You have rehearsed your first dance for the twentieth time. You want it to be elegant, beautiful, perfect. Your veil and wedding dress will drift about you in a whirly waltz. Not any different than the father-daughter dance or the mother-son dance, your expression and emotion changes from second to second. As you reminisce your life that lies behind you and look forward to your amazing future, an emotional modulation from happiness to sadness; flow and ebb, flux within your soul.

(Click on an image, then use your RIGHT and LEFT arrow keys to go through all of them)

This is possibly one of the most beautiful and elegant sliver in weddings that I adore. Yet, this is possibly one of the hardest part in a wedding to photograph (other than the kiss in the church, which is all about timing). You see, lighting for photographers is akin to water to fish. Dance images are always a challenge to shoot, due to how badly lighted the dance floor is, the continual movements of bodies in motion, shifting dance lights and video lights (that the videographers uses-can cause the brightness to veer from too bright-to too dark), the different angles to capture, and most of all, all that to be photographed within 2-3 minutes.

If lady luck smiles upon you, at the end of most weddings, your photographer will hopefully end up with a good 1 to 2 decent but underexposed (aka dark or badly lighted) images. They will most likely processed it into black & white, and claim it as art, or make it into a brownish sepia and chalk it off as creative. The pictures are usually very grainy and if you danced slow enough, the images will just be a little blurred.

My recommendation? One of the biggest question to ask your photographer is to have him/her show you A DOZEN of their dance images from A SINGLE wedding. That’s possibly one of the best indicator on his creativity, lighting skills and how well he can tango! To start off with the challenge, here are my dozen, shot a mere few days ago, last Saturday, for Jenn and Matt in Maggiano’s Little Italy‘s lovely banquet room.

- Michael Soo

After the long wait, the 2009/2010 swimsuit calendar that we photographed about 3 months ago for the NFL Tampa Bay Buccaneers has been released during Training Camp! It’s definitely a hit as the calendar was sold out during the first week of release!!!! Woozah!!

Well, what are you waiting for? Order the calendar NOW! It makes a great gift! I’m getting 50-60 of them, one way or another.

- Michael Soo

I gotto say, I can never get enough of a photograph on a beautiful lightbox. It just enhances the image so beautifully. That’s also why we were so thrilled to have our image showcased in the main entryway to Smugmug‘s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Not only that, it’s enlarged up to a life size of 8 feet tall !!! With me being a super tall guy, standing at 5 feet 5 inches, that monstrous light panel is almost twice as tall! Well, almost.

Chris MacAskill had to use a double lightbox (I seem to be using the terms interchangeably due to how similar they are to each other these days) for the image. Check it out below, with the image on the right being the original image. Whee!!!

I’ve always liked boutique hotels. The role of theme designs play a huge role to make guests feel connected and comfortable. The hotel acts as the sum of a well-planned design, which is a rare sight in the world we live in. Ask me about it. In my college years, I would buy pieces of furniture from various shops due mostly to budget constraints. The apartment feel disconnected, from a design point of view. An orchestrated design makes one feel soulful about the surroundings.

Menlo Park’s spanking new Rosewood Hotel, nestled at the edge of Santa Cruz Mountains is designed as a calm California Ranch architecture is a boutique hotel of this sort.
The food and art pieces are no different. They only use local ingredients and local artists. The texture (see the five images above) tells a tale about what the hotel’s design theme is all about.

We photographed Cathy and Michael’s wedding there. As they are rather private people, I’ll only showcase a small handful of selected images (without the usual slideshow) in this blog.

Do NOT, however, mistake private for boring. How often do you see a cake_in_the_face during a wedding cake cutting?

- Michael Soo

A few months ago, our regular bookmaker that crafts our handmade wedding guest books went into retirement. They were kind enough to give us ample notice. So, we jumped right ahead to find a new guestbook maker that meets our expectations and demands…and boy, are we demanding?!

To start our search, we requested catalogs from over twenty vendors. We narrowed down the search to eight based on their quality, turnaround time and elegance. We then purchased sample covers, papers and swatches from these eight vendors and picked four. We ordered sample books from all four. As you can imagine, the cost for this search, was quite high.

One came really close to what we want. Their pages are great as they can be signed using any regular pen. They have a variety of genuine leather covers. The colors of our engagement photos turned out incredibly accurate. The B&W; which are typically hard to reproduce came out beautifully. However, the pages are thin and the size of the album isn’t royal enough for us. So, our search continued.

