Well, it’s been a long 24 hours. Good…but long. I have been on an emotional roller-coaster, good times…stressful times…peaceful times. Won’t times make up their mind??

After work. I cruised out to Coors with Dan and we took in a little Dave Matthews Band. Dude. Sweet concert. Enough said. Dave was in usual form, kicking butt…playing old tunes, new tunes…it pretty much rocked. After the concert, we drove out to SDSU and I did a ride-along for old times’ sake. Danny’s last shift with State is going on now, so I wanted to get a ride in before he makes the move to Carlsbad. Talk about a crazy shift…not much happened, but we definitely kept busy. And if you were ever wondering if you could see a school girl and a girl wearing nothing but trash-bags or caution tape, just drive out to State. You’ll find pretty much any type of girl, or guy for that matter, and they are usually in an intoxicated state. I saw more people stumbling around and/or throwing up in one night than I usually see. Good times, though.

I crashed late…and hard…only to wake up and take my car to get serviced. Today was the first day in a long time that I haven’t scheduled a photo shoot…so I took advantage of that to run a few errands. I come to find out that my car needs major work and servicing and after all was said and done, I would have ended up paying tons of money. I figured it was time for a new ride. I was inspired by my sister, who recently picked up an 07 Honda civic a few weeks ago…so I headed out to Mission Valley Honda and picked up an 08 Civic Coupe. Fully loaded. It is pretty much the sweetest ride ever. And we were in an out in record time. It was pretty ridiculous. I’m going to enjoy driving it around…and hopefully the ladies will enjoy looking at my riding in it. :P

I also got to hang out a little with Brian and Flor and their friend, Carolyn. We had breakfast at the Mission Cafe and then chilled a little at Flor and Brian’s place, watching Brian hang pictures. Trust me, it’s as exciting as it sounds. :)

Anyway, photos of the new car to come! I’m going to chill for a little while since it’s been a long day..but you’ll hear from me later.

I had the special opportunity to shoot my best friend and his best girl on Wednesday night…

The Magnificent, Noble, Dignitary Sir Brian Mounts and his lady, Flor, announced their engagement a couple weeks ago and I had the opportunity to take their engagement photos…

We tried getting serious pictures, folks…but if you know these two, you know it just isn’t possible. :) Well, we got a couple.

Congratulations to the both of them. They will be tying the knot in December.

I’ve got this on my desktop at work as a little motivator…

It’s not working.

I’m trying, guys…I really am.

How many Asians can you fit in a Honda 2-door coupe?

This is, of course, assuming the vehicle is lowered and tricked out as much as it can be on a minimum-wage salary, looking only slightly ghetto with a crap-ass paint job and ready to drag race at an undisclosed location with some Mexicans down in Chula.

Oh, and the answer is six.

There is something seriously wrong going on here, people. What the eff. Is there something in the water? Am I just naturally immune?

My friends are dropping like flies. I have three friends getting married in a relatively short amount of time…and a lady at work just approached me to do her wedding photography. Now, don’t get me wrong…marriage is a good thing. But everyone getting married all of a sudden? Weird.

If anything, I feel sorry for these saps. :) Just kidding…

But at least it’s profitable for me…being a wedding photographer and all. ;)

Well, it was a fun weekend. Weather was a little crazy…but I think fall is officially here. Fall is definitely one of my favorite seasons. I love the crisp, cool air, the leaves changing…good times. But just because it’s getting colder, that hasn’t stopped me from dragging a hot girl to the beach in a bikini. :)

Speaking of hot girls, I had a busy weekend. Friday, Brian and I headed out to Thin & Onyx and filmed a super cool lingerie and body paint fashion show. Got some great clips…and the girls were smokin’. The paint was really cool under the black lights. Hot girls in lingerie…open bar. No complaints here.

Despite the late night, I woke up early and headed out to Essence Digital’s studio for a photo shoot with the sexy Anastacia. Not only is she gorgeous, but she’s tons of fun to hang out with. I would know, since we spent a few hours last month bonding while walking to our cars after nearly killing ourselves by hiking up the hill at Black’s beach. Anyway…she’s super cool…and we definitely got some great shots in…

Today, I met up with Kimberly for a ever-so-brief shoot at Windansea. The weather was perfect and the sky was clear after the rainyness…but we had some allergy issues and had to cut the shoot short. We got a few good frames, though…and had fun doing it too…

More shots from weekend here. Enjoy…back to the grind tomorrow. It’s winding down…

So my buddy Mike Crouch has inspired me to lean towards video at photo shoots with some projects we’ve got in the works, so I brought my camera to Ennis’s and my photoshoot with Laura. Laura is a sweetheart and Ennis and I do tend to create adventure-like photo shoots, especially with Ennis and his acrobatic skills…so I thought we would definitely get some cool clips. Here is one of them, courtesy of iMovie. I’m not in the movie much…but then again, there would be too many ridiculously good looking people in the movie. And someone has to wield the video camera.

