Shot this wedding for Abby Rose photo. Another wedding at addison oaks, Michigan. This one had a totally different twist. They had different food stations for the dinner, different carnival games it was pretty amazing. The couple were theater people and everyone who did a toast about Tommy, the groom, mentioned he was a creative genius.

The usual Addison Oaks Ceremony Site

One bride Michelle Leroy-Didimenco

They played bocce ball after the wedding. Immediately after getting married.

They made a lego box for their gifts. They loved Legos.

They had carnival games at the wedding. This one was fill or bust.

Card sharks. Sort of like from the price is right. I think thats where it’s from.

This one was a throw the ball in the cups game. The prizes would be in the cups.

Dancing with the father.

My sister gave birth to a cute little daughter Reagan Weiss.

These are photos that my sister Dinah shot.  They live in Oregon and I’m visiting them next month for Thanksgiving. Something to look forward to.

1. Facebook.com - Utilize the groups functions. Build a network of friends and keep your profile page updated with interesting things to with either a RSS feed or something content related. Photos are the best way to grab someones interest. They pop up in the minifeed. Utilize the minifeed!
2. Flickr.com - Use the Flickr tags to put yourself out there for people who are searching.
3. Technorati.com - If you own a blog this might be a big boost to you. Usually if you find an area to blog about that no one else has blogged about you can get a free backlink to Technorati.
4. Livejournal.com - Livejournal is an old but very helpful website in terms of traffic for me as a photographer. Just add yourself to a community and add photos as well as a link back to you. You can find communities in all different kinds
5. Forums - Join some forums around the internet. Make sure you contribute to the forums and communities by provide commenting love or provide the community members with interesting content.
6. Smugmug.com - Smugmug is awesome. It provides top notch searchability. I have no idea how but it somehow works. Just make sure you embed keywords to your photos. Make sure your keywords are relevant.
7. Stumbleupon.com - Stumble upon is useful because it provides everyone with a level playing field to find your website. Anyone can just hit the stumbleupon.com button to come to your website. The problem is the traffic isn’t very targeted.
8. Digg.com - Behemoth Digg.com is also very useful; but its very hard to get yourself on the front page. But if you do get on the front page get ready for the digg effect
9. Cocomment.com - This is a rather new system but I think it has a lot of merit. There is a pretty big community and when you tag posts you can organize them together. They’ve also now have plugins for your blog as well.
10. Sphinn.com - This one is a digg type system and is gaining popularity. Its another digg clone powered by pligg.com
11. Photographyvoter.com- this one is just starting to build some steam around the blogosphere. It does need a lot of help. You might not get that many hits but you’ll get very targeted users that actually are geniunely interested in your website

I’m missing other websites huh? I’ve only excluded others primarily because I haven’t discovered them. Please feel free to leave some suggest some websites that I may have not mentioned.

This Friday, September 28th, 2007, there is an event you must attend if you’re a photographer.

Dave and Quinn of DQ Studios of Calgary in Detroit. They’re going to be at Harold Jankowiak’s, of Modern Photoglyphs, place presenting their Quickeys product. If you’re not familiar with Quickeys it is a product used by DQ studios that speeds up the workflow by automating tasks to a number of keys alongside of using a wacom tablet. I’m not sure how Dave and Quinn of DQ studios actually engineered it. I’m thinking it is just a bunch of macros that fire off and trigger actions. Then they just use their wacom tablet to mask out certain areas.

I’ve seen a demonstration in Las Vegas when Dave and Quinn spoke about it. It seems like there is quite a bit of a learning curve to it; as well as it might not work for everyone. Again, Harold of Modern Photoglyphs will be hosting this event at his house in Troy. I’ll be attending. Hopefully there will be lots of other Detroit Photographers that will be participating as well!

Contact me if you’re interested. I can provide you with the information needed.

As a Detroit-er, we’ve had the privilege of living right next to the open Canadian border. My mother would take us weekly on Saturdays Windsor, Ontario with her friends and sometimes relatives to enjoy getting fresh vegetables and cooking supplies needed. We would always start the day by getting Dim Sum at Wah-court and then visiting pastry shops which would bake the freshest tasty chinese pastries. That would be usually my favorite part of our ritualistic weekly adventure across the border.  Waiting at the pastrie shop counter and pointing to my favorite sweet pastries. She primarily did this because of the advantage that Detroit-ers had: the American Dollar vs. the Canadian Dollar.

