Wedding: Emma and Alex

These are some pictures from another wedding that I was second shooting with AAcreation. This was a really fun wedding - with a couple that met while swing dancing, you know the party's got to be good! It was at the Christmas House in Rancho Cucamonga, and it was a nice, small gathering. About 50 guests, tops.

Portraits: Blended #8

Here are the pictures of Nancy, as promised. Nancy describes herself as half Lebanese and half Texan. We took these pictures at her home in Riverside.

Portraits: Patty and Nancy

I met Patty in grad school; we had several classes together and helped each other study for our big, bad, comprehensive exams. She now lives in Riverside with Nancy. We took these pictures in the botanical gardens at UC Riverside.

Look for more pictures of Nancy coming soon - as we were strolling through the gardens and I was nattering on about my mixed race photography project, Nancy told me that she was half Lebanese! Which means she's a perfect candidate for Project Blended.

Aperture Plug-Ins

I only have two plug-ins for Aperture 2.0: one that exports images directly to SmugMug, and one that exports images directly to Flickr. Man, have they made things easier. Since Aperture collapses everything into one library that cannot be accessed by other programs (at least I haven't figured it out), I used to have to export files as JPEGs to another folder on my hard drive, then use a different program to upload them to my website of choice. Now I can do everything from within Aperture, which is just easy, easy, easy.

I haven't explored other options for Aperture plug-ins because, frankly, I am addicted to Photoshop. I mostly use Aperture for as an organizational tool, and Camera Raw and Photoshop for editing. But I might play around with Aperture's editing options and see what they have to offer.

Wedding: Marisa and Oscar

I've decided that wedding photography is the next frontier, and I found a wonderful photographer - AAcreation Photography - who lets me tag along on his wedding assignments. The first wedding I helped photograph was Marisa and Oscar. I don't know how the bride managed to stay so beautiful because it was meltingly hot that day.

It goes without saying that shooting weddings is a lot harder than it looks. But I think with some more practice and experience, I can swing it. These photos were taken at a church in Pomona and at the reception in Bloomington.

Portraits: Blended #7

Alan is the first individual I've photographed for my project - all the other sessions have been couples and families. When I decided to do this project, I initially wanted to just photograph mixed race individuals but figured I would include couples as well, since they're all pieces of the same pie. And now couples are the dominant aspect. But I have plenty of time to balance it out!

I met Alan through my aunt. He's an actor and model living in Santa Monica. His father is French and German, and his mother is African American and Native American.