Peter Brandon and I have been friends for ? years. I don’t know exactly but he’s the kinda guy you’d think you’ve known forever. I hate am not a fan of country music, never have been, that is until this guy invited us to a concert. Well his music has grown and my photography has grown. A few months back, he asked me to take some photos for his next album (Album #3). Sure! It didn’t phase me with the fact that should my photos be used on for the cover art, that EVERYBODY who had his album would be looking at MY photos. Now that I think about, it still doesn’t phase me. Well turns out I’d say about 80% of the album art are my photos. I was pretty stoked to say the least! Well I always said I’d be on an album someday, I just didn’t know how!

Cut to a few weeks ago to his album release concert, he asked if I wanted to take photos of the concert at the OC Pavillion. This place is such a beautiful venue. They have a great restaurant upstairs and an awesome bar/lounge in the basement. I’m a fan of live music (was an audio engineer for a while, a long long time ago) so I’ll take up any type of concert offer for fun. Concert/theater photography is hard! With the lights changing constantly, etc. Anyways, I brought along a fellow photographer buddy, Danny Mendoza, to shoot the concert with me. The concert was fun, there were special appearances by the Bee Gees, Bob Marley, Elvis, and Flava Flav, OK well not really, but it was a good attempt Peter! Anyways, here’s just some of the photos from that night.

Don’t forget the new blog is right around the corner! New web address and all! Stay tuned! Take care and God bless.

BTW – Congrats to Peter & Robin on their soon to be born baby! Robin don’t have him until we get back from the river!! And early happy birthday to my sister Aileen!

Shootouts, meetups, group shoots, etc. Whatever you want to call it, are essential for photographers. Not only for networking and meeting with other photographers, but also to get creative without the pressures of clients and making sure you got the shots you needed. It’s the best practice you can get! With this event, I got to meet people I’ve been friends with via Twitter and FaceBook that I haven’t met in person as well as friends from previous shootouts. I also challenged myself with this shoot. I had recently acquired a Canon 135mm f/2L lens and forced myself to use only that lens. Can I just say, I love this lens! It may be a little long for portrait use but the bokeh on this is super smooth! So the photos you see below are all from that lens.

The day of the event for me started off LATE. I won’t get into it but leaving Diamond Bar at 3:45 to get to San Juan Capistrano by 4:00 wasn’t going to happen so I arrived a little bit after the groups dispersed to go on their respective shoots. I missed Jasmine Star‘s opening talk. From what I heard she had a wealth of information. The event concluded with a delicious dinner at Sarducci’s sponsored by ShootDotEdit and another talk from Michael and Anna Costa. Right before their talk they held a raffle. I don’t expect much from raffles, especially when everyone hoards to throw their business card in. Anyways, they had a lot of cool prizes and then they announced the next prize, one year of ShowIt Sites. I think that was one of the biggest prizes there. Anna pulls a card and I think “Hey 18% grey card with rounded corners, kinda looks like mine. Huh..” Anna calls out my name, stumbling with my last name like everyone does. WTH?!?! Did she just call my name? Raise my hand and sure enough the prize is mine. OK, enough rubbing in to all my photographer friends. It was a great night. I got to hang out with all my photographer buddys and meet new ones! Can’t wait for the next one! Thanks to Rob and the Photog Shootout group for putting on such a great event. With that here’s a little slideshow of what I captured. As always, comments appreciated. Thanks and God bless!

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EDIT: Boo! Slideshow plugin broken!! All images are currently small. Sent an email off for support. Hopefully fixed soon! You can still view it fullscreen by clicking on the monitor icon on the bottom right of the slideshow. The photos end up showing a little soft though.

On the personal front, my wife Erika and I are expecting our third baby this May. Due date is May 29 but she has been early with our past two children so we’re shooting for mid May. I’m totally excited as is the rest of the family but I’m gonna be a new dad for the third time. How? Well our oldest is 12, and the princess is turning 4. So each birth has been practically a new one since we got rid of most baby necessities. It’s amazing how much things have changed! No need for a special swaddler($$$) blanket for me! I can wrap a baby better than a Chipotle burrito!

With that, there’s been some rearranging going on in the house. I got kicked out of my home office for the 3 year old to move into and the new baby moving into the 3 year old’s old room which is conveniently across the hallway from us. So if you’re still tracking that’s two rooms painted and my office homeless. Not really! We’ve decided to convert our hardly used living room (you know the nicely vacuumed room no one is allowed to step into but just look at?) into my own studio! This will be a work in progress over time since there are other priorities (baby) to focus on. So for now, it’s a mess, but my desk is nicely positioned by the huge window with a view of, well, the driveway.

So that’s my story/excuse. I promise to get back into the blogging swing of things especially when the baby is born. Or maybe not… LOL You’ll get a year of photos of all my children! I can’t help if I make beautiful babies with my wife!

Just in case I don’t blog, here are a ton of photos from the SoCal Photo ShootOut this past Saturday graciously organized by Hanssie Trainor and Matt Saville. Congratulations Matt on your upcoming wedding! It was a great day and I met a lot of new photographers as well as my peeps from the [b] school- Kate Noelle, Michelle Yam and Kien Trinh. Enjoy the photos, and as usual your comment love is greatly appreciated!!! Take care and God bless!

Oh I also wanted to give a huge “Thank You” to all my fellow [b] school classmates for giving me some comment love. For a while all I heard were crickets on this blog (even though site stats said otherwise!) and wondering if my efforts were being wasted. Sooooo it would be awesome that if you visit my site (:cough: umm friends & family :cough:), to just leave a quick comment so I know you came by!

This past Sunday was our church’s  turn to serve the homeless in Long Beach. We do this every other month and the turnout keeps getting bigger and bigger. On this particular day we fed over 250 people, probably closer to 300 though! Anyways, here are some of the pictures. Thanks for reading! God bless!

The High School kids getting their hands in the dessert…

Quick meeting before we started putting together the meals…

Stackin’ em up! Chili, baked potato and cornbread on the menu tonight…

It was  A LOT of food. We even ran out of the to-go containers and had to use bowls for the late comers…