My sons, Edmond and Corbin, decided that since dad always is taking pictures at weddings that they would try and bridge the gap between dad’s world of weddings and their world of Legos and created a fabulous, fun Lego Star Wars wedding. Sadly I’m still not sure who the bride and groom were in the Star Wars universe, but was happy to oblige them in shooting this strange wedding for them so their brilliance could be recorded for history and of course their infamy.

The bride and the groom walk down the isle during the Lego Star Wars wedding my sons put together yesterday. I’m not really sure who the bride is, but apparently the father of the bride in this Indiana Jones’ father. As you can see by the droids and the clone troopers that the guest list was a who’s who in the Lego Star Wars Universe.

Obi Wan Kenobi and Asajj Ventress take a long look at each other and are strange choice for best man and maid of honor for the Lego Star Wars bride and groom.

This is what the kids think I look like at a wedding. Though I don’t understand why they think I have a strange mustache, I have been known to wear black and wear a fedora. I must admit that if that camera was to scale it would weigh about 80 pounds. No wonder they put it on the tripod.

The Lego Star Wars bride and her father walk down the isle as clone troopers and droids look on during the ceremony.

A clone trooper snaps a picture during the wedding as the bride passes during the processional. This is a typical happening during a wedding that two dozen people will hold up there P&S cameras or phones to capture a nice out of focus fuzzy picture that they can cherish for all of five minutes before erasing it and buying a print from me.

Somehow the bride lost her father during the processional. It doesn’t have to make sense according to convention. It’s a little boys dream wedding, not a girl. Notice the lack of flowers. A little girl would never have dreamed this up unless she was settling for some parent’s basement dwelling Star Wars obsessed loser that she feels sorry for.

The groom waits for the bride at the alter as Obi Wan and some droid thing the kids made a ring bearer wait along side.

The bride and groom meet on the wedding day for the first time. I think the bride’s father was taken off and devoured by the Sarlacc beast or so the kids decided after much contention.

It was decided that Yoda was going to have to be the Lego Star Wars wedding officiant. I’m not sure what text he’s supposed to be holding their as I doubt the Jedi subscribe to any known religion that those of us on earth have heard of. The bride and groom clasp hands and ascend the stairs.

Asajj Ventress is asked multiple times by Yoda to put out her light sabre and turn the ringer off on her cell phone but she threatens him with a beheading so he continues the ceremony as if she wasn’t a heartless snake wench from a third rate backwards planet.

The two wait patiently as Yoda opens his Bible type thing and fumbles around for his notes and finally is able to begin the ceremony.

Love is in the air between these two nameless Lego Star Wars humanoids. Or in the words of Yoda, “Love him, you do? Love her, you do? Good, is it?”

And Yoda said, “Pronounce you man and wife, I do. Kiss the bride you do or do not. There is no try.”

Excitement builds as they hold their kiss long enough for me to run around the the other side of the wedding and get another shot from this angle. If only all of my couples where this inanimate.

The happy couple begins the recessional by not falling down the stairs.

Through the salute of several battle droids the bride and groom march happily to The Imperial March even though the choice of music was the cause of much contention among those guests being decidedly against the empires vicious rule of the galaxy. Those apposed to the empire would be promptly extinguished after the last of the wedding formal photographs.

It was a sign of goodwill that Obi Wan and Asajj Ventress walked together during the recessional. They were not happy about the seating arrangements and both were terribly unhappy with the placement of their table that was too far from the buffet.

R2-D2 and the unnamed ring bearer droid beep happily as they walk down isle during the recessional.

LEGO star wars wedding formal photographs

In many real world weddings I get a list of pictures to take after the ceremony. Sometimes the list consists of immediate family, the bridal party and sometimes grandparents and siblings. Sometimes the list consists of 30 shots of family that have no interest in being in pictures, but are bound by obligation to stand and smile or do their closest approximation of what they think is a smile while doing whatever they can do to not put down their drink. These formals from the kids’ Lego Star Wars wedding are an extreme collection of bizarre grouping that typify just how outlandish it can get.

This is the wedding party shot. Asajj Ventress is the aunt of the bride and Obi Wan is the groom’s 2nd cousin.