The winner guest book that made it, is now beautifully shown above. It is 10×10″, comes with a nice box and is wrapped in soft fabric to protect the album from scratches. Beautiful soft leather smother the album, is smooth to the touch. The pages are thick, images spread panoramic across. It lays flat without any center seems. Overall, a fantastic book!

We can’t wait to produce more of these for our other clients using images from their engagement session!

- Michael Soo

We’re truly proud to be a part of Maggiano’s Little Italy’s preferred photographer celebrating Maggiano’s Annual Bridal Faire last week. We’ve also photographed the food, rooms and weddings in this lovely restaurant. I really want to thank the wonderful staffs there that have been so supportive and generous.

Check out our photography album for Maggiano by clicking the images above or below.

The HyperMac is a cool-looking external battery pack designed to make the iPhone and MacBook products even more mobile. I wanted to get that message across in the pictures I took, and to me, the key to getting great product shots is great lighting.

On the day of the shoot, Daniel from HyperMac, showed up with product in hand, and we got going. As we talked, I began to light the HyperMac to show off how sleek and small it is, and how good it looks side-by-side with Mac products.

Expert lighting does the job that some photographers depend on Photoshop to do. No doubt, Photoshop can help out with minor enhancements after a picture has been taken, but the trick is to get the lighting right from the very start. It’s always great to see the satisfaction on a client’s face when the images appear immediately on the monitor to show how the finished photos will look.

- Michael Soo

Just a few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of photographing Karen and Joe’s wedding. Weddings are a big part of what I do, and I enjoy every one of them for the happiness and sense of celebration that ties them all together in a chain of love. I also love them for what makes them unique.

This wedding was no exception.

Karen’s dad is no longer with us, so understandably there was a lot of emotion around his not being there. In Chinese culture, the tea ceremony demonstrates respect for the older generations. Here, in Saratoga’s tranquil and elegant Hakone Gardens, we are at the same venue where our lovely Stacy and Harold got married. The guests witnessed the bride and groom serving tea to their parents. When Karen’s turn came, everyone—me included—was completely choked up. Karen knelt and offered tea to her mom and also to her dad whose tea cup was carefully placed on the empty chair right next to her.

Yes, the chair was empty, but the hearts of everyone at that wedding were as full as the cups of tea. I won’t forget this scene anytime soon or the tradition that it honors, and I know that Karen and Joe won’t either.

- Michael Soo

When I think about Chanel and Peter’s recent wedding, the first words that come to mind after “How great!” are “Wow, what a trip!” And I mean that in the best possible way. Here’s how it all came down…

This gorgeous couple’s ceremony was to be held at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in San Jose. Chanel checked into the nearby Fairmont Hotel to dress and have her make-up done to perfection. She was lookin’ absolutely great, and everybody was in high spirits and full of anticipation. So far, so good.

The next step in the plan was to head south—an hour’s drive—to the Cinnabar Hills Golf Club to photograph the wedding party. The shoot went like a dream, the shots looked great, and with our mission accomplished, we all jumped into our cars and hit the road back to San Jose.

Chanel, who had been pretty cool, calm, and collected up until then was beginning to get just a touch flustered. Think about it. There was her makeup to keep fresh, her dress to keep unwrinkled, and a million other things to keep straight.

But everything went great. After a beautiful ceremony at the historic church, we went back to Cinnabar Hills for the reception.

All in all, a 10-hour day just packed with action. Chanel and Peter had booked a couple of hours less, but I believe in putting in whatever it takes to get the job done right. Getting a great result is what makes what we do so worthwhile. That and the smiles of pure joy on the faces of the bride and groom and their families.

- Michael Soo

We’ve been asked by a few prospects to show them sample images that we took of reflective objects. We figure that we’ll just post a shot we took for a fellow friend, owner of Vintagio winery, which he promptly used for his business card.

The biggest challenge for 99% of product photographers out there are photographing reflective products such as bottles, glasses and especially spheric items. It’s really because with these surfaces, you’ll see the reflection of anything and everything around the object, the sky, windows and even the photographer and his/her camera! The worst thing to do is to use the on-camera flash that creats a hotspot on the reflective objects.

The distractions are avoidable by surrounding the glass object with a surface that you want to see, such as white board or plastic. It’ll help tremendously to create the perfect glass or bottle imagery you want.

- Michael Soo