sean flanigan

here is another one of my favorite photographers, sean flanigan, based out of a nearby city to seattle, wa. he uses textures in a minimal kind of way, and his photos have a sort of stark, vintage kind of feel with a lot of the buzzword, photojournalism.

leigh miller

here's the work of leigh miller, based out of
southern california. this image in the car isn't particularly striking, but i like the concept. something about this wedding stood out to me; perhaps it was the fact that the bride wasn't blonde and a size 2, perhaps it was because things, perhaps the people themselves seemed different....it was set in england, perhaps it was just the shoes in the first image.

i realize that all but two of the images i have picked are black and white! oh color, how i miss thee. but the point here is composition i guess. photos that my parents might disapprove of because "their heads and feet have been chopped off."




but i love the energy in these candids. i couldn't put my finger on how to describe it until tonight. perhaps that's why i like candids so much.

anna kuperberg

it's easy to see why the work of anna kuperberg has been featured in martha stewart.


i was warming up to the idea of textures, but upon revisiting a few photography greats, like jesh de rox, it was a little too much for me. but anna does it the best for me, i think because it's so subtle. here's some more work on her blog

american friends

i had started watching this episode the other day. lately i've been pretty rage against the company i work for, because i'm being sent to timbuktu and have 80% closing shifts while people at a temp organization make double what i make and get to pick and choose the stores they work at. but i've gotten a lot of love from the place lately from unexpected people. sure the people at 59 are always happy to see me. sure i've got pui. but one gal sent me an amish friendship bread recipe we had casually talked about - she hunted me down and faxed it to me. even dennis is getting in on the faxing action with inventive stories about his sidekick guido and the new game, rock band. one tech even hunted me down because i left a necklace at her store. when andrew first proposed, a lot of people were suprised that we weren't having our wedding in the states. and at the time, i was like, why? we don't have any friends here (besides laurie). it might've been viktoryia (holy cow i can't spell) who said, but in a year's time, you will. so i'm hoping a few random people from work can stay within the 100-120 guest list.

a girl from work called me up out of the blue this weekend to tell me she just got engaged. i had no idea she was even seeing anyone. and turns out, she hadn't been. she has an arranged marriage and she's totally okay with it, using mary's words. like really okay with it! i asked her where she was having the wedding, and she said the ceremony in abbottsford, and the reception in surrey. and then i realized that my very americanized seattle friend is going to have to move to canada! holy cow. so i came home tonight and watched the rest of that simpson's episode and thought of her.

my photos

i struggle with embracing the concept of photoshop. while i may have used pink filters in the darkroom to enhance contrast, and i certainly have always made use of that in photoshop (the sole effect on the first three photos), i have too much of an appreciation for the image straight out of the camera. hence my love for fuji's reds and greens, my longing for a lab that can fathom cross processing, and my love affair with the lomo l-ca and its naturally created vignette. so i spent some time in photoshop today with some of my hawaii photos taken on the credit card sized camera to warm up to the medium and to remind me that i don't need a $2000 camera to take good photos, and i can certainly tote around a concealable camera on my wedding day. keep in mind that i had this inexplicable obsession with surreal colored skies today, and i am editing on a laptop - i'm always slightly appaled at how my st*tchpixie photos look when viewed on my 19" lcd because the laptop screen lies!








a polarizing filter makes the skies bluer on film, and takes away any glare off shiny objects and windows. doing nothing but bumping up the contrast umpteen times on this photo below makes for some neat effects on the window glare at the bottom of the image.

jeremy lawson

i stumbled across don't box us in dot com today and came across some fantastically ethereal images from this photographer, Jeremy Lawson, from Ozark, Missouri.

photography

so here is the work of michele m waite, based out of bellingham, wa (?) i could be wrong but that's what her phone number looks like. i love her composition and attention to color. while you could certainly nitpick and say her whites are often washed out, and the horizon is sometimes 2 degrees off from being parallel with the edge of the frame, i do love her work!



as a side note, i added a statcounter to my blog, and i'm slightly terrified to say that i get almost as many hits on my blog as i do on st*tchpixie (and i pay for advertising for st*tchpixie!!!). i can see what people are googling to find me - and quite a few of the search strings are for that bridal shop in north van run by the terribly snooty woman. hah!

d300!

i've always believed everything happens for a reason. losing my photographer, no big deal, it's meant to be i'll find something better. missing out on my nikon d200 twice at costco.com, that's fine...maybe it will come back by christmas. or....maybe they'll make a D300!!!! okay i'm now stoked. liz and chaia have both asked me to take some photos of them and their families, so here's what i can do with the equipment i already own:

in addition to what's below, here's a few on flickr, and a few more that are fisheye shots via my trusty minolta maxuum 7000 and lomo fisheye2.











so on my wedding day, like i said in one of my very first posts, i guess i don't necessarily want to pack heat. andrew owns a camera just like this pink one, although it's not pink and it's probably a millipixel or two smaller, but it's the size of a stitchpixie coin purse, and toteably concealable.

