A sincere thanks to everyone who visited our booth at the Bridal Expo this year at the Cocoanut Grove!  This was our second year at the Expo, and this year was even busier than the last!

Our booth was often pretty mobbed, so if you didn’t have room to squeeze in to talk to us, please drop us a line here and get in touch! We don’t bite. Except when we haven’t had our coffee yet. ProTip: Don’t get between a photographer and his/her coffee.

Also, we are booking up VERY quickly this year, so if you are perhaps on the fence about whether you want us to shoot your wedding, it might be a good idea to contact us to see if your date is one of the many that have received multiple requests. Locking in a date is a first-come-first-served thing; whoever gets their deposit in first gets the date.  So while I don’t want to go all infomercial on you, it really might be a good idea to “act now”!

Finally, we had a TON of entries to our free engagement session raffle, and will be drawing a winner later this week. If you are not the winner, though, don’t despair! We will be sending out an email shortly with a special price for an engagement session, just for you folks who entered the raffle.

Thanks again, and we hope to see many of you awesome people again this year!

This Red Bat is always ready to pitch in with the cameras for the Homeless Services Center. I had the opportunity to shoot portraits for them about a year ago, and it was wonderful to have the chance to help out with their biggest annual event: the Soupline Supper and Benefit Auction, a fabulously tasty fundraiser, held in April (yeah, I know, that was a long time ago!) at the Cocoanut Grove. This year, the event raised over $60,000, money that will go towards providing meals, transitional and emergency services, and new programs for the homeless. The Homeless Services Center also introduced their new Executive Director, Monica Martinez, who has lots of energy and great ideas.

At the Soupline Supper, guests carrying plastic trays collected little cups of soup from a line of community leaders dispensing yumminess of all kinds from giant pots. There were also bread, salad, and desserts, plus a silent auction and a raffle. The room was packed, and I saw people I know from various aspects of Santa Cruz life, including my grandparents and our neighbors and some former UCSC colleagues.

Shooting this event was really fun, though I did wonder why so many people gave me funny looks once the desserts started coming out. Turned out I’d gotten chocolate sauce all over my face and neck when I’d sampled a cookie while taking pictures in the kitchen. People thought I had been injured somehow; chocolate looks a lot like dried blood. I am laughing about this now but at the time it was quite embarrassing to discover that I’d spent over an hour walking around looking like I’d fallen down the front stairs.

I share this with you to let you know that it’s not a good idea to eat while you’re holding a camera. Ever since that day, when I am offered food while shooting, I put the camera down before I start eating. But if you are a photographer who is trying to produce looks of confusion and curiosity in your subjects, smearing reddish-brown stuff all over your person before you shoot is a reliable method.

Despite my discomfiture, I got a lot of photos I was very happy with. Here are just a few of them. There are lots more, and you can see them by visiting redbatprints.com, our gallery site.

Congratulations to the Homeless Services Center and the amazing Stacey Plant for organizing an extraordinarily successful and delicious fundraiser!