5-0 Baybeee! / Ahh, my first Saturday off in months. Great fall day in college football season, and there's no better place to be than tailgating at a Purdue game. What makes it even sweeter is that this was no ordinary game, but Purdue-Notre Dame. What makes it even better than that is that this was a 4-0 Purdue team at home against an 0-4 ND team. Oh the sweetness and joy was in the air, my friends!!

My buddy Jason and I had a blast tailgating with a group of friends. Of course, I would be remiss as a photographer if I didn't have a camera somewhere on my person to catch some of the events of the day!!









(Yes, that is Grover and Oscar the Grouch partying with the group!!)




("Skinny's" job was to irritate the ND fans.)


(Best. Grill. Ever.)

Jenny & Matt / While Kelly and I still have a few weddings left in 2007, Jenny and Matt's wedding was the beginning of the end of 'the season' for us. This was the last wedding of a string of pretty much consecutive shooting weekends since early June, so while we're looking forward to a Saturday off, we were also really psyched up to push ourselves and get some fantastic photos for Jenny and Matt. Great day, beautiful sunset, and a really great wedding!

Molly...Almost Three / And since we had the studio lights set up again for the first time in awhile, Molly just had to come in and get her time in the limelight, too!

John, Leah, Emma, and Michael / It's been awhile since I've had the chance to do a family studio session, and I didn't realize how much I missed it until I got in there and started the session. Their session was scheduled to be about 20-30 minutes and get a dozen or so photos. An hour and nearly a hundred photos later, we were all tired of the flashes but we had some awesome photos!

Some of my favorites...

Amy & Bryan / This wedding was a big change-of-pace for me personally as a shooter. It was a subcontracted wedding, so not Amy and Bryan weren't a couple that I met with personally and booked. As I got to know them throughout the course of the day, though, I realized that they were the same type of people that we typically book, so I knew that I was going to get some fantastic photos of them. I had the opportunity to shoot with Scott Cleveland, a photographer who I've known for a few years through an online professional discussion forum. It was a bit odd at first shooting with someone other than Kelly, but Scott and I worked great together and were doing the dance of staying out of each other's shots and making sure we had everything covered like we were old hands at shooting together.

As always, I had a blast and got some truly awesome photos. The reception was at the Fountain Square Theatre. Kelly had shot there a few weeks ago and warned me about how dark it was in there. I made sure to bring my big strobes, which gave me plenty of light. Once the technical details were sorted out, I could really start to appreciate how unique this venue is. And then, of course, I started playing around without the big strobes. :-)

Some photos...

Grandma's excited...


Lacing up...



Seeing each other for the first time before the wedding...




My 'arthouse' shot of the night...


Fountain Square Theatre...



My buddy...



Scott's pose, my angle. Yeah, I'd say we work well together...

Amanda & Eric / You remember how a few weddings back I said it was nice to have a kind of laid-back reception, but that we love a good party-reception too? Well guess what, this was a great party-reception! It's not very often that I end up dancing, but at the end of the night I found myself with no camera in my hand and trying not to make too much of a fool of myself. ;-)

Party aside, this was a great wedding. We had a beautiful ceremony under the tent. Some people think that rain ruins an outside wedding, but as long as there's a tent I kind of like rainy days like that--there's something very soothing and special about the soft rain overlapping the sounds of two people sharing their vows.


Here are just a few moments from the day...

The beast is done!!!

New computer, originally uploaded by whitesharkphoto.

Asus P5K-Deluxe motherboard.
Intel Core 2 Duo 6750 CPU, 64 bit.
700w power supply.
Diamond Stealth 512MB video card.
300GB SATA system drive.
Dual 1TB SATA RAID arrays.
Antec full-tower case with three-layer noise and thermal shielding.
Windows Vista Business 64-bit edition.

And I built it myself (with some help from my buddy, Jason).

So that's where I've been for the past week. It's been up and running, since the 2nd day of the build, but getting 500,000 photos (about 3/4 of a terabyte) migrated, along with installing all our application software on the new machine, has taken quite awhile.

Now I can finally get back to work (well, mostly. The data still has another two days to migrate!).