Okay, we’re super busy this week with shoots. So I’m just gonna post a few teasers for y’all. If I type any more, I won’t get to eat before our wedding this afternoon

So we had a little session down in Laguna yesterday with Holden and Rebecca, who are getting married next month. The surf was monstrously high for Laguna, and there were legions of surfers out enjoying what must have been 10 foot waves.

Which meant that there were only small sections of beach with dry sand. So we got a little wetter than we planned, a little quicker than we planned:

Here’s also a little photo of me shooting in the water:

And the resulting shot:

Holden and Rebecca were very easy to shoot, and we’re going to make even more kickass photos for them on their wedding. We’re looking forward to it, guys!

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On a side note, (WARNING, photographer geek-speak soapbox rant ahead!) I still love what you can do with a 50mm lens. We finally broke down and bought a 70-200mm f/2.8 IS this week, because there are times when some long glass really does come in handy. I know that for most wedding and portrait photographers, this is THE lens. The shallow depth of field, the compression of space, the flexibility of framing – yes they all make it easy to get shots like the third one above. But it always “feels” more cold and detatched with that super-compressed perspective. It’s like there’s no context for the photo, which can be nice, but the images always end up looking like little slices of emotion floating in space, rather than pieces of real life. It was a little bit awkward for me yesterday, shooting with that lens, because I just don’t see the world in telephoto most of the time. Just doesn’t feel right to me.

The last photo, with Rebecca on Holden’s back, was shot with a 50. And there’s something about that middle focal length, for me, that has a wonderful psychological immediacy to it. It puts you, the viewer of the photo, right there with them – both physically and psychologically. It just “feels” a little more immediate to me. The first and third photos were shot with the 70-200, and the last one was shot with the 50. Look back and forth between them – they really do “feel” different.

Yes, you have to work a lot harder to rock a 50 – any monkey with a camera can make nice frames with a tele zoom – but the results, to me anyway, are worth it. Instead of standing on the beach and just zooming the lens, you have to move with your subject, running backwards, crouching, jumping, etc. And because of that involvement, that interaction, the last photo just feels so much more real and in-your-face than the stuff shot with the long glass. Maybe it’s just me, because I only know one or two other photographers that share my thoughts on normal-length prime lenses, but I see it. Which is why I usually just bring the 50 along for portrait shoots. It just plain works, and you’ll have to pry my 50mm f/1.4 from my cold, dead hands.

It’s been a while. I spent many of my college days on road trips to a surreal little section of the California desert called the Salton Sea. Formed by mistake during the building of the California Aqueduct, developers at the Salton Sea once had hopes of transforming this huge salt water body into a booming resort community.

Instead, something went wrong along the way, and whats left is an eerie string of half-abandoned towns, mostly boarded-up sheds and burnt-down mobile homes dotted along the water’s edge. It gets a little more derelict every time I visit. “Our Place Saloon,” where I had a beer with my friend Tim last time, was closed down on this trip. The next bar was a few miles down the road, in another town, and I’m pretty sure was basically someone’s home.

It’s always loomed large in my mind just because, as someone who’s grown up in Southern California, the whole area represents something of a giant question mark. In an area where driving a C-Class Benz isn’t really extravagant at all, and where a half-mil barely buys a two bedroom townhome, it’s hard to imagine that places like the Salton Sea actually exist. And that people actually live there (albeit not many). It’s like a time capsule of failed ambitions and plans gone wrong. And it makes one wonder why Palm Springs, just a little ways down highway 111, is a playground for the rich and a vacation spot for former presidents, while the Salton Sea is a rotting shell of civilization, dying a little every day. It’s probably the damned golf.

Anyway, this past weekend, we took a little mini-vacation to Palm Springs, as it was our last weekend off until sometime in November. Chenin had never been to the Salton Sea, but she’d seen pictures. And since just about everything in Palm Springs was closed until October, we drove on out there. It was every bit as weird as I remembered, and Chenin finally understood my fascination with the place. Unfortunately, it was also 100 degrees and stinky as hell (sometimes the Salton Sea can really reek like a big rotting fish). So we didn’t stay long. We DID at least walk down to the water’s edge at Salton Sea Beach, where the “sand” is actually a sprawling carpet of fish bones. I snapped a couple shots with my little point n shoot, and really liked this one:

If you want to see more photos from the area, check out the personal work section of our site – it’s got some stuff from trips out there a few years ago.