i mentioned to a couple people already, but the folks from sex and the city found my cityscape purses at a local boutique and wanted 1000 manhattan cityscape pouches for the premier of the new movie this spring! but they wanted it in like 8 days' time, so there was no hope for me.

etsy

i managed to pique the excitement of my wonderful video dude when i posted about vintage veils. so here's what i'm thinking about for my bridesmaids and maybe something a little more subtle for the moms (ie sans feathers) since i am anti-corsage.

from four gals at etsy:
1. boring sidney from seattle!!
2. kiss curl
3. begurple
4. samantha sultana

i don't know if i can handle some 700-odd photos of myself, so i'm going to make sure everyone else looks stunning as well. and including vintage hats and stick on mustaches as previously posted with the photo booth....which reminds me i have to really sit down and get serious about booking everything!

mother of the bride dresses

for many years i thought the only person that could possibly stand my shopping habits was tiara. she was the only girl i knew that could spend as much time as me rifling through every clearance rack at the gap, and she was more than patient (she seemed interested and constructive) with me while i tried on more items than the ten i was theoretically allowed to bring into the room. that is until i brought jenn and vanessa dress shopping. i think we should've brought one of those clickers that they use for counting people that walk into events like the pne for how many dresses they've hopped in and out of. at least 100 by now i'd say.

i think there must be some sort of name for the disease i have, demanding that my friends squirm in and out of dress after dress after dress. this crazy warholesque colorwheel of fun perhaps conveys a bit of my delerium. it's in an entirely different class than dragging the boyfriend to the mall with and popping out of the dressing room to show off 5 different skirts as dies a slow and painful death in the boyfriend seating area.

my mom visited last weekend and insisted on going to the mall. so what did we do? run a muck in nordstrom's changing room until they closed. the dress on the right looked fab on her - much better than on this waif of a model.

she's going on a cruise and we were trying to find a nice "formal" dress. i made her squeeze into a shimmy dress just for fun. being a size -2 for her upper body (i do recall gap came up with negative sizes at one point), but a 6 down below does not work well with almost any dress. but these two "pregnant people" dresses whose style i never understood seemed to work well, and she was even able to pull of an XS! yay, mom!

she zipped into a stunning strapless number but can't find it on the website now. my mom has never worn strapless anything so it was great to see her shine like a tiny oscar nominee. unfortunately i didn't bring along my camera :(

mother of the bride dresses are hideous (see representative outfit, right)! let no mom be subjected to wearing something like this. so i'm going to try to find some stunning cocktail dress for her to pull off so she can dance the night away.

"time alone to recharge...."

i have had an obvious lack of blogging due to no internet, and a general disinterest in wedding related things. i haven't set foot into a bridal shop since the summer, i haven't really got anything except my fantastic video guy and venue. i can't believe it's november, i swear last month was august. side note: i got accepted to be a bee at weddingbee.com so that's pretty exciting! i'm thinking of being "miss snapdragon" for my love of cameras ;)

speaking of weddingbee, a quick surf through the site tonight piqued my last flicker of waning interest in wedding-related ho hum, which finally gives people like jenn and vanessa and tiara something to read.

laila, if you're out there, i'm sure something deep in your soul also cringes at the word "extrovert." but here's what it said on weddingbee, and it's a little bit true about me, but freakishly, awakeningly true about andrew! hello "introverted" husband to be!:

Extrovert: An extrovert is a person who is energized by being around other people. Extroverts tend to “fade” when alone and can easily become bored without other people around. When given the chance, an extrovert will talk with someone else rather than sit alone and think. In fact, extroverts tend to think as they speak, unlike introverts who are far more likely to think before they speak. Extroverts often think better when they are talking. Concepts just don’t seem real to them unless they can talk about them; reflecting on them isn’t enough. Extroverts enjoy social situations and even seek them out since they enjoy being around people.

Introvert: Contrary to what most people think, an introvert is not simply a person who is shy. In fact, being shy has little to do with being an introvert! Shyness has an element of apprehension, nervousness and anxiety, and while an introvert may also be shy, introversion itself is not shyness. An introvert is a person who is energized by being alone and whose energy is drained by being around other people. Introverts are more concerned with the inner world of the mind. They enjoy thinking, exploring their thoughts and feelings. They often avoid social situations because being around people drains their energy. This is true even if they have good social skills. After being with people for any length of time, such as at a party, they need time alone to “recharge.”

the boy has that venus/mars book on men and women. i had leafed through it at one point, and although everything completely obvious, it becomes more solidified and tangibly realized in print.

not insinuating anything about relationships/marriage and how it may pertain to jenn, but when i came across these classy dresses by stephanie james couture (thanks again to the gals at wb), i thought of my dearest maid of honor.




i've begun to look for another photographer, and with the entire country at my disposal i'm a bit overwhelmed by the options, but underwhelmed by the content. i want something to really pop out at me and last longer than the painstakingly selected photos of the "featured wedding" section. all i can walk away with from this experience so far is that no dresses really stand out to me. not that i really expected very much from my dress-to-be, but i now see a lot of potential wow-factor in the vintage look. i love the concept of tea length, but feel as though i might look 12 years old standing at 5'2" in a dress like this.