You know, I get in front of the camera as little as possible and keep company with brilliant beautiful people such as Christina and Megan so as there can always be something in front of the camera so long as it’s not me.  No such luck today and while teaching Megan more about shooting got a few shots taken.  She actually made me look pretty good.  That’s hard.  But I actually look like the fun, exciting person that I am.  The guy you want at your wedding making beautiful images.  Kudos to Megan on this one!  She is the best trusty sidekick ever.

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As an artist who is creative I get bored with doing the same thing over and over. Typically I try and one up what I did the last shoot, creating something better that makes me feel like I’ve achieved something in this directive. Since admitting that I was an artist rather than a technician in the world of photography I’ve pushed as hard as I can to be better always. And I’ve decided that I will hence forth be going on sabbatical from time to time to refocus my mind to be sharper and more creative. Gary Larson, the creator of the Far Side comic strip did and I’ve decided that so will I. Today was the beginning of my sabbatical.

Behind the studio is an old blue Datsun truck and just by coincidence, Christina happened to be wearing blue. The landlord stores it there because our rear parking lot is as big as our front parking lot, but not one person parks back there.

The above picture reminds me of a still from a Hitchcock movie. Love the feel of it in B&W.

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Here are some of the more interesting shots from our company Christmas card shoot shot at the park near the Palmer Event Center near Ladybird Lake.  Special thanks to my friend Matt Crow who came down to pull the shutter for us and help us carry the obscenely heavy bags of gear up the hill to the location. It was an exhausting shoot! Every time I get in front of the camera I just feel like the life is being sucked out of me. Thank God the results are worth it!  Thanks to JoElla Thompson for hair and make-up!

This is our Christmas card from 2003, the last time a serious amount of effort was put into a card.

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I’m a hell of an ad agency when I want to be. My son’s class all had to run for class mayor this Monday and due to the fact that the whole family was sick for all of last week we didn’t know about it until the day before. So I whipped this out in two hours for his campaign the night before. Other kids were making promises of candy and amusement park rides, which I thought rather fitting being the political climate of our day and promises of free, free, free from the government but less freedom in the end. So we came up with a campaign that can’t win but looked really damn cool and spoke the truth which can’t be said about any real world politicians. I say, be honest, be right, be forward and write in Edmond for class mayor. He’s the real maverick.

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Everybody needs time away from their kids. Only Nazis think otherwise. I decided to take a week long vacation with my wife and chose a cruise to the Eastern Caribbean on the Crown Princess as my way of escaping from the children. We flew into Ft Lauderdale, popped onto the boat, shut off the internet and the phone and started doing what everyone does on a cruise ship: eat! We aren’t really big on the live music or stage shows, but we certainly love food prepared with care and presented beautifully. We stopped at four ports of call: Princess Cays in the Bahamas, St Marteen, St Thomas and Grand Turk.

It was a blast and a wonderful quiet voyage and I look forward to going on another one again when we have some time.

One really cool thing that they had on the top of the ship was a giant TV screen where movies would play every night and serve fresh made popcorn made with real butter.

Christina looking over Port Everglades in Ft Lauderdale.

On the tender to Princess Cays.

I love bread.

I’m pretty sure that all of the palm trees were planted on all of the islands we visited. Apparently an island isn’t tropical without a palm tree.

My beautiful wife on St Marteen

I think I drank too much at this place in St Marteen. My head was pounding and I was really thirsty, but ran out of water.

Christina and an escaped gorilla. Or maybe it was Christina and her dad. I sometimes get confused by that.

Christina in the ocean in front of the Crown Princess at Grand Turk.

Just about the last people on the boat, we got my father-in-law to snap a picture of us before it left without us. We had some much fun on this trip and stopped at such wonderful places that I think we’ll go on the same exact cruise again, but take the kids. Should be fun!

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This was an odd sort of trip where we drove a lot and talked a lot and seemingly did a lot even though it felt like we weren’t too busy. We drove out to visit my grandmother in California. She has terminal cancer. My kids didn’t know why we were really going. They thought it was one of Daddy’s wacky vacations where he just drives forever. They were right about it for the most part. We did drive a lot.

