectural maze of walkways, balconies, arenas and exhibits decorated with mosaics and brightly painted iron figures…

we heard an ice cream truck –> snacks during a shoot… awesome

a little downtown photo shoot with ashley and tyler…

they’re so cool… ashley held the pumpkin up to her face before i could suggest it…

we had to scramble a little: the sun sets sooo early – it gets super dark, super fast…

but why fight it…? we ended up creating a starry night in the pitch black of 5:30pm

the first photo is how we ended up framing the bridal portrait – two images on a wide screen 16:9 frame and custom matte…

after the mountains, we headed to denver’s grand central station… it was wet, dark and a tad bit smelly…

we had to ask a security guard to turn on some lights… but it was perfect…

i needed some spicy tofu panang from thai basil to warm up my still frozen toes…

just some fun stuff from shoots around halloween…

the coat and tie is for an editorial about ill-fitting suits… kung fu kicks were a bonus…

i think i almost dislocated my shoulder trying to put on that jacket…

i’m currently up in durango, colorado to shoot sharon’s wedding…

back in august, we shot bridals on Mount Bierstadt…

[taken from wikipedia] wikipedia is awesome…!!!
“As with most peaks in Colorado, July and August make the best months for climbing Mount Bierstadt.”
[first photo]
sharon took this pic a couple days before the shoot…

[second pic]
what i had to trek two miles in: ankle deep in slushy muddy stuff… i also lost my voice on this shoot… and we only had 30 minutes of sunlight…

so a little preview of sharon…

and afterwards, the most amazing pancakes at a little dive called snooze in downtown denver…

meagan and jason were just recently married and they wanted a little session in downtown bryan…
[jason's a little skilled behind the camera, so i was pretty stoked that he asked me]

so we went to downtown bryan… the dodgy end…

during the shoot, a taxi drives up… an unshaven, stale alcohol stinkin, 80′s neon track suit wearing guy stumbles through our shoot and begins to rattle the locked doors of the player’s lounge…

i guess he missed what looked like to be an awesome luau party…

so he walks back through our shoot, mumbles something incoherent, and rolls back into the cab…

um.. okay…

back to shooting, i guess…

it’s always good sign when you show up to a location and your clients are uncorking bottle number two…

torre di pietra vineyards is a great place and it’s also ranks first for “wine we keep running into randomly”… it was the wine of choice during allison and jordan’s wedding in january… livas and katie toured there during their first wedding anniversary… and now, marion and kyle…

i dont know how many wine glasses you have to break or how many bunches of grapes you can pick off the vines to get kicked out of there, but we didn’t hang out long enough to find out…

that led us to wildseed farms, a working wildflower farm… it was closing, but did that stop us…? heck no…!!! or the lack of an entrance to the field of california poppies…? heck no…!!! good thing marion and kyle are a couple of professional fence hoppers… (and poppy tramplers) and again, we didnt hang out long enough to get kicked out of there…

next stop: the sauer-beckmann farmstead…  status: definitely closed… patrolling state troopers didn’t help any… fine… we’ll just play by the fence…

last stop: fredericksburg clinic… i think if the staff knew how many blue plastic medical gloves i went through trying to make balloon animals and playing CSI investigator, they probably would have kicked me out of there…

next up: getting kicked out of wherever we shoot marion’s bridals…

dusted off the ol’ toobin cowboy hat to join sarah and brandon along the san marcos river on sunday after shooting their wedding at kali kate in buda, tx on saturday…

i got to dust off the underwater camera housing also…

they made custom toobs, of course…

[yeah, i know that's not how you spell "tubes", but i'm in texas... dag-gum]

i rode with them on saturday in a sweet restored rolls royce around downtown austin… it took a couple tries, but brandon finally figured out a way to jump without blocking sarah’s face with his hand… solution: the banana…

i shot joshua and tyler’s wedding last year: two redheads on st. patty’s day: i still have songs from boondock saints and dropkick murphys and house of pain in my head…

josh (i’m the only one who calls him josh and not joshua) was my editor at the battalion… now he’s the publisher and editor of the pflugerville flag… newspapers gennerally run at a loss, so if josh gets the paper one dollar of profit, he gets a hella-big bonus…

their son will be born today… how do i know this…? because i have mad baby-bearing prediction skills… ha… tyler is either going to naturally pop a baby out today, or they are inducing her… either way, she’s gonna lose nine pounds instantly…

three days ago, we spent some time at a playground and a huge field of corn in hutto, tx… josh was trying to be a video journalist by documenting the shoot with his new hd camera, but we kept pulling him from behind his camera to play with his wife and yet-to-be-born son…

crystal was there too, skooling me love-affair-style…

afterwards, burgers and a paper airplane throwing contest at the watertank bar and grill in plugerville…

lily pads,  muddy bridges, cliff overhangs and giant concrete bears make for a fun shoot around highland park in dallas…

afterwards we cooled off at village burger bar in west village: champagne mandarin iced tea and sweet potato fries are a yummy-after-shoot snack…