So yes, I’m still awake…I’m a nerd, I know. I was editing some pictures from the weekend. Had a blast at both of my shoots this weekend…today was tons of fun. Cruised up to Ramona with Ennis and did a little exploring to find the perfect spot for our country shoot with Laura Baker. We found a dairy farm, complete with cows, pumpkins, and hay…and we managed to charm the owner of the property into letting us shoot there. He and his daughter were totally chill and let us have a run of the place. It was a lot of fun…although hay and cows don’t smell really good. Luckily I do. Well, Laura does too, since she’s a girl and all.

After shooting for a bit at the farm, we changed it up a bit and headed out to the fairgrounds, where we did a little breaking and entering and shot around the grandstand. It wasn’t really breaking and entering since the gate was unlocked, but we have a feeling they were expecting us and considered it an open invitation to shoot there. Kimberly met up with us a little later and after the shoot, we went to Mi Ranchito for a little food.

All in all, some awesome pictures….and a great adventure:

I really enjoyed showing Ennis and Laura around my hometown…definitely good times.

Now, I’m off to bed. More later.

Okay, so I’m a little sleepy, so this is going to be a little short. It’s been a long week, so I haven’t been as on top of the updates as I should. I think you know why…

But I have been a busy guy. More on that later. I will, however, share some pictures from today’s (yesterday’s) adventures with Kimberly. We had a blast as always…since she is one cool chick. :) We headed out with Ennis and snapped a few shots at our secret location. Ennis, of course, did his acrobatics (video coming soon), and I got some super sweet shots of this sexy, classy girl. Take a gander…

After the shoot, had a great time schmoozing with Kimberly, Ennis, and Gianna over pasta at the Olive Garden. Good times all around.

Tomorrow, Ennis and I head out to my hometown to shoot with the lovely Laura Baker…and hopefully will get a surprise visit from Kimberly. More to come…and video too!!

Good night, all!

I’m a ridiculously good looking, nice guy/photographer. Like Napoleon, I’ve got all kinds of skills. Numb-chuck skills. Bo staff skills. Computer hacking skills. Mortgage processing skills.

I’ve just spent the last 2 hours pimping myself out to every corporate monster that exists. The “W” is shutting our center down, which means I need a job.

So I ask again. Wanna hire me?

I don’t want to say making French fries is beneath me…but since I do have a college degree, I think I’m more qualified and willing to eat the French fries. (so I applied to Jack in the Box. :) )

I have some time…so if anyone knows of places that are hiring, send them my way. My resume is polished and ready. My suit is pressed. I’m not sad I’m losing my job…I’m mostly sad that I won’t be working with my friends here for very much longer. They are a cool group of people. I think we’re all sad, really.

And who wants to do work today? Not me…I’m ready for lunch in a big way.

Happy hump day.

Okay, so my problems have been solved! No, I haven’t gotten a life…but I have a brand-spanking new MacBook Pro, courtesy of my grandma…the silent partner of NGS Media. Okay, well it’s not so silent anymore since I spread it all over the internet…but yes, my grandma saved the day. After my PC went kaput last week, I was slightly irritated. I had all these things to do and didn’t quite know how I was going to get them done. Now I can do all that…and more.

I took to editing a video for the Simple Glam Girls calendar release party next week. We had shot about an hour or so of footage from our shoot a couple weeks ago..and needless to say, I cut, transitioned, and edited everything in about 30 minutes. I took an hour of video down to about 6 minutes. Granted, I was using iMovie…and I’m used to more complex editors…but I have to tell you, for a simple movie with one video source, iMovie is definitely the way to go. I have never clipped video that fast before in my life. And this computer not only clips, but renders as I go…and it renders faster than I can blink my eyes. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration…but it’s pretty damn fast. I am seriously still amazed that I was able to procrastinate and get this video edited in the time it takes to watch a sitcom. Ridiculous.

I will be getting the CS3 production suite on this machine too and my life will be even sweeter. I can’t wait!

So yeah, definitely good news to blog about. I also have some fun shoots planned, so stay tuned! I headed out to Hooters tonight and hung out with Emilie, who is only one of the coolest chicks in the world. She was definitely rockin’ the orange shorts tonight! But we’ve got some schemes in the works, so that’ll be fun. Saw Stevie too…and it’s pretty much awesome every time I see her too. And the fried pickles were divine.

Hope everyone is staying cool! Summer is actually winding down…and it’s sad to see it go.

I like big butts…and I cannot lie.

But apparently these guys don’t.

This commercial literally cracked me up the first time I saw it…and it continues to get a chortle out of me every time:

I’ve cooled off a little since my little rant last night. Life throws stuff at you sometimes and there’s nothing you can do about it but suck it up and deal. And that’s what I’m doing.

Besides, today was a good day. Chill, but good. Went out for breakfast with AJ and tooled around the house doing miscellaneous crap. My morning shoot was cancelled inexplicably, which is a bummer since the model is such a hottie…but we’re supposed to be shooting next weekend, so it all works out. ;) I did, however, set up a last minute shoot for the afternoon with a gal named Julie.

