Hello everyone. I just filled all the spots for my Costa Rica photo tours this year, and many of the other photo tours are almost full as well.  I wanted to let you all know what was available for the remainder of this year and 2025, so you don't miss out! Costa Rica Rain Forest - June 2024 - SOLD OUT! Peru - July 2024 - SOLD OUT! San Francisco - September 2024 - 5 Spots remaining Indochina (Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) - October 2024 - 6 spots available Costa Rica Rain Forest - November 2024 - SOLD OUT! African Safari in Tanzania - January 2025 - 6 Spots Available Greece - June ..read more

A couple of weeks ago I took some really special senior portraits. They were special for a number of reasons. First of all, I was going to be taking the photos down in Southern California, including spending a whole day in Disneyland looking for good portrait locations. And secondly, the images were of my girlfriend's daughter, Hannah, who works at Disneyland and is about to graduate from college.  We were down visiting my cousin and her husband who have an amazing place right on Laguna Beach, so we thought we would take advantage of that time and location to get some nice photos for Hann ..read more

Last week I traveled up to Sacramento to the studios of FOX 40 for my first live TV interview. I have done plenty of pre-recorded video pieces, but never done one live. As it turns out, it was a lot of fun. After NBC ran the piece on me last month, I received an email from a producer at FOX 40, who had seen the video, asking me if I would come up for an interview on their Studio40 show. Due to my travel schedule, we had to wait 3 weeks to make it happen, but last Wednesday we got it done. This is what it looked like behind the scene. I was supposed to be on air for 4 minutes, but they en ..read more

I woke up the other day and turned on the news. One of the big stories of the day was the controversy about a modified image of Kate Middleton and her family. Being a photographer, I was highly intrigued by this story.  By now, most of you have seen the image. At first, people were talking about one or two areas of the image that were manipulated. Now that a couple of days have passed, experts have located many areas of the photo that have been retouched. But my question is: Why is this such a big deal? I can tell you that every family portrait I have ever taken has been retouched to on ..read more

Going to photography trade shows is always a lot of fun for me. I love being surrounded by other creative people, trading stories, sharing ideas and just hanging out.  Of course, the pandemic stopped all of these for years, and even when they did return, the shows were not what they used to be. I am hoping that the Wedding and Portraits Photography Expo (WPPI) in Las Vegas next week brings a resurgence of attendance and energy.  One of the things I love most about these shows is meeting with many of my sponsors and seeing the new gear. And yes, I will be talking to them about fu ..read more

I am writing this blog at 4am, since I am not able to sleep. Yesterday I spent the first half of the day at a funeral. Not for someone who was elderly and had lived a good long life, but for an 18 year old who's life ended way too soon. I have photographed for this family for more than 10 years and it has really hit me hard. This is now the third kid that I have photographed who has past away, and all three of those happened in the most tragic ways.  I am not writing this to depress all of you, I am writing this because, as I processed images for the funeral it reaffirmed how important th ..read more

I recently had a client ask my why I needed to retouch their images. She said "why didn't you shoot them correctly in the first place?" I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback by this question. But as much as I felt defensive, I also was very prepared to answer this question. My answer to her was quite simple, and went something like this: * The goal of the photographer is to get a really nice photo that is 90% complete. But almost every photo needs some sort of retouching. Whether it is removing fly-away hairs, exit signs, those rogue microphones in the corner of the frame, or some other dis ..read more

To celebrate the 6 month countdown to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, NBC has started their marketing machine to get everyone excited about the upcoming Games. As part of that campaign, NBC sent a reporter down my way about 3 weeks ago and interviewed me for a couple of hours to create a profile on me for the 6pm news.  That piece ran on Friday evening as me and my friends watched at home. I was not nervous during the interview process, but I was a little nervous about how they would edit the video and what they would say. As it turns out, I think they did a nice job with the segme ..read more

Today is the 6 month countdown to the Opening Ceremony of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. For those of you who have followed my journey through the last seven Olympic Games here in the blog, I am excited to share yet another experience with you all. And this one should be amazing! As always, my goal is to share the behind-the-scenes of the Games as well as my daily photos and the stories behind the images. We are now six months from the start of the Olympics, but the planning process has been going on for almost two years now. Let me tell you a little bit about that process and some of th ..read more

As many of you know, I have been teaching photography all over the world for many years now, but I have done very few photo tours within the United States. After repeated requests I decided to start a photo tour of my home town, San Francisco, late last year. October tends to be the best weather in the city, so I picked that time for my tour.  Having never lead a tour in San Francisco, I did have reservations about where I should take people and how to handle some of the logistics. Obviously, I know the city inside and out, but I wanted to make sure that we could fit in all the best locat ..read more