Ben and Marianna’s (sort of) Big Fat Greek Wedding

Posted on June 27, 2008

Ben and Marianna had a gorgeous wedding at The Magnolia Hotel in downtown Houston. Marianna’s family is greek, and Ben’s family is Italian, so it was a very cool blend of both culture’s traditions, and lots of crazy dancing! I loved it! Much of the food was greek-inspired, and it was excellent! Here are a few of the pictures from their big day. To see more, check out their slideshow!

PS- I’ve been making a habit of posting 20+ pics from each wedding, so I’m compressing the images a little more. Let me know if they start to look bad on your screen!

Sarah Beth and Nathan’s Wedding at Minute Maid Park

Posted on June 19, 2008

Ok, I’m back from Vacation, and I’ve still got one more Hawaii post to make, but first I’m finishing up some of the weddings I shot before I left.

Sarah Beth and Nathan had an awesome wedding. The girls started the day with brunch at the Ashland House restaurant, while the guys met up at Discovery Green park to hang out, play baseball, and do other generally manly things. Their wedding was at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, and their reception was on the club level of Minute Maid Park, complete with baseball guest favors, popcorn machines, and traditional baseball game food. It was awesome! They put so much effort into ever little detail. To show everything here would make the post way too long (as it is, I could only narrow it down to 27!). Thanks guys for letting be a part of this amazing event!

Check out their slideshow HERE!

Maui: Road to Hana Part 2

Posted on June 11, 2008

Here are some shots from our second trip down the Hana Highway.

And they weren’t kidding….

In the nook of this bay is Red Sand Beach. A cool semi-secluded beach in Hana, with, you guessed it, red sand. It is also apparently a topless beach, as we found out. Sorry, no pictures of that. Gotta keep it PG.

This looks like a scene from Jurassic Park.

Maui: Zipline!

Posted on June 11, 2008

Here are some shots from the zipline tour we took the other day. Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to bring my real camera, so I had to use my little cannon point-and-shoot, which I love, but it just isn’t the same…

Kacie took this self portrait while on the “zipper-lifter”. It’s like a ski lift that brings you up the mountain while sitting in your harness.

This is “Line Number 3″. The longest zip line in Hawaii. It was awesomely awesome. Almost 2000 feet long, and super fast.

When Kacie came in on Line 3, she almost slid back out onto the line, which obviously would make her stuck out there. Then she’d be what they call a “pineapple”. They would have to throw this bag of rope out to her (called the pineapple bag) and reel her back in. Fortunately our guide reached out just in time and grabbed her harness.

That’s right, a real Suisse Army Pinzgauer. This is what they used to move us around the course if it was too far to hike.

Sorry these are kind of boring. I did get some video on my little Canon– maybe I’ll try to put that up later.

Maui: Starry Night

Posted on June 10, 2008

Because of the little light pollution here, there are some amazingly starry nights. Two nights ago I went out to do some experimenting and see if I could capture the scene. I was blown away! I found out that when using a long enough exposure, and a moderately high ISO, my camera was far more sensitive than my eyes. Check it out.

Shooting data:
D3, Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8
14mm
f/2.8, 30sec
ISO 1600

This is the same shooting data as above, but at ISO 800. This is more true to what you could actually see with the naked eye.

Maui: Road to Hana

Posted on June 6, 2008

On this day we left early in the morning to take the Road to Hana. Hana is a city on the North-Eastern most point of the island. The road you take to get there is 40 miles of incredibly narrow and winding roads through the rain forrest, climbing up into the mountain, then dipping down to the coast and back up again. Along the road there are wonderful places to stop and take in the view, or after short hike, see water falls, natural swimming holes, and other beautiful things. Unfortunately this is the dry season, so many of the waterfalls were more like water trickles. Also, many of the hikes take you through private land. Many land owners don’t care, but some have started to put of fences and no-trespassing signs to discourage tourists from tromping across their land. It works some of the time. Photographically, we came to a lot of the sites at the worst time of the day: high noon. We hit some on the way back that evening, in better light, and got some nice shots though. Also, we had other in our caravan, so I didn’t want to slow everyone down too much. Next week Kacie and I plan on going again by ourselves, and later in the day, so we can get some really sweet shots. Here are some of the keepers from this trip.

Can you spot the tourists???

Kacie and I in the bamboo forrest, on one of our hikes.

The road was filled with these very narrow, century-old bridges. The state would like to replace the bridges, but in order to do it with federal funding they have to widen them to two lanes, and the locals won’t let that happen. The bridges actually felt pretty safe, except that on many you can’t see who is coming around the corner and a head-on collision seems imminent.

Getting some close-ups on the lava rocks

We’re beginning to learn that the locals REALLY don’t like tourists. Especially on this side of the island. Several times we were laughed at, glared at, or flicked-off just because we were tourists. We weren’t even doing anything obnoxious, they could just tell because we were driving rental cars. While at the beach one day our jeep (and two others) had beer poured all over the inside. I’m really not impressed, especially considering that tourism is by far the primary industry here. Somehow I don’t think the locals would like it if we all stopped coming and pouring money into their economy. There would go their maintained roads, beaches, and their livelihoods. Ok, enough ranting.

It’s kind of amazing how much vegetation here grows right out of the rocks. Here the roots of a large tree are intertwined in a large pile of rocks.

Maui day 2

Posted on June 5, 2008

Ok, so I’m running a couple days behind, but hey, it’s my vacation! I don’t have a lot of really interesting photos from Monday because we spent most of it lounging around on the beach. I did get a couple good grabs, though.

Kacie grabbed this shot of me while I was boogie boarding. Waaaait fooor iiittt…..

Then along came the local. I taught him everything he knows.

This is the beach we were on.

Water crashing into nearby rocks. A moment later me and my camera got soaked. Thank you Nikon for weather-proofing.

More to come! Tuesday: driving through the rain forrest on the Northeast side of the Island. Wednesday: zip-line-ing!

More Maui pics coming soon…

Posted on June 4, 2008

… I promise. I just haven’t had a good chance to go through and pick out my keepers to put up on the blog. Probably late tonight, which will be early in the morning for you guys on the mainland. Have a great Wednesday!

Maui day 1

Posted on June 2, 2008

Today was a great day. Kind of lazy, but great. We didn’t do too much exciting other than a short excursion to west Maui to see the ‘”blow hole”. A hole about 2 feet in diameter that shoots ocean water 75 feet into the air. Then we did a little off road exploration in the Jeeps, which I’m pretty sure is against our rental agreement… Anyway, here are some fun shots I did grab today.

This was the blow hole. I found that a couple minute climb to the very slippery area downwind of the hole gave you a really cool rainbow after the water shot into the air. If you’re patient enough, you get to see the rainbow and the beginning of the next “blow”.

Some cool rain clouds near an adjacent island.

Kacie wasn’t trying to be melodramatic I just caught her when she wasn’t looking.

Me breaking my rental agreement.

On the way back up from the beach to the house, there were some really cool storm clouds gathering over the mountain. I just stuck my camera up out of the jeep while driving and grabbed this shot. I’m really hoping for a good lightening storm while I’m here…

Thanks for looking and come back tomorrow for more!!!

ps- For you photographers, all the above shots were taken with my D300, not my D3. It is quite a capable camera, and really ideal for traveling because of the smaller size (although I brought both). I was shooting with the Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 all day, mostly in Aperture Priority or Manual mode.

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