This is the wedding party shot sans the flower droid and the ring bearer. Asajj Ventress is the aunt of the bride and Obi Wan is the groom’s 2nd cousin.

The bride and groom with some distant relatives. This photo was requested by the grandmother of the bride who was not able to attend the wedding due to illness. No one wanted to be in this photo.

Visiting from the far off worlds of Gylfff and Stryllg, Toby and Tommy stand with the bride as the grooms clone trooper great uncle Harry and best friend clone trooper Floyd.

The officiant is a little confused about where to be during the photographs and which camera to look at.

This shot was much better of the bride and groom with the officiant, Yoda actually looking at the right camera and being in the right place.

During the formal pictures, Yoda’s head kept wanting to fall off. Do not be concerned as no Yoda’s were harmed during the making of this wedding.

I was able to slip myself and my camera into a photograph with the bride and groom. How often is it that you can be in photographs from a Lego Star Wars wedding? This pictures was shot by my assistant, the little green annoying guy from Jabba’s sail barge that got zapped by R2-D2. He’s not the best but he can move fast.

The bride and groom are pictured here with their godfathers. Mace Windu and Qui-gon Jin. The intergalactic Catholic Mafia references are more accurate than you know.

The bride and groom are pictured here with their favorite pets/droids/whatever.

Here is a fine image of a very proud Henry Jones standing next to his daughter and new son-in-law.

The cake was made by one of the finest bakeries ever threatened by Darth Vader on pain of death to create a ten foot wedding cake made from pixie dust and ground graphite. The taste was like nothing I’ve ever had before. I could see though walls after having a piece.

Another shot by my assistant of me shooting the bride and groom getting ready to cut the cake.

They still stood there nervously look at me in a confused manner before they finally felt ready to cut the cake.

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I did a little clinic for my friend Coral with some of the new lighting we’ve been doing on our shoots that make them pop more than ever. She’s a brilliant available light genius and can make images really look better than life, but has very little experience using her strobes. Hence the photography clinic in Medford, Ore. On a visit to the Oregon’s Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon, Coral found some former clients she had shot who volunteered to be our models for the day. We stuck with one location because half of us were suffering from food poisoning from this place, an awful dive along the Rogue River legendary for poisoning passing river rafters because it was the only game in town, but I digress. I think Coral had shot Daniel and Naomi’s wedding some time in the past, but that was never made clear to me because of the afore mentioned food poisoning and the fact that Coral is kind of all over the place at once when she talks. Did I mention the genius part? The pictures below are from our outing.

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I’ve become quite adept at adapting to situations. Weddings are no place for those who are not flexible. If you find yourself a wedding photographer one day and get upset when things don’t go your way perhaps you should continue on your journey to find your true calling. I’ve had many problems with my old strobes when used manually off camera. Firstly, I needed to fire them using pocket wizards which meant that I needed some sort of adapters from pocket wizard to Canon flash. The first adapters were $12 and worked 99% of the time, though they did decide to not work at a wedding which caused a little heart flutter for a moment until the adaptive genes kicked in and I found a solution quickly, quietly and without a fuss. After that episode I decided to buy the most expensive adapter made: $35 each. They fired 100% of the time but had a downside. The wire coming out of the adapter was easily torn out. By easily I do mean difficult for a normal person who is not pulling the adapter out of the camera bag full force. I broke one and lost one.

A new solution was forming in my mind when I saw someone on Flickr had done a mod to their Canon 580 flash which inserted a 1/8″ jack inside of the flash housing and soldered stuff inside the flash to achieve this. I was a little skeptical because the 550s I had were different than 580s. But I finally went to Fry’s, found the parts for $.99 each and started tearing apart a flash. After an hour and a half of testing and a hole drilled in the wrong place with the drill press, I figured it all out and had a shiny new adapter on the flash and everything soldered internally. The second flash took 20 minutes. I ran out of jacks at this point because I’d had o actually scrounge on the floor at Fry’s to even find the two I had bought. I’ll get more adapters soon and finish the project. I also was amused to find out that all the pocket wizards to is complete a circuit. $180 for a little radio receiver that just completes a circuit. I might have to invent my own pocket wizards in the future that are better, smaller and cheaper.

