My First Wedding!

Yes, I'm a polygraphous man and I plan to have a lot more weddings in the future. Honestly, not a whole lot to report on this one except that it wasn't as bad (scary) as I was expecting. The daylight was a bit harsh and I wasn't really prepared with an assistant to hold a reflector or anything so I just did the best I could with my trusty SB-600 loaded with Lithium AA's (expensive little SOG's!). Also, because of the difficult lighting I opted to go a little modern with a wide lens and a polarizer to get that dramatic look.

For the reception shots, I'm fortunate I had the D300 at my disposal for the low light shots. The auto-ISO chooser often selected ISO3200 which basically saved my butt. Thank goodness for auto-ISO!!! It allows me to concentrate making photographs instead of changing settings on the camera. Anyway, there really isn't much else to report on so without further adieu I present to you my work.

Got lucky this weekend...

This last Saturday I intended to do one thing or another that had absolutely nothing to do with hiking Squaw Peak but when all of my other plans fell through, I had no other choice. After work (I picked up a shift which ended at 1530 hours local time) I changed clothes and headed to the mountain. I brought my new and amazing Nikon D300 along for this trip because I knew there would be something worth photographing--whether it be a sunset or ....a sunset. Actually, I hung my camera around my neck and turned on the interval timer which snapped pics of my trip up the hill, automatically, every 5 seconds.

Once I reached the top I took a break, sat down, and enjoyed the scenery. Shortly after making it up there off in the distance I heard a helicopter. Ok, this isn't too unheard of...helicopters fly by there all the time. This one was the Phoenix Police Department "Firebird" unit and they just happened to swing by to see what's happening at the top of Squaw Peak. They eventually saw me waving at them with one hand and holding my beautiful Nikon D300 with the lovely MB-D10 vertical grip in the other and decided they wanted their portrait taken. We did several poses as they were very cooperative. Hopefully they'll like these proofs as much as I do. I think they will...

...and by the way, I never did get any good sunset shots.