Technically, about 45 days….but it’s been a crazy busy 45 days.  In addition to a lot of client work in my own city of Yellowknife, this past month or so has seen me travel to Mexico, St. Louis, and Toronto for various clients and speaking/teaching engagements, including as a mentor at the incredible yearly American photo event, After Dark, followed by a speech in Toronto for the Globe & Mail.  Oh, and I photographed perhaps the most important event of the year, too:  my little girl’s one year-old birthday party

In short, haven’t had a lot of blogging time.  Here – in no particular order – is why.

A wedding that truly had everything going for it. First, how can you go wrong getting married in Maui (the place where the couple got engaged a year earlier, see this blog post) at one of the nicest hotel properties in the world, the Grand Wailea, a Waldorf-Astoria resort that has no problem taking your breath away, with one of Alberta’s best rock bands, Shelbi, flown in for the occasion?

Every detail was thought of, planned, and executed perfectly. Details aside, the couple did what they were supposed to do: be ridiculously happy, in love, and enjoy and take in every moment. And the moments were many.

Some of my favourite destination wedding photography. But with shooting conditions like this, my job was easy.

Any wedding shot on New Year’s Eve is bound to be an avalanche of moments. Any wedding shot in my home city with a fun-lovin’ bride and groom that featured a trip onto the ice road, shooters at the Gold Range, cold, snow, ice, free-flowing champagne, Japanese tourists, Pilot’s Monument, sweet tunes, wild dancing, fireworks, and the Fire Department is, well, my end to 2012.

Highlights of the day, in 57 photos.

It’s a funny thing being a photographer: you just shoot. You’re not thinking about the shoot you are lined up to shoot the following week, or the shoot that you did last week – when you’re in the moment, camera in hand, subject in front of you (whether it be human, animal, still, or a wisp of passing light), you just think about making the shot at hand. You’re thinking about how a slight shift in angle, or a change of lens, can give you that image that unleashes the butterflies in your gut and causes a reaction in you. Because you know if an image excites you somehow, it’s bound to resonate with others.

I spent the last few days slowly going through my very large 2012 archive trying to pick out some of those images that gave me that feeling. It wasn’t easy as I shot a lot. By a lot I mean approximately 400 photoshoots. There were a lot of images that I liked, and many more that I didn’t. Not every image is a keeper. That’s okay….some of the best images come out of learning from the bad ones.

I’m sure I’m missing some of my favourites. I’m also sure that a couple of these may have been taken in 2011. It’s a hard thing to keep a handle on such a large library. But here is 100 images (and by 100, I really mean 113) from 2012 – or thereabouts – that resonated with me, across the many different forms of photography that I’m fortunate enough to shoot. I hope a few resonate with you.

Dave

PS – This is my final contest of 2012, too.  To enter?  Leave a comment below saying you were here and took a glance.  The winner gets a $250 gift certificate to be applied towards the print of your choosing.

When I wake up the morning of a client’s wedding, I only have one goal for the day:  to capture “the story” of the day as best I can.  How can I best capture the sights, the smiles, the tears…the emotional feel of the day in way that feels authentic?

For this reason, with a few rare exceptions I make a point of spending 12 hours with the bride and groom the day of a wedding.  Exhausting?  To be sure.  Photographing a wedding is a marathon day of standing, crawling,  and directing – all the while usually freezing or sweltering (the bulk of my weddings are either in Yellowknife or in warmer destinations) – and doing so while maintaining your professionalism and smile through the whole day.  The smile part, I find, is easy.  The exhaustion part not so much.  I usually come home drained…but elated.

How do you best tell the story of a day?  I rarely come into a wedding with a single specific idea for an image:  I rather prefer to let the day pull me in different directions and react as an observer, and a documentor, accordingly.  There’s always some degree of posed photos:  it’s not a bad thing.  Everyone wants photos of themselves and various groups within a wedding, smiling into the camera.  And the smiles are real.  But the magic, I find, in a wedding is in the moments.  The authentic moments.  And if you come into a wedding with too many preconceived images in your brain, I find you miss the moments.  You miss the images that matter.

