This post is Part 1 of a 4-part series. Read Part 1 – Read Part 2 – Read Part 3 – Read Part 4

Welcome to 2010! Happy New Year! (Yeah, I know it’s already February, but at least our first post of the year is in time for the Chinese New Year, right?) Things have been busy in Red Bat World. Photos have been processed, couples have been bonded in matrimony, various events have been thoroughly documented, terrifyingly large prints have been made for a bridal expo. Vast quantities of fun and work have occurred in approximately equal amounts.

Let’s go back to 2009, to the day that Jill and Chase got married. Some of you already know about this: Jill and Chase wanted a wedding with no guests, and they wanted it to be in Santa Cruz. That’s right, no guests at all! Just the officiant, the photographers, and the stylist. Before the wedding day, they drove from their home near Los Angeles several times to pick the perfect location, line up all the details, and of course, have a Red Bat engagement session. To read about (and see photos of) their engagement session, click here.

We knew that photographing a wedding with no guests would be an unusual experience. No crowd to infiltrate, no list of people to follow and try to capture without being obnoxious. What would this day be like, we wondered? What would our future be… No, wait, those are lyrics from The Sound of Music. Oops! (That happens to me sometimes.) Back to the subject at hand.

Of course it wasn’t really true that there were no guests, because WE were the guests, along with the highly talented stylist, Jill G. By this point in our relationship with Jill and Chase, we considered them to be good friends, so it felt quite natural to attend their wedding. In fact, the whole idea seemed totally normal by the time the day arrived, just part of the love story that is Jill and Chase together. It was a little bit like a wedding-themed photoshoot, but it was as serious as any other wedding. It was a day of solemn ceremonies, but it was also casual and full of jokes.

And because there were no guests, we were able to focus completely on the bride and groom and hundreds of details we wouldn’t have time to capture at a regular wedding.

This post has some of our favorite getting ready shots. For Chase, getting ready meant arriving at the venue before Jill and putting together a canopy he’d made especially for their ceremony. Chase is quite handy with a blowtorch. For Jill, getting ready meant achieving total perfection in hair and makeup, and boy was it worth it: there was absolutely no retouching required on her photos. Patrick followed Chase and watched him construct the canopy, while I hung around the two Jills (Jill the bride and Jill G. the stylist) and captured the process of making the bride even more beautiful than she usually is.

In case you’re wondering, Jill’s getting-ready, as well as the reception, happened at the Scotts Valley Hilton. The wedding itself took place at Pacific Oaks Vineyard Estate.

There are a lot of photos in this post, but if all has gone as I planned, they’ve all finished loading now that you’ve reached the end of the words. Enjoy, and make sure you look for photos of the Jill and Chase ceremony and reception in posts to come…

This post is part 3 of a 3-part series. Read part 1 – Read part 2 - Read part 3

This fabulous couple’s wedding reception was held at 515 in Santa Cruz. Talk about a challenge for these photographers! It was dark in there. I couldn’t have gotten the shots I did without the Lightscoop, a small, inexpensive piece of equipment that made it possible to shoot in those dim rooms without the awful results that happen with forward-facing flash.

The newlyweds treated us to an hauntingly sweet duet, with Peter playing the guitar and both of them singing. They claimed that this duet would replace their first dance, but then they gave us a sort of first dance anyway, and everyone was utterly charmed by them for the hundredth time that day. Here are 32 (!!) photos of the first evening of their married lives.

As a special bonus, I’ve included another behind-the-scenes Red Bat shot, about halfway down in this post. It’s Patrick, helping to test the lighting in the area where we expected the first dance to be. By dancing with an invisible partner. Because at Red Bat Photography, we know how to use our imaginations.

Hooray for Crystal and Peter!!

Regular readers know of my love of cellphone pics. (To see cellphone pics from previous months, click here.) The gallery below has 60 photos from my phone taken during June and July.

Alas, I have sad tidings: around the beginning of July, I dropped my phone (again). Suddenly, the camera could only see life from a psychedelic perspective. Now my cellphone photos look like this:

No, they don’t all look like photos of Caffe Pergolesi on a Saturday night. But they do look like the strangest dream I’ve ever had about ordinary, everyday stuff. They show what the world might look like if my soul was suddenly trapped in the body of some other species- possibly a species nobody knows about because it’s invisible. Sure, these photos are kind of interesting, but after just a few I find myself feeling queasy and uncertain about my grip on reality. And I simply cannot lose my grip on reality, not during WEDDING SEASON.

You can see a few more of these trippy photos at the end of the show below.

The bright side of all this is that I now have one more reason to buy the phone Patrick uses, the one he described in this post. But first there are a few lenses I want to acquire. As soon as I can fully justify a new phone purchase, cellphone pics posts will begin anew! Until then, what you see here will have to suffice.

So long, Samsung t439 camera, you fragile beauty…

CLICK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE IMAGE BELOW TO GET STARTED.

The first few photos in this month’s cellphone pics gallery are shots of a book of images by photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. (You can see his stuff by clicking here.) Manuel Alvarez Bravo was just one of the many photographers whose work I saw (in a book, not in real life) for the first time in May. Another was Sam Abell, the photographer who made the image of beans and toast you’ll see later in the cellphone pics gallery. (To see more photos by Sam Abell, click here.) It was kind of funny to find myself exhausted from processing photos and wrestling with their presentation yet unable to stay away from photography. I kept going to the bookstore to try to take my mind off my photo troubles with good old fiction, only to be drawn into the photo books section and seduced by someone else’s pictures. How did this obsession happen to me? I swear I never saw it coming.

This month marked the beginning of a fervent desire to actually buy all of these beautiful photo books. Especially the Sam Abell book. I think it’s because I’ve learned so much about photography in the last two years of doing it as a job, and have a better appreciation now of innovative work. Also, I’ve got a better sense of my own outside-the-commercial-zone aesthetic and can get very excited about photographers who travel in similar directions. Or in very different directions. Mostly, it’s just fun to imagine what it was like to make someone else’s photographs.

For those who may wonder, the little guy in these photos is my nephew Jasper (loves ice, cats, flowers, and putting things into other things). He shows up frequently in the cellphone pics galleries, because when I’m hanging out with him I am too busy to manage a real camera but am compelled to document him anyway. His mama, my sister Joye, manages to take lots of gorgeous photos of him with a real camera, but she has superpowers and extra arms since she became a mom.

This isn’t the first cellphone pics post to include a photo of a dead bird. I keep finding them. What’s up with that? (To see cellphone pics from previous months, click here.)

CLICK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE IMAGE BELOW TO SEE MAY THROUGH THE CRAPPY YET WONDERFUL LENS OF MY PHONE.