Coors Field Engagement Session | Denver Engagement Session | Tiffany & Michael - Part 1

Tiffany & Michael's Engagement Session - Part 1 - Coors Field. 

When Tiffany & Michael chose Coors Field as their first location for their engagement portraits I was ecstatic! I absolutely love when my clients choose fun locations for their sessions.  Tiffany's dad grew up with the third base coach of the Colorado Rockies, and was able to get us in without a fee.  Since the Rockies were at Spring training in Arizona when these were photographed, we had full run of the place. 

Vacation - Prosper, TX

I'm on vacation this week in Texas at my parents house.  I came to bring my two little doggies here for their three month summer vacation while we are in Germany in May.   We decided that we'd rather not board them for the three weeks we are gone - so my parents offered to take them - only downside is that we had to drive them down to Texas and will be dogless for April & June.   They will have lots of land to run and play and even people to crawl in bed with.

My parents just got a puppy a week before I showed up so they will be living in the dog house with 4 dogs.  I'm going to see If I can get a photo of all four dogs together before I head out.

I had to wear out little miss Mattie in order to get her to sit still for photos.  We are trying to teach her to sit still in your lap but she's like a little alligator and her mouth is open just looking for anything to chew on.

 

Mattie adores her big brother Jake and he is in love with her even if it means getting chewed on. 

Houston Wedding Photography | Anna & Mauricio | Feb 26, 2011

Anna & Mauricio held their wedding at Holy Rosary Catholic Church with reception at the Houston Club in Houston, TX.  The day before the wedding they held a traditional Vietnamese Tea Ceremony at Anna's parents house. 



See Their Story:



Venders:

Ceremony: Holy Rosary Catholic Church
Reception: The Houston Club
Floral Designer: Kygan Nguyen
Cake Artist: Cake Affairs
Hair Salon & Makeup Artist: Salon Jori

Cows Gone Coconut - A Photo Story

Lindsay Karson started her gluten free cookie business, Greater Good Foods, LLC, in 2008 after struggling with her own dietary challenges the previous year.  In 2007, Karson found out she was allergic to gluten and also lactose intolerant.  These dietary challenges led her to explore other ways to make her favorite foods without using items she was allergic to.  Even with the success of her gluten free baking company, Karson was left wanting dairy free ice cream.  After successfully creating a tasty non-dairy ice cream using coconut milk, in 2010 she registered Over The Moo, a company dedicated to producing dairy free frozen desserts.  In 2011 she changed her business name to Cows Gone Coconut so she could trademark the name.

Karson currently sells her ice cream at the Denver Urban Homestead farmers market, Marczyks Grocery in Denver and is expanding to Lucky’s Grocery in Boulder.  The recipes are all hand crafted with most of the ingredients being organic and sweetened only with agave, coconut sugar and Colorado honey.  Karson mixes, dips, packages and delivers each and every pint by hand.

A Photo Story, Lindsay Karson

I am working on a photo story of small business owner, Lindsay Karson.  She owns a non-dairy frozen  dessert company - Cows Gone Coconut & teaches yoga .  I met Lindsay a couple weeks ago at a grand opening event for Samadhi Center for Yoga and I was just intrigued by her story, drive and inspirations.  I am lucky enough that she is letting me into her life for a couple weeks so I can photograph the things she does.

The Samadhi Center has an amazing room for their yoga classes and I was able to capture this image during Lindsay's 5AM Aquarian Sadhana held the first Sunday of every month.  The class is run by donation only.  Waking up at 4:30AM on Sunday morning to drive to yoga, isn't my cup of tea, however it was very peaceful, relaxing, and calming.  If I was a morning person or lived much closer this would be an uplifting way to start your day. 

 

Spring Fashion Ideas

The biggest question I get about photo sessions is "What should I wear?" In truth I can make any clothing selection work within a chosen background but there are definitely choices that work better than others.

In general do not wear clothing with large high contrast logos on them, any text on your shirt will be one of the first things you look at in your image, if it is a small pocket sized logo it is probably OK.  Try to have everyone stay in the same tonal range, i.e. everyone is wearing pastels and jeans instead of one person wears a black shirt and the other wears a white shirt. 

