I recent got a mountain bike again. I used to race pretty serious and did bike trials, but once I went and started working for myself, my boss wouldn’t let me go out and ride nearly as much, but with the addition of my new mountain bike I’ve been riding more again.

My buddy Pat just hooked me up on a brand new bike this week and I was amped to get it built up and try it out on the trail. Well, my buddy and fellow photographer Tim Meyer had scheduled a ride with me yesterday, so I had the perfect chance to test out my bike and go riding for the first time since being sick last week.

Tim pushed me hard and we had a blast both breaking in fresh bikes. Here’s a couple quick point and shoot photos during a rest stop. (And just so happens this is the same exact spot where I got a quick flat while riding back down)

Me

Tim Meyer

If you live in Santa Barbara and want to go mountain biking (and have a bike) hit me up! I need to get out more regularly!!!

It’s really a blessing to work as a wedding photographer here in Santa Barbara! This place is just full of the most friendly people and wedding professionals. I get asked by other wedding photographers all the time, “Isn’t it just super competitive in Santa Barbara?” Well, I learned from my former boss David Jay that you really shouldn’t compete with people, but share the love and to move forward through relationships.

Kelly Oshiro of Kelly Oshiro Events just did a feature on our wedding photography bussiness on her awesome blog! She’s working super hard creating a HUGE resource of information through her blog for Santa Barbara brides planning their weddings here in Santa Barbara.

For any bride planning a wedding in Santa Barbara Kelly’s blog is a great resource with reviews/features of tons of great locations and vendors throughout Santa Barbara County!

I was excited early last month when Bethany Hopkins from the Santa Barbara News Press contacted me about doing an article about Green Weddings.

This is something we had just recently started working to be more aware of and have attempted to be more proactive in helping to make a reality for our clients.

It was really neat to hear that the News Press was interested in bringing the option of Green Weddings forward to it’s readers here in Santa Barbara. I think a bit of what I had to say about going green wasn’t quite the happy marriage stuff that worked for a newspaper article like this, so there’s only one quote from me, but it was fun to express my opinions of looking at your carbon footprint and realizing that in reality, the biggest place to cut back is usually in transportation.

Brides who are interested in having a green wedding here in Santa Barbara or anywhere around the world should definitely check out TerraPass.com and their Wedding Carbon Footprint Calculator. If you are having a destination wedding and can’t help but have guests fly to your wedding you can still make a huge difference and purchase Carbon Offsets through TerraPass.

It’s awesome to see brides becoming more and more concerned with this and take note of how they can help their wedding to be more green. We’re excited (as mentioned in the article) to be offering a new album which is printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper as well as produced in a factory that is 100% wind energy powered. Soooo cool!

Oh, and for those of you who want to read the article, you can click here to read the story. They also interviewed our past clients Carlton and Paola about their wedding. These two truly get it when it comes to going green and it was inspiring to chat with them about their wedding and how they worked to make their wedding more environmentally friendly.

Some of these photographs are from weddings, some are from our anniversary when we went to Mexico, and some are from when I’ve gone out recently to shoot for fun.

(I would love to know what you guys think about the size of the pictures right now. I made it so I could post bigger pictures, but are they too big now?)

First, this is the sickest happy accident I’ve gotten in a while, and I didn’t even realize how cool it was until I looked really close. I was going to enter it in a print comp tomorrow, but realized I don’t have a big enough scan of it!!

Edit: for those who can’t see it, look just above the couple’s head and you can see a faint image of them kissing - this is a double exposure on the same piece of film. - end edit.

April at her wedding at the Madrona Manor:

For our anniversary in November we took a trip down to Baja with our friends Austin and Dara and took a little side trip to La Bufadora.

This cat snagged our picture with his polaroid camera. Hopefully he’s stocking up on film right now seeing as Polaroid just announced that they’re going to stop making his film. :-(

Sunrise at Rincon on “Big Wednesday” December 5, 2007. The sunrise was truly amazing (I only maybe see the sunrise like 4 times a year)

Here is another adorable family I had the chance to photograph for their Christmas portraits in Carpinteria. Jen Turner, our talented intern, came along with me on this shoot and we had a blast taking pictures of these guys down at the beach on Santa Clause lane. I love the rocks there and the rail road tracks are so fun as a background too. The girls were adorable, definitely hammed it up for us!

Here are my favorites from the day :)