Visiting my grandmother was a little stressful, but we went down to one of the beaches in Ventura that I had gone to as a little boy with my family including her and watched my little boys flop about in the waves as we talked. She had always been a big part of my life. She was a big part of my eldest son’s life as well. When we were in college she drove 50 miles to watch Edmond one or two days a week.

I don’t think I’ll be able to get to Ventura to see her ever again so this was my goodbye. I don’t like this goodbye.

They have Rebel gas stations in Las Vegas.


Corbin at Dodger stadium. I hadn’t been there in 29 years. Still was awful.



Always pay attention to the details of what’s on the side of the trash cans at the Ventura park. This says that these 55 gallon drums were filled with apple juice concentrate from China for Tropicana. How fresh does your apple juice seem now?

Barbaba Ann Jensen. My last living grandmother. We called her Gram. The name eventually evolved into Grambo, a rough, tough fighting machine groomed specifically for destroying bad guys and making casseroles. She always tried to trick us kids into eating food that had ingredients in it that she claimed weren’t in it. I know a freaking onion when I feel it crunching in my mouth. She was in a good deal of pain and had a hard time leaving her apartment, but did venture to the beach and took us out to Andria’s Seafood, a local place that my family has gone to for years in Ventura.

Edmond, Christina and Corbin at a Ventura beach

Edmond at a Ventura beach.



I needed a few pictures of Vegas for a crazy project I’m working on so I surprised everyone in the car and drove there without anyone noticing until we got to the Nevada border. I suppose it was a good test to see if I could surprise my wife.



Most every Fry’s has a motif. Except perhaps the one in Plano. But I suppose that fits the personality of the city from what I’ve seen. I’ve been to a few. Burbank had a alien flying saucer sticking out of the front of it and had a 50s style alien invasion going on. Manhattan Beach had one that was a jungle and completely overgrown with bushes and trees. So I suppose it was fitting that Vegas had this. It was closed when we came by at 9:30 p.m. What the heck? I thought Vegas never slept.

We walked around Vegas for 4 hours with the kids to see the sights and shoot a couple of shots. I think it wiped them out. They never sleep.

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Our son Edmond is a crazy reader. He spends a good deal of his day reading books aimed at kids a whole lot older than he is. How many of you read C.S. Lewis at 7 years old. I’m sure he’s going to wipe out The Abolition Of Man or War and Peace any day now.

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My son Edmond and I participated in the Cub Scouts ‘Lad and Dad Bake-off’ where we created this bizarre contraption of culinary confusion. The deal was that we got no help from Mom which was a dangerous road to travel. My hat now goes off to the cake makers who provide elegant, beautiful memorable wedding cakes that I see at so many of my weddings. I had always figured that anyone could do it and it was only flour, sugar and butter. How wrong I was. It took us three hours to create this baked confection that nightmares are made of and ours came out of a box and was not from scratch. All in all , we actually did a pretty good job for our first try. The Cub Scouts auction off the cakes as a fundraiser every year. I suppose we’ll have to plan ahead next year and learn a little more about how to make cakes. We’ll have to go to Simon Lee and get some tips so we can have a killer cake next year.

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It was a long drive through bugs and white-out rain storms to get to the glory of Marathon, Texas and the fun oasis of the Gage Hotel. Marathon is a ghost town apparently due to the fact that I-10 was built and diverted all of the cross country traffic away from US Highway 90. It was like watching Cars and seeing Radiator Springs in person. The glory was gone except for this fabulous hotel where we were shooting a wedding the next day. After unpacking, Christina and I wandered around the tiny town and shot a few pictures. Everything was run down and desolate.

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We haven’t shot that much studio since moving to Texas, so we hauled out the lights and shot a little of me and the kids this evening. I’m not used to being the subject of pictures and do a much better job behind the camera, but I came up with a few pictures for my wife as she brushes up for a maternity session.

Some of the expressions I made were definitely inspired by the movie 300, I think.

Now the kids on the other hand were nuts but they were extremely cute.

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