Thanks to PinkleToes For Photographers for these lovely clothing designs, can't you just imagine your photos done while wearing these -- amazing: I believe all these outfits came from Old Navy last year.

This last set is probably my least favorite, but it still works because one person is wearing a dark shirt with light colored pants and the other is the opposite so you are still balanced in the photograph.

Vietnamese Tea Ceremony, Houston, TX

As part of Anna & Mauricio's wedding they held a Vietnamese Tea Ceremony the day before.  I posted a whole gallery of images on my facebook page but I just LOVE this image.  When I was composing this image, I wanted it to show how elegant Anna looked in her dress and I think I nailed it. Check out the rest of their sneak peeks of the Vietnamese Tea Ceremony on my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/SharonArnoldiPhotography

New Logo & Branding

I'm proud to announce my new logo & new branding.  The blog was the first to get updated, while the website still in transition.  Hope you enjoy!

How To Photograph A Laptop In A Dark Room | Studio Tutorial

Its fun to get a behind the scenes look at how a photograph is produced.  There was no happy accident here, everything was controlled within the studio.  Thanks Sean for being my model.  The mood and thought behind this image was a student up late at night working on a project in the dark.

The Final Image:

How I got here: (Production shots taken with my iphone)

The final image is composed of 3 images, Shot 1, Shot 2 and a screen shot.

SHOT 1: 
In the first shot I used a ProPhoto strobe with a softbox for the main light source, which is placed slightly above & behind the laptop.  I chose a softbox to project soft light as to mimic light coming directly from the laptop screen.  Don't be fooled the shutterspeed in this image isn't slow enough to capture any light from the laptops screen. 

I used a tungsten light with a blue gel to light up the hands and give the face a little rim light.  You can see the touches the tungsten adds to the image when you look at Sean's left hand - at his knuckles.  I had to add a blue gel to the light to match the color of the light to the main light.  I could have used another strobe here instead of the tungsten light but I didn't have anything small enough to put back there.

I used a scrim as a bounce board to light up the right edge of the laptop.  This shows up much more in shot #2 but I wanted to have it placed correctly for the first shot.  It is about 3 ft from the laptop and it adds just enough punch without going overboard.

I used a 4x5 Camera with a Leaf back (digital back).  The camera is tethered to a different laptop and shows the photos as I shoot.  This allows me to see the entire final image on a large screen so I know what works and what doesn't.

SHOT 2:  
This shot uses the exact same setup except Sean isn't in the image.  I used a longer shutterspeed for this image.  The purpose for shot 2 is to get the keyboard as glowy as possible.  The keyboard from this image will be superimposed into the first image to maximize keyboard glow. 

SCREENSHOT:  
I did a screen shot on my desktop computer to superimpose onto the laptop's screen - I should have used the laptop because my desktop screen is much wider than the laptop screen so I had to delete a chunk of the middle of the screen so everything fit and looked normal.  In the end it looks fine.  I used the Photoshop Perspective & Warp tools to get the screen in there at the right angle.  I thought it would be silly to make it like Sean was editing the same image and looking online for Photoshop tutorials.

Hope you enjoyed this! Feel free to email or add comments if you have any questions.

Red Rocks Wedding Photography | MacKenzie & Dominic | 12/19/2010

As a Colorado wedding photographer I love it when I get the opportunity to photograph a winter wedding.  The thought of a bride in a beautiful white dress standing among a snow covered backdrop gets me overjoyed.

MacKenzie & Dominic chose to get married at the Chapel at Red Rocks in Morrison, CO.  We were hoping for a snowy backdrop but it just didn't happen - instead we had beautiful fall colors that played perfectly with the red ribbon on MacKenzie's dress.  Red Rocks Park is an amazing place to photograph anyone, let alone a beautiful bride.  I felt like I hit the jackpot on this one.  Colorado's famous blue sky came out and the color was so perfect against the natural earth colors of the rock.

After the ceremony we took pictures around the park then headed out to Maggiano's Little Italy in downtown Denver for celebration & dancing.

Congratulations MacKenzie & Dominic! 

