The other day I started looking at my calendar full of so many tasks and started to think about how much time I spend actually photographing. Right now during the busy summer wedding season we do 1 or 2 weddings a weekend, and 1 or 2 portrait sessions so about 2-3 days during the week I am photographing. The rest of the days my calendar is packed full with client meetings, marketing, accounting, getting orders prepped, photoshop and many other random things you find yourself doing as a small business owner. And while most of these are needed to run your business some can wait a bit.

I love the art of photography, it constantly inspires me to be creative and get out and shoot. This month I am going to commit to shooting something every day. I might even get out and shoot some things I haven’t done in a long time like some landscapes or work on my own art projects!!! I’ll post a shot from every shoot (not that day, but maybe in a week i’ll post a shot from yesterdays shoot and then try and keep up a shot every day on the blog)

Every day is a gift and I am thankful to have the opportunity to do something I have a passion for. So watch out for a ton of images coming soon

– Mark

Michael and Annmarie had such an amazing wedding on Saturday. It was hot out but they are just 2 lovebirds and the heat didn’t even phase them! We captured so many great photos of them and got to shoot at some of our favorite locations all in the same day. The ceremony started at at the lovely Villa Montalvo in Saratoga for a morning ceremony. After that we headed over Hakone gardens for some more photos of them and ended the day at the St. Claire hotel in San Jose.

We had the A list team all day also with Amazáe Special Events coordinating and David from Video Reflections filming. More details and photos to come soon!

Here is one more video with the iPhone and it captures action pretty well. YouTube compresses the video so you get some of the jagged pixels you see, but on the actual iPhone when you view it the video actually flows very smooth. I’ll do a full review after about a week and share my experiences with using the phone on a daily basis.

Happy fathers day to all of the Dad’s out there and espicially my awesome Dad! My dad is a big part of my life and always there when I need him. Thanks for everything you do Dad, I love you

I tried to find a photo of him and I but don’t really have any (there aren’t many photos of my with other people since I usually am taking the photo) But here is a shot of him from last year with Jim Brown. He is a huge sports fan so got a kick out of meeting Jim Brown at our Church one day.

After debating for awhile wether to upgrade or not I decided to go for the new iPhone 3GS, mainly for the video features and improved battery life. This year there aren’t a ton of improvements compared to the previous iPhone 3G, but some of these little improvements are very nice and worth the upgrade in my opinion. I’ll give you a brief run down of some new features in my first hour or so of testing. Once I get more real world testing out i’ll update you all

- Screen – There is a little bit of an improvement with the new screen and smudges, its not huge but you will get less fingerprints on the phone and they do wipe clear a little bit easier.
- Voice Controls – This was one part of the keynote that I didn’t think I would really use and glossed over it, but so far it is a very nice feature. I can see myself using the voice dialing a lot when in the car
and for listening to music its pretty nice to just say the artist name or song and have that start playing right away. It works pretty good but you do have to speak clearly, the first few times it got the wrong song so I had to slow down just a little bit and it understood me perfect.
- Camera – Autofocus works great and its so nice to be able to shift focus to another part of the image. Also the macro works really good, this is a huge improvement from the last iPhone camera that couldn’t take close up shots. Another great thing about being able to select your focus point is with exposure, it seems like the iphone uses the part you click on for focus as the exposure basis so if the exposure is off just click a point close by that has a neutral color (white or black will throw the exposure off so look for a neutral color). This helps the exposure a lot which used to be my main gripe on the old iPhone, I was always moving back and forth to try and get a decent exposure and now its a lot easier.
- Video – One of the big features for me I wanted to try out and so far it works just as they say. Video quality is great, not HD but very good for a cell phone. If you are out and need to grab a quick video snippet of something it works perfect and the trim feature comes in handy to trim out unneeded stuff. And being able to upload it right away to mobile me, you tube or email the video makes it very easy to share your videos with your family and friends.
- Speed – The last upgrade the 3GS has compared to the 3G is a faster processor and more RAM. Since I use my iPhone a lot during the day. I am always checking email and doing other tasks, the few seconds waiting for a program to launch or waiting for an email to delete used to add up to a lot of wasted time. The 3GS is much more responsive, scrolling through emails and deleting emails is seamless there are no lags like there used to be with my 3G. Launching most applications seems to be about 50% faster, I used to have to wait about 6-10 seconds for the camera to come up and now its about 2 seconds. If you use your iPhone a lot you will see a good bump in performance.

Here are some sample photos and videos, sorry there isn’t anything too exciting to video my normal model (baby Faith) was sleeping so captured some things around the house. Once I get more energy later i’ll find some cool stuff to film

and a few videos

I’ll post more later when I have used the phone for a week or so but so far I am happy with the upgrade.

– Mark

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