Here’s the most recent “wedding story” that I’ve photographed, a wonderful wedding on the shores of the Pacific at the Pueblo Bonito Resort in charming Mazatlan, Mexico.  The bride and groom, Melissa and Jamie, brought to the wedding day the only thing that I request as a photographer of my clients:  themselves, real, happy, and in the moment. Hope you enjoy their story.

I just wrapped up an excellent week spent “working” in Mazatlan, Mexico, photographing the wedding of a great northern couple who decided to get away from it all for their big day.

Over these past couple of years I’ve started to book in anywhere from 3-to-5 destination weddings per year – and yes, I have nothing in the world to complain about with gigs like these.  I like sun.  I like water.  I like listening to the screams of joy from my little ones when yet another wave crashes over their backs as they lay on their bellies in the shallow surf.  I have the best family a man can ask for, and they’re very accepting in the time I spend away from them for my artistic pursuits; on the flip side, I try to bring them with me as much as practicalities (and our bank account) can allow.  These trips for me are technically work, but when you work a job that never feels like work – even when you’re shooting in a -40C climate – work trips like this are nothing but fun.

Fun, and full of friendships and connections with people.  Often I go down to these weddings knowing very little about a client, other than a couple of short meetings leading up to the date of travel.  But as soon as I land, you find yourself bonding to the people who’ve trusted you to travel great distances with them.  You hang out.  You meet their families.  Their friends end up holding your baby in the pool.  After a day or two, your clients become acquaintances.  After a week, you feel like you’ve known them for a very long time.

Although I often try to sneak in a lot of landscape photography when I travel to and fro, this week I concentrated almost exclusively on people.  My “own people” (my family), my wedding couple, and even the friends of the wedding couple (I ended up doing two portrait sessions aside from the wedding with people involved in the wedding).  In short, a great week, with great memories.  And some great people.

55 moments from a uniquely northern “Scottish” wedding.

I don’t normally have wedding images processed for about two-to-three weeks following a wedding but given that it’s Halloween weekend, I thought I would sit this Sunday afternoon and post up a taste of a great day yesterday.

After shootings dozens and dozens of weddings, very little surprises me. I really enjoy photographing weddings, and I love creativity, so when someone blends the two and asks me to photograph something a little outside-the-box, it’s my kind of day. So when Tiffany and Matt came to last year to ask about photographing their Gothic-themed, Halloween weekend wedding I knew I was up for a fun challenge.

They had every detail planned, and I have to say…the event was incredibly classy. Actually one of the nicest done weddings I’ve ever seen. Hope you enjoy the preview.

Hello from the road.  Which, this summer, is par for the course.

I always have people ask me “do you mind traveling so much?”  Yes….but mostly no.  I love travel.  Correction, we love travel – meaning me and my little family pack .  Sure there are times when you wish you could sleep a little longer – although I’m finally getting over my long-standing inability to sleep in an airplane – and there are times when the cafeteria food up at a job site makes you yearn for your wife’s great homecooking (see how I slid in that suck-up?), but all-in-all, I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love it.  I am always thankful for the travel opportunities I have had, many of which I’ve been able to take my family on:  I fully realize that most people don’t have the same opportunities and I try my best to never take that for granted.

Still….even I thought I was slightly on the insane side with this current bout of travel.  Two weddings in three days – a whole country apart.  And if you include the wedding I photographed just a few days earlier in Yellowknife, it’s really three weddings in a week almost coast-to-coast-to-coast apart.  That’s a whole lot of kilometres.

But it all went brilliantly.  I slept on airplanes.  Conditions and great couples on both coasts (one in Vancouver, the other in Cape Breton) were perfect, and I had several great days of photography…and even managed to sneak in a family visit on both coasts, and some additional shooting on the side.

Over and out – time to catch a plane back home….and to catch some ZZZs.

But first:  here, then, is my weekend in chronological order:

A visual tour through a March wedding in the tropical heat of Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Huge congratulations to Ainslie and Brendan…beautiful wedding, and had a blast “hanging” with you guys for the week!