Julie is SUCH a sweetheart…genuine, sweet, beautiful, and fun to shoot. This was her first official photo shoot, and I think we did well. The sunset was just TOO beautiful to pass up, so we snapped some as the big orange ball tucked down behind the horizon. And with Julie standing in front of all this, you just KNOW the pictures came out good.

But don’t take my word for it…here are a couple samples:

Anyway, it was lots of fun with Julie. We’re shooting again next week, so that oughta be fun. :)

And on that note, I’m going to run out and grab something to eat. Hooray for 3-day weekends.

And I’m watching Hitch for the second time…I think I really need to change the channel. :)

Well, I don’t think it’s the best idea to write when I’m so pissed off…but against my better judgment I’m going to, since I have nothing else to do.

So I headed out to the Padres game with Doug tonight, which was cool since a grand slam by Cameron in the 5th put the Pads in an excellent position. We won 7 to nothing. Sweet game.

So I come home to do a little editing and such and, well, found out that my tower that has been faithful to me for the last 5 years fizzled out. Kaput. Nothing.

When I left it this afternoon, I was running a diagnostic on one of my external drives and trying to restore some information that had been corrupted…and was pretty successful too…but now I guess that doesn’t matter since my machine isn’t even working now. And I’m frustrated because I have projects that were in the works, projects that were soon-to-be in the works, and general garbage that was on that machine. And now I can’t even do anything. And it’s frustrating. I may seem really calm on the outside…but if you know me, you know that I internalize a lot of stuff and I’m frustrated to the point of picking up my computer and literally throwing it THROUGH the window onto oncoming traffic and watching it smash on the street into a million pieces. It would be a welcome addition to the busted up car that’s already parked in front of our building.

But that wouldn’t do any good. What I REALLY need to do is buy a new machine instead of put money into this one that has lasted 5 long years…but I will probably have to see if I can salvage this one somehow, or at least the information on it. I’m sort of at a standstill right now…and that’s the annoying thing.

But enough ranting. It was a long-ass week with no end in sight…and now the weekend is here and I have some time to relax (a little).

I never told you about my adventures last Friday. I shot with a crazy cool girl named Anastacia. Not only is she strikingly beautiful, but she’s adventurous and sexy as heck. We wanted to do some uninhibited implied shots on the beach, so we decided to trek Blacks clothing option beach in La Jolla. And for being a gray day with crappy weather and no sun, we got some AMAZING shots.

Quite honestly, this is the only one I have to show to prove how awesome our shoot was. But there are many more. (just a side note, this photo generated something like 25 comments in the matter of just a few days on my Model Mayhem profile…I guess people like it. :) )But Anastacia rocks.

Okay, so the rest of the story…in order to get to the clothing optional part of the beach, you have to trek down a paved road from this residential area and then about a mile or so down the beach. It seriously is a walk. And the road is crazy steep too. So anyway, we got done shooting and saw where the “other” way to get down to the beach was. There are a few ways to get to that part of the beach, and one of them is this STEEP (and I mean STEEP) trail and stairs that someone created. And I kid you not when I say it’s treacherous. And steep. Did I mention that? So we decided that we would try hiking up that way instead of walking a mile back down the beach and then walking up the paved road. Big mistake. First of all, this hike up the make shift trail is steep. I don’t think I mentioned that yet. We had to stop several times because of running out of breath and my legs feeling like jello. At least the view was breathtaking. :) Anastacia is from Colorado, so her lungs are fine. :) But wow…it was amazing when we made it to the top! I felt like I was going to die, but I didn’t. However, I seriously felt like dying when I realized that our cars were WAY far away from where the trail spit us out. After hiking that long hike, I didn’t feel like walking anymore…but we ended up walking a couple miles or so back to our cars. I tell you, it was interesting to say the least. We were both tired and wet, and desperate enough to start calling friends to see if anyone could take us to our cars…we were beaten down, but not out. As a matter of fact, it was nice getting to bond a little…would have been better if I wasn’t so exhausted…but it was still cool. But dude, the pictures were worth it!

On Saturday, of course, Tara and Aleck got married. Saturday was pretty much awesome.

And Sunday…was pretty much awesome too. A buddy, Mike Crouch, called me up and asked if I’d like to help out him and his partner, Jon, with a calendar shoot they were doing. I said, “heck yes!” and drove out to this awesome house in east country…complete with spa and infinity pool in the back yard. It was a grueling job setting up lights in the smoldering heat…but easily forgotten when you realize you are basking in the smoldering hotness of 10+ bikini models. ;) I captured some pretty awesome frames (which I can’t share until the calendar comes out, of course…so stay tuned…and buy a calendar ). I also got to meet some pretty awesome girls too…they were ALL sweethearts and I hopefully will be shooting more with all of them soon. I also got to shoot alongside two of the COOLEST photographers ever. Jon and Mike definitely get two thumbs up as being two of the coolest guys. I’m looking forward to shooting more with them in the future too.

And that brings us to today. It’s ending on a frustrating note…but what can you do?