Unfortunely, as of recent the US dollar as fallen to a point where the Canadian Dollar are almost the same. This is startling because its always been an fact in my life that the American Dollar was strong and worth something. Hopefully, something good will come out of this for Detroit-ers and more Canadians may travel over to Detroit and buy our goods.

See it for yourself at Reuters.

Night Photography is one of my favorite things to do besides [tag]wedding[/tag] photography. Every once in a while one needs a departure from doing the same type of photography.  It’s taught me a plethora about how to see light. In a way with night photography, the outdoors is your studio.

Titled, “Plastic Knife Fight.” Copyright Chris J. Lee 2007.

So I thought I’d share some tips.

1. Be Careful - Make sure you bring a friend with you. Your safety is very important.  It’s dark, you’re carrying expensive equipment and it’d be easy to just get your things stolen.  Also, never leave your camera unattended. If you can try to have a car around for your get-away. So you could run like a ninja. Hey, I’m a wuss I get scared easily. If you run into cops it might be useful to bring your business card too & always have a cell phone on you.
2. Bring a flashlight - When you’re doing night photography you can always add light to the scene. This can be helpful if the foreground is really dark. If its cold make sure you bring several flashlights. I’ll explain at number 9.
3. Keep warm - Usually it’s colder at night. Make sure you have some way of keeping warm. It’s not an issue in the summer but in the winter I’ve faced some harsh conditions. I’d definately suggest getting gloves. If you do get gloves make sure you’re able to push buttons with your gloves on.
4. Check the scene first - Shoot at 3200 ISO and a faster shutter speed before deciding to commit to a 10-20 minute exposure. This way you can check the frame.
5. Use a Tripod - If you’re going to use a long exposure make sure you have a secure tripod. It might even help to gaffer tape it up. I love my Bogen Manfrotto Tripod.
6. Take multiple exposures - If your camera has a bracketing try to bracket your properly exposed photo. Expose for the highlights then shadows and then use multiple layers to create one photo in photoshop. This way you don’t blow the highlights out of light sources.
7. Turn on noise reduction - On Nikon and Canon cameras there are  functions that turn on noise reduction for long exposures. Usually with long exposures, areas where the scenes are dark but continue to be exposed will add more noise. But beware usually the photos will
8. Shoot in raw - I guess this is very debatable on your workflow. But I love using raw because I can change the white balance in scenes where you will not know what the color temperature of the photo. Mixed lighting is very common in more urban scenes. Plus the file size provides you the ability to print very large prints.
9. Bring extras - Bring extra batteries. When it’s cold the batteries for your camera and flashlight usually drain much faster. I suggest using a crank flashlight. Those are helpful when you’re in a jam and can’t find batteries for your flash light. Also bring extra compact flash cards if you’re shooting raw. Sucks when you have a great shot but
10. Start shooting at sunset - Usually if you want really  super blue skies the best time to do it is right after the sun gets down. See below photo. This was shot right before sunset when the skies were orangish. Thats at least what my photo professor told me.

Congrats to all the winners:

Weddings

Cakes : Cake Nouveau

Caterer : Catering 2 You

Flowers : Viviano Flower Shop

Invitations : Gourmet Invitations

Limousine : Checker Sedan

Music : Mike Staff Productions

Photographer : Arising Images

Rings : Pat Scott Jewelers

Tuxedo : President Tuxedo

Venue : Crystal Gardens

Videographer : George’s Video Productions

Wedding dresses : The Wedding Shoppe

Source: wdiv.cityvoter.com

I even got to see Prem’s award on this past Monday at our monthly Detroit Photographers Get Together. It’s pretty neat. From what I can recall it has these church windows on the top of the award. A very unique looking award. Nice to have!

I went to Michigan State University and everyone there knows “Beaners” as a coffee place out on Harrison Road thats open 24 x 7. Now they’re officially changing their name to “Biggby”. I think it’s because Beaners is trying to move to their franchises to the southwest and market them there.

To East Lansing-ites we associate “Beaners” wasn’t associated as a racial slur. I think it’s great they’re siding on the side of political correctness; but i think it might conjure a negative reaction on some loyal fans of the previous name. I predict that many will react negatively because many have grown accustomed to this name and the new name isn’t really that attractive. It’s kind of banal. I’m just skeptical.

According to their press release from Beaners Biggby, they’ve spent nearly a million dollars to re-brand their coffee name.

