Happy Birthday to Patrick! Shown here enjoying Thai food (and enduring bad music) after a Red Bat location scouting expedition.

Patrick, your fellow citizens of Planet Earth are glad you were able to join us here oh so many years ago.

I hope your heart center is feeling soft and open today, because I’m about to throw some love at you. 19 photographs of it, in fact! But don’t worry, they’re optimized so they should load pretty fast. Just keep reading while that’s happening.

Emily and Matt got hitched at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph in San Jose, a stunning place to launch into married life if ever there was one. That place is gorgeous. We were worried about the light, wondering if there would be enough, since we couldn’t use flashes during the ceremony and wanted to avoid using them anyway (we are big fans of natural light). As it turned out, the light situation was challenging but not impossible. We got plenty of great shots just working with what was there.

The Red Bats had the pleasure of following these two throughout their wedding day, starting at 7 am (yes, we will get up early for our clients!) and ending up at the Capitol Club in the afternoon. It was a small wedding, just the family and some friends, and this made it easy to focus on the bride and groom and their delight in every detail of getting legally wed. They were so happy about the whole thing, so sweet to each other and everybody else, that they made falling in love and getting married seem like the only logical thing for anybody in their right mind to do.

It was easy to see they both felt they’d hit the jackpot in the romance department. Working on their photos later, I kept getting teary-eyed looking at the two of them together. (Have I mentioned yet what a cheeseball I am? Well, now you know for sure.) I’m not including the most touching photos here because some moments are too private for a blog post.

But I will reveal, in words anyway, that the bride’s father cried during his first dance with his newly married daughter, and almost everybody in the room cried too (including me) and I am sure the ones who didn’t were either not paying attention or holding it in. I told you these were some sweet people.

Congratulations, Emily and Matt!

Remember that night in the middle of December when the moon was like a beacon in the sky? On December 13th, the moon was closer to the earth than it had been since 1993. A year rife with angst and drama for me, I might add, as that was the year I graduated from high school and was wondering what the hell I was going to do with my life.

Well, the moon found me in a much better place this year than it did then, and I’m thankful for that. I spent the evening in San Jose at a coffee shop watching my girlfriend’s friend play guitar. I brought my camera of course, and thought I’d share some of the results with you. There was certainly a little bit of magic in the air that night…

I bumped up the blacks in this a bit to enhance the flower-shaped debris field flung out from the impact crater on the lower right.

This is Malachi Hernandez. Remember that name. He and his scarf are gonna be HUGE in 2009.