Watch Their Slideshow:

 

Venders: 

Photography: Sharon Arnoldi Photography

Hair / Makeup: Rebecca J Salon

Florist: Flowers Forever Design

Cake Artist: Cake Heads Bakery

DJ: Rockcandy Professional DJ

How To Backup Your Images

Recently I've been asked by quite a few people what I use to backup my libraries of photos.  In reality I use multiple solutions, not just one.  I have 4 TB of storage on my main computer, 3 External Hard drives, Online Cloud Storage & I store DVDs of images at an off site location. 

Sound excessive? Its not. Mechanical hard disks WILL fail.  If you don't store anything off-site, what happens if your studio/house burns down or gets broken into? I don't ever want to have to explain to a client why I lost their images.

Here's the breakdown of my plan:

After I shoot, I do not erase my memory card until the images are downloaded to my computer and backed up to an external hard drive / indestructible thumbdrive.  If I am backlogged  - I might dump all the images onto Wuala (cloud storage)  just for safe keeping.  If I am not backlogged the images will get culled, edited and uploaded to Pictage as soon as possible.  Pictage provides a lifetime backup of your images - once I get my images to Pictage I feel much better, until then I can backup 80 GB onto my waterproof / fireproof USB thumb drives - made by LaCIE available on Amazon.com.


SERVICES I USE:

Wuala - (Cloud Storage) For Backup of shoots in 1 calendar year - this also gives me access to files from anywhere so if I go on travel and want to work on images & I forgot to transfer them to my laptop I have access.  Pretty sweet service. Its free to sign up and my referral link gives you an extra 1 GB free
( http://www.wuala.com/referral/33PMK55K5H66FK3JMHAJ)

Pictage -  (Cloud Storage) - Lifetime backup of all images uploaded into system.  Monthly fee to use Pictage.

Local & External Hard Drive Space: I use my computer to store 2-3 yrs of the most recent images, Raw & JPG files.  My external hard drive is an exact replica. I have a thing for LaCIE hard drives - some people hate them but I have had great success with them.

DVDs / Solid State Storage - At the end of each year I backup all shoots and mail them off to my parents house, boring I know and time consuming.  I'm waiting for solid state hard drives to become cheap then I will just have one for every year and mail it off.  Key to solid state hard drives are - no moving parts, yes they can still fail but failure is less likely.

So there you have it: for me to lose all my images: my house, my parents house, Pictage & Wuala would all have to crash at the same time - whats the probability in that?

Highlands Ranch Photographer {Newborn Twins}

Lainey & Parker at five weeks old! Mom & Dad are lucky to have such beautiful babies.  They were lots of fun to work with.  We were able to capture wonderful photos of each of them during the first shoot, but they were WIDE awake so it was really difficult to get a picture of them together without someone smacking the other with an arm or leg.  On the second day, brother was cooperative and sleepy and sister was wide awake but content!  In the end, it was all a success.  Watch their slideshow to see some of the outtakes, still super cute!

Miner Family Portraits at DeKoevend Park

When I arrived at DeKoevend Park for this family portrait session the temperature was 50 degrees, it was bright and sunny (and warm) I even took my coat off during the first half of the shoot.  But something happened while we were there and the temperature dropped almost 20 degrees - when I left my car said it was 32 degrees outside!!!  Poor miss Charlotte got mighty cold by the time we finished.

We also photographed her 4 - legged friends:

Family Portrait At Red Rocks Park In Morrison, Colorado

On the day of this family portrait session I woke up and thought that there must be a fire in the mountains because their was a thick haze covering the mountains.  I was really worried about the whole situation and as I drove from Highlands Ranch to Red Rocks I actively listened to the radio to figure out if something was going on.  When I got there the answer was "Fall Fog" and it really put my normally bright red rocks colors into a bit of a haze.

This was an original image from the shoot before any adjustments were made to the color:

 

This is an image in the same series after the reds were brightened to bring out the rock color

Denver Family Photographer - {Rice Family Session}

Have you ever chased around a 2 yr old trying to take their photo in a place full of exciting things? That is what this session was all about! But it was so much fun - we chased miss Eleanor up & down stairs, around and around back up and down the stairs - haha.  Eleanor was definitely the most active two year old I've photographed yet.  But by the end of the session she wanted me to carry her (probably all that running around) and offered to make me a burger once we found a kitchen! So cute!