It turned out to be a rather slow beginning of the wedding season, so I’ve found time to do some travelling, and more excitingly, get a bike! From very little prior experience, I woke up one morning with a bike on my mind… 2 weeks later I was trained and licensed, and another week later I had a brand new 2007 Honda Shaddow 600: best thing I’ve ever bought. My new cruiser has a little over 400 miles in the 3 weeks I’ve had it, and it is a blast to ride around, and affordable. It accelerates like a corvette and gets 60mpg, so at this point I look back wondering what took me so long to get a bike.
Click through the gallery for a couple shots of my new transportation

Cheers,
cmM

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This has been coming for a while now. My portfolios haven’t received much attention lately because I’ve had a website update stuck on my head for a good part of this year. What’s coming is a simpler interface with, here it comes,…. larger images. (actually, it’ll be a more dynamic portfolio so they’ll vary in size). Either way, some real eye candy on the way.

On a different note, I’m making a radical change to my pricing structure. No significant increase or decrease, just a complete obliteration of my old approach.

Big month!

Cheers,
cmM

This past weekend I had the opportunity to shoot a rather unique wedding. The wedding took place at the groom’s residence (both the bride and groom are public figures, him being a former professional athlete and current coach and writer, and the bride being an actress/model - reason for which, unfortunately, no images along with this post - special contractual obligations). So, the wedding started under the pretense of a dinner party (note: none of the guests had any idea of the real reason for the gathering). A couple hours into the party an announcement was made by the groom to unveil the true meaning of the day, and uncover the previously hidden altar on the patio and introduce the bride. It was a big surprise, to say the least, for everyone to see the bride walking down the stairs in her wedding dress. All in all, it was a pretty cool thing to take part of, I very much enjoy weddings that are even a little out of the norm every now and then.

Cheers,
cmM

So what is the difference between the Wedding Photojournalist Association and the Artistic Guild of the Wedding Photojournalist Association? Short answer: standards - neither higher, nor lower, just different. While they are both related, the WPJA is theoretically the equivalent of raw photojournalism, and on the other side, the [AG]WPJA is photojournalist with a fine art touch added to it. When I first was accepted and joined the WPJA the [AG]WPJA did not exist, only after a while did it make its way around. This is a much better fit for me as a photographer, because, even though I have a predominantly photojournalistic approach to my photography (there are the rare exceptions, but those are usually not by choice), I almost always manipulate the images in post processing. To elaborate on that, I never ever alter scenes (I don’t change skies, I don’t move people around, because that would change the reality of a moment captured into a big lie), but I do enhance what is there (I will increase the contrast in the sky if will add to the drama, I will convert a lot of my images to duotones, I will continuously experiment with color and tonal corrections, and so on). Going back to my WPJA history, when my membership expired I decided to try to become a member of the Artistic Guild of the WPJA. I filled out the application then waited to for an answer. I got an e-mail just a couple days after my application submission (which was surprisingly fast) form Joseph Victor Stefanchik (very reputable wedding photographer), who did my portfolio review and granted my acceptance. If JVS says I’m worth a dime, I must be!

Cheers,
Cristian

I took a weekend off from city life and went to Wisconsin for a couple of days to catch some white bass; this time of the year the bass move up the river from the lakes to spawn. They aren’t particularly big (they don’t grow as large as large/small mouth bass, or striped bass), but they’re still fun to catch, and they’re in large numbers. Between me, my brother, and my girlfriend (yes, she fished, but we had to do the baiting and removing of the poor fish from her hook ) we caught around 100 of them in one evening and the next day. Pretty good catch

Click through the gallery for some shots (all taken with my trusty ol’ digital Rebel and 35mm f/2.0)

Cheers,
-Cristian

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I don’t shoot much fashion anymore, but here is a fashion show I attended last Thursday to show my support to my fashion designer girlfriend Beata Wodziak. She, along with a bunch of other fashion students from The Illinois Institute of Art had their collections showcased. I though the show was an overall success, and some of the items were quite brilliant. Check out my showcase of objectively shot images from FAME 2008 fashion show (no room for subjectivity in runway photography, unfortunately

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