I’m shooting Claire and Christopher’s wedding next weekend. But before the wedding, they asked me to photograph Claire’s ring. It’s a stunning piece of art, a unique piece that perfectly suits them, and the story behind the ring is incredible. Christopher envisioned the ring he wanted to give Claire when he proposed to her. But the problem was he wanted to create a unique mount that would show off the beautiful red Padparadscha Sapphire he had gotten. Two different jewelers told him they couldn’t make a ring that would safely hold the stone. So, he did what any creative engineer who works in a prototype lab would do, he made it himself. He created the design in CAD and then ran a finite element analysis to ensure the ring would produce exactly the right amount of force to safely hold the sapphire, and precision machined it out of titanium. I asked Chris for the CAD images and am posting them below. Amazing!
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August 27, 2010 - 7:55 PM
Ohmygoodness, that is one gorgeous ring! The stone is brilliant and the setting is absolutely unique. Very talented & skilled man, and lucky, lucky girl!
Anitra and Justin were recently married in a small ceremony and wanted to have a separate reception with friends at their parent’s home in Minneapolis. They had lots of fun details, including a custom logo design and a poster with one of the bridal portraits from the day of their wedding (seen in the background of the first picture). The goal was to have a very laid back and fun reception. Since they already had plenty of photos of themselves, they asked me to focus on the details and their guests, especially the kids. The kids were a lot of fun. There were disposable cameras on the tables for guests to take their own photos. I snapped a quick shot of a young boy using one of the cameras, and he got very shy and hid under the table. That quickly turned into a game of trying to take pictures of the photographer without getting his picture taken. And of course, pretty soon there were 5 kids playing that game. They must have snapped 100+ photos of me on those disposable cameras! I got a picture of the boy in the green cast and then he said that it was unfair that I had two cameras. I said ‘I’ve got you outgunned”… and 30 seconds later he was back with 4 cameras! The girl with the beer seemed a little underage to me, but the security guy with the umbrella checked her ID, so I’m sure it was legit. (and if you were wondering – she did not get any adult beverages, her parents were keeping a close eye on her).
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One of my first cityscape photos (from years ago) was featured on MinnPost yesterday. Was like a little blast from the past. I also got a bunch of emails about it – thanks for all the nice compliments.
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Please excuse the lack of new content right now… I’m in the process of doing some big behind the scenes updates to the website. I’ve put some new content onto my portfolio page, the root page will be updated to point towards either the portfolio or blog, I’ve got a new logo in the works, and I’m updating my portfolio and videos to HTML5 to make the whole site compatible with the iPhone / iPad. Please let me know if you have any problems with the site. Will be a work in progress throughout August.
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Jeff proposed to Kristi at Como Park in St Paul, right at the overlook you see here in the first photograph. So, when they asked me to shoot their upcoming wedding, they also asked me to take engagement photos for them at Como. We rented out the Japanese Garden for half an hour after the park closed. It was great to have such a beautiful venue all to ourselves for a little while, then we walked around the Conservatory and waterfall nearby.
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I spent the 4th of July with some friends up in Alaska. Two words… awe inspiring! The beauty of Alaska is everywhere you travel. We arrived in Anchorage, and we quickly rented bikes and headed out on the Coastal Trail. Of course, standard bikes seems too… standard. So we got a tandem. Not crashing was an accomplishment, and we had a lot of laughs. As we approached Kincaid Park, we came across 4 moose just grazing on the side of the trail, right in the largest city in the state! These moose clearly see a lot of people because they didn’t pay much attention to us.
We then headed South off in our friend’s RV to camp for a couple days. The campfire shot you see here was taken a bit after midnight, it stays light very late in the summer!
We went fishing / drifting down the Kenai River. It’s Alaska, so needless to say the water is COLD (40?), so waders or heavy boots are a must. My feet (the first ones below) stayed nice and warm, though they did look a bit ridiculous. I had never seen a bald eagle before (though there are many in Minnesota), so was blown away when I saw probably 10 or so in a day!
Sunday we headed to Seward, where we caught a bit of the race up and down Marathon Mountain (which happens to be the 2nd longest race in the US, started by a bar dare about 95 years ago). The run is pretty incredible, hundreds of people run straight up a very steep mountain and turn around and run down as fast as they can (the goal is to break 1 hour, the record is 43 minutes). There are a lot of falls and muddy people at the end of the race! We jumped on a boat and headed out to see the Resurrection Fjords and wildlife, where we were lucky enough to see Puffins, sea lions, and 3 humpback whales! (sorry, my humpback picture is pretty sad, but it’s all I got after I changed my lens…)
We spent our last morning in Anchorage hiking Flattop Mountain, where we tested whether 40MPH winds were enough to make human kites. Almost.
And before we boarded our flight back home, we stopped by Lake Hood to see the world’s largest Seaplane Base. Most of Alaska isn’t accessible by car, but there are a lot of lakes where you can land a bush plane, so Anchorage has plenty of them! The last shot is the front of a van, sawed off to just include basically the engine and driver’s seat, mounted to a rail system used to load and tow the sea planes.
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July 16, 2010 - 9:19 AM
Wow, great series of photos! Lots of great views diverse wildlife 
I’ve always wanted to visit Alaska I will, someday
My image of this cute dog, Lola, was posted by Minnesota Public Radio on thier new blog: Minnesota Today.
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Below is the coffee table book I created for Katie and Gabe’s Wedding Reception at Target Field in Minneapolis (home of the Twins Major League Baseball team). The wedding ceremony was held on a separate date out of town, so this day was specifically about celebrating with friends and family. So the album has much more emphasis on guests than you might typically see in a wedding album. We started the day with photos with friends and family, then took bridal portraits at Target Field for about half and hour, and then spent the evening at the reception at the Metropolitan Club (the beautiful glass enclosed event room on the 2nd floor of the stadium located prominently at the entrance down the first base line).
The first image below is the photographic cover we made for the book. The rest of the slides are spreads (left and right half would be split slightly in the middle, each page is 11.5×12, or 23×12 for the spread). Note: Some personal slides from the reception not shown here.
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