What do you think?

The Hyatt in Dearborn, Michgin is definately a very nice place to have a wedding. Anil & Vu totally went all out and had their ceremony decorated very well. As I said before I shot this for Jonathan Thrasher out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The day started at 8am when we got breakfast. The breakfast at the Dearborn Hyatt isn’t too great of a value. It was rather overpriced but the cook to serve omelets were pretty tasty and their options are quite limited.

So the next day I woke up early and drove to the Dearborn Hyatt. It’s about a 45 minute drive from West Bloomfield, Mi. Jonathan and I had breakfast and then we were off to shooting. The day turned out to be pretty awesome.

This is their ceremony site. Up in the center is a platform where they set a stage fully decorated for their wedding. I’ve never seen a more elaborate and beautiful setup than this. The setup was primarily a stage used for a traditional indian weddings. I’m not sure what it’s called.

Grabbed this mirror shot of Vu getting ready. Rarely do I get to see brides to get ready mainly because I’m a guy and they don’t want them watch them in their scrubbed nature.

This is Vu after the transformation. She looks great!

This is another shot of vu. This is after she saw the ceremony site. She was pretty pleased.

This is their horse trainer. They had a horse take him from the parking lot into the dearborn hyatt.

Here is anil right before mounting the horse. Hes pictured here with his mother. I guess it’s indian wedding tradition for the Groom to ride into the hotel from the parking lot.

This is Anil and Vu tying the knot, literally. They tie a scarf to each other and they walk around in a circle after each different phases. This is toward the end of the phases of this tndian wedding tradition.

This is Anil and we’re doing a portrait that Jonathan preplanned. He was shooting Vu and I shot Anil. We had about 30 minutes to produce portraits. Most of the day was spent changing and taking formals in different outfits. They had three different outfits: indian, vietnamese, and a western one. This photo was shot in front of the elevators of the Dearborn Hyatt.

This is a shot I preconceived. I liked the soft quality of ambient light. With a little flash and made this photo. Remember we had little time but at least we prepped out all the locations.

I previsualized this photo because from scouting out the cake. It was huge and very tall! So I set up my lights right behind them. I did immediately because I wanted to apply what I learned from Bruce Dorn’s recent seminar. He said that he worked with this cinematographer and he would always light the background first. Therefore, I thought that would the first thing I’d do. I didn’t expect the light to flare like that but it was a happy accident. Probably my favorite photo of the day. Either that or the horse photo above.

This is Yanni. I spotted this right by the piano in the Reception hall of the Dearborn Hyatt. Vu likes playing Piano.

I have a lot of reception shots because these guys all really know how to dance. But there were two that I stuck out. This one. i just love her expression and the mystery of Vu (the brides) face and the stark geometric lines everywhere.

I also liked this one the most because by luck his fingers are right where my strobes fired off as well as the vantage point. It’s hard to get good random photos shot from above because I don’t know what I’m aiming at. This photo reminds me of Jesh De Rox. Primarily because he uses that light magenta palette in some of his photos. But you can’t really pin Jesh de rox to one style.

Wow that was a lot of photos! Primarily because I did shoot for that long. I’ve never shot for 13 hours.

I met up with Jonathan Thrasher at the Marriot for their pre-wedding ceremony. Apparently, its an indian thing for them to do multiple days of wedding ceremony. I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve never been to such an multicultural wedding. The wedding was done in three different languages. I’m not quite the indian wedding photographer. I wish I knew what they were saying and singing.

Jonathan is on the far left if it wasn’t obvious enough. He’s left eye dominant. We discussed this because he wish he didn’t need to wear glasses. I guess lasik might be the way for him to go but like my vision its very important to me. My job depends on it!

This is Anil (left) and Vu(right). They’re a really fun couple.

This Ceremony had a lot of dancing involved. These people really know how to get down and dance!

A bunch of relatives, cousins practiced dances and performed for the couple. I really like the dress and patterns of the style of dress that they wore. It was definitely diverse and unique to me; since, i’ve never encountered anything like this.

These kids did a more modern dance. I liked this one because they were pretty adept and on their feet.

After the floor was open people just flocked and danced to indian music. It was actually very entertaining to listen to.

This proved to be pretty dangerous to be around. This is when they hold hands and swing around in circles. I feared that my camera would break so I had to back of a little bit. They’re pretty intense about this!