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I suppose this image that was captured by Christina at Melissa and Chris’ wedding really is a good example of how I was born into the wrong era. I think I was meant to be around in the ’40s when my hats were more appropriate. The hat has many uses including keeping me from getting cooked by the insane Texas sun and hides the retreat of my hairline toward the North Pole. It also can be used to hide my inevitable bad hair days.

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Megan and I did another shoot today to test out some more stuff with the beauty dish. It’s been a good many days that we’ve been able to shoot and hone these skills and the quality of what we’ve been able to shoot has gotten dramatically better since we began. We’d hoped to shoot outside today, but it was just too dang cold.

Megan brought a chair from her home to shoot and we had a lot of fun seeing how many weird positions she could twist herself into. She says this is the chair that she does all of her post in at home when she’s working on her own projects. What a weird chair to work in. I suppose my trusty sidekick would have a weird chair.

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Man the allergies are brutal this time of the year. Megan is my yard stick of allergies because she’s pretty quickly effected by whatever is blowing in the wind. I haven’t lived here long enough to know if I am dying or if it is just an allergy. She keeps me informed that I am not dying and it will all be alright if I can just make it until something isn’t growing in Texas.

She found this tree while attending an event at the convention center so we packed up everything and drove down to downtown for a little while for another experiment. It’s a giant tree with a lot of stuff that looks like tree cancer, but I’m not a tree doctor so my prognosis can not be used against me when the tree decides to sue. We also dropped into a creek bed underneath 6th street to a place that really didn’t smell that good but looked pretty dang cool.

We then went back to the studio and played with coloring the strobes for a while.

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New lighting techniques have opened my eyes to new possibilities. My artistic knowledge sabbatical continues with todays few tests in the studio. We played with lights in different places and unusual ways of posing. Megan just won’t accept that she is a rock star. I should just be quiet or her head will get to big. She keeps promising it wont, but I just don’t know if she can take my perpetual prattling about how good she is at everything she touches.

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I spent part of the weekend making myself a beauty dish. Why? Because I wanted to do something with my son and I’ve been meaning to do the beauty dish thing for a while. It caused a lot of smoke in the kitchen, lots of noise and lots of paint fumes to create this dish, but it was well worth it. Today was the first day that we had available to use the new dish so Megan got together with Jo Ella who created a very dramatic look with very wild hair for us to shoot in Taylor today. It was way too cold but Megan is an incredible trooper and never said anything about the cold. Megan is the very best Trusty Sidekick ever! We love photographing downtown Austin, but parking is always such a pain that Taylor works out better when we are looking for that warehouse district look.

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New year. New Logo Old pictures that I found from the past.

Christina in her most daring role to date. This is the master suite in our rental house in 2004. When I’m not taking pictures I can do some amazing things with wood, drywall and paint and then some. Visit my studio some time. I was painting some shelves for my studio in this room while we were remodeling the house and the studio at the same time.

I put plastic sheets up on the wall to protect the walls from the black paint I was spraying with an airless sprayer.

After an hour of spraying the shelves I wasn’t all the way there anymore and started painting words on the walls. Yes, paint fumes tend to fuel the mind in mysterious ways.

Called my wife and said to get on her weird hippie clothes and do herself up because I had an idea. After calling her I spun around and around on the floor to mix the black paint into the crud on the floor and give it some wild circular patterns. Then I walked home in the rain to get the wife. I left foot prints on the street for 1/2 a mile because I had caked so much paint onto them with the spinning.

I used one strobe on the camera bouncing and cranked it up an extra stop to make the room really white.

I haven’t ever used drugs, nor did I start drinking until I was 32, but this is the second time I’ve been high from paint fumes. The first was with my father-in-law. Weird, huh?

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Today was day three of our sabbatical with Megan, my trusty sidekick. Today we spent a glorious day outside in what must have been 75 degrees or hotter. We went out to visit the sad little downtown of Taylor, Texas; a lone abandoned wreck, mostly half filled with businesses trying to fight off a a painful end brought on by the city’s Wal-Mart.

But what a place to shoot! No one’s around except the occasional truck filled with onlookers circling the block more than once to gawk at us, mostly Megan. I love Taylor deep down. I just wish it wasn’t so far away. But what fabulous pictures of Megan!

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