Birthday Party with the sea sharks

"Sea Sharks" was Owen's 5th year birthday party theme this year. I always get so excited to shoot birthday party because it's always filed with lots of laughter and surprises.
I've been photographing birthday parties for Owen's family for about three years now. Each party was fun and filled with fun details even when mommy was pregnant with his younger sister.
This year's big surprise was the Aquarium of the Pacific! Nice ladies from the Aquarium of the Pacific brought the baby sharks and the starfishes for Owen and his guests. They are too many fun photos to choose from but here are few of my favorites. I will upload the slideshow later!

but I don't think it impressed Owen that much

playing games
Adam was so great with kids! -look how serious Owen looks!
So cute~~~
Jump for fun was a big hit!- I wanted to jump in with the kids but I was afraid my lens would hurt them.

Older brother Everett
Princess Addison

Happy Mother's Day!

Google Analytics tells me that I have increasing number of visitors daily!
I can see that my friends from Sendai, Japan are reading my blog. How cool is that? I e-mail them as often as I could but this way they can see what I am up to pretty regularly. That is enough for me to continue to write on this blog even though it really scares me because my writing in English isn't perfect. It's little frustrating for me at times because I can write pretty well in Korean. I used to win national essay competitions as a student. So bear with me if my writing isn't perfect or not so entertaining. I promise you it will get better. Thank you everyone who has visited my blog either by accident or by referrals. Please come back to read more and make comments. Everyone is giving away something on their blog to thank their blogger friends so I am going to give away something.
Mother's day is around the corner and I would like to giveaway, one family portrait session for free. All you have to do is send me a little story about special "mother" you know of and if you can attach the photo of you with that special woman. I will have my mother pick the winner on Mother's day! I would love to inform the winner on Mother's day, but I am shooting a Sunday wedding so it will have to wait. *****As a prize You will receive a portrait session + favorite images on CD.*****

Let me tell you little bit about my amazing mother. Her name is Bona and she immigrated to United States in 1988 with her two children. In Korea, She worked as an esthetician since I was about 10 years old. She needed to get licensed again in the states so she got her license in 6months. I still don't know how my mother managed to go to school here in United States and got her license because she did not speak any English. She probably did impossible for us. She has been a small business owner since then. Recently, I have been complaining everyday how hard it is to manage business side of photography, but my mother has been doing this for 20years all by herself. I am so proud of her and I am so thankful everyday that God allowed me to be born as my mother's daughter. She raised me to be strong and she taught me to share. She turned 60 years old last year so we created this family portrait with the help of my tripod. LOL We have fronzen faces, but she displays this photo at her shop and point it out to her customers saying "My family, my daughter is a good photographer!" I hope I make her very proud one day. Like making the list of American photo's top ten best wedding photographers in the world will just do that. I love you mom!

Are you equipped for this season?

I found this image of me that was taken by my friend back in 2004 and I had a good laugh.
I promised that I will try to post something for many aspiring photographers out there so here is my very first attempt. I still consider myself as an aspiring photographer so it will be mostly about the lessons that I learned as I was starting out and something I picked up from watching other great photographers for past 5 years. There are many useful forums online nowadays, so I am not going get too technical with my entries. I hope you find it useful somehow.

So my very first post title is
#1 Shoot light
Shooting with minimum gear on yourself gives you mobility. This also allows you to focus on one thing and one thing only while you are on the job. That is to capture true moments. A good photographer captures the moments as the day unfolds.

Can you see the amount of gear that I have on me here? I was second shooting for my friend that day so I believe I had less on me. LOL !!! This Wedding was held in mid summer afternoon at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Greystone Mansion and Park offers many beautiful location to shoot, but the ceremony was at noon so we chose to use fill flash. But I probably did not need mighty Quantum Turbo power pack. (I will elaborate on fill-flash on another posting) When you are new in this industry it is nice to be over prepared then not prepared. And please bring your back up gears and leave them in the car safely. At the time we were new and we weren't able to instantly check what we were shooting with film cameras, so we equipped ourselves with everything we had then. Even now, I always bring my light meter with me even if I don't use it.

Here Tammie is wearing;

Nikon F100 with Nikkor ED 24-120mm f/3.5

Nikon N80 with Nikkor 85mm f1.8

Quantum Turbo battery pack with SB-80 Speedlite

and think I am wearing another not so fancy belt purse for films.

I think having two camera bodies on yourself as you shoot wedding is generally a good idea. Especially, if you are shooting alone. We can now just switch ISOs on digital cameras but I still do at times because I can quickly switch my lenses this way. I now have a cool Shootsac, so I try to go to my job in style now.

I am not a big fan of long lenses. Don't get me wrong, I own one and I love milky blurred look ,but I find that I don't get it out much unless I am shooting at outdoors where I have a lot of room to move around. I am strong and I can lift heavy things pretty well.( I move house furniture all by myself) But I am only 5'4" and having heavy gears on me for 10 hours is really hard on my body so I came up with a solution . That is to shoot with a fast prime lens. I can still get "bokeh" ( means blurred in Japanese also means demantia and senile- can you see the relations here?) and gain my mobility back. Prime lenses are now very popular among wedding photographers. Using a prime lens means that you need to zoom yourself in and out instead of a lense. This also challenges you to be more creative with your composition. Hey, I can always use more cardio! so this works for me.

Here are list of some good prime lenses to have: I will just list Canon lenses here. If you are on budget or own a different system you can just take notes of the length of lenses (mm) and the brightness of the lens (f-stops) then get similar items that fits your budget. I own few Tamron lense for traveling and I highly recommend them.

Canon EF 24mm f 1.4L

Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 or on big budget 50mm f/1.2 L

Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 or on big budget 85mm f/1.2 L II

Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro (my favorite lens along with 50mm f/1.4)

Canon EF 135 f/2L

Please feel free to leave comments or e-mail me with questions!

Little office update: with extra Ram added to my PC. It's not flying but it's working fine. I've decide to maintain current condition until I finish editing all the images for my website. Andy is dying to build new PC for me, but I can't afford to not have computer for few days!