Oh man!  What a month!  I can’t believe January is almost over…  During this month I’ve had the opportunity to connect with so many incredibly close groups of people and feel completely involved and accepted in their wedding days.  From coast to coast my travel schedule, broken down, has looked like this:

Portland–>Akumal–>Portland–>Puerto Vallarta–>Portland–>Playa Mujeres–>Puerto Vallarta–>Punta de Mita

And that’s where I’m at, that very last part.  The only thing left to add is an an arrow on Sunday pointing to Portland.  My 11-day 3-wedding Mexico travel-ganza is ending tomorrow with Tara and Will in Punta de Mita.

I’ve officially been in Mexico more days in January than I’ve been at home in Portland and the photos you see above and below are a sneak peak from the very first wedding of the month, Suzanne and Derek in Akumal.

And even my short time in Portland has been incredibly productive this month.  The Broshot Lifestyle is firing on all cylinders and in a positive direction.  I found an inspiring accountant that fits me and my business and I’ve found a new place to live.  Whoa!

See you tomorrow Punta de Mita, and see you Sunday Portland, I miss you!

On my way to Nadine and Jesse’s wedding on the south coast of Oaxaca state, I photographed ancient Mixtec ruins and spent a sleepless night outside the Mexico City airport.  The second night without sleep I spent ten hours in the far back corner of a sixteen-passenger van winding through the mountains.  That was the night my jaw started popping (still does, dental bills!), and we only had one break to stretch.  We got out of the van and I was delirious from my head having bobbed semi-consciously from side to side like a dead chicken for hours on the slow switchbacks.

But when I stepped out of the van it was like a dream and it was cold.  Oaxaca City is already about a mile high and it was clear that we were real high up.  There was a lone cinderblock outpost and a lady and her family cooking at a grill in what was their living room, kitchen, and road house.  I bought two tangerines and walked back outside and looked up.  Above me I saw wispy clouds elongated by their speed whipping one by one over the top of me, they were real close.  A cloud would break from the horizon down below and be gone over the top of us and out of sight in seconds.  It was that quick and that fantastical, beyond the clouds I saw stars.  It felt like I was both in the middle of nowhere and at the edge of the earth staring out at the universe.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the way to Huatulco and after being dropped off on a dimly lit but safe street, I got help from a taxi driver who told me that my name, Nathan, was the name of a profit.  The taxi driver found me an overbooked hotel in an overbooked town where I laid, again sleepless, on the floor until a room opened up in the morning one hour later.  Forty-eight hours after rising from my bed in Portland, Oregon I slept for five, ate breakfast and shot Nadine and Jesse’s wedding while connecting with awesome people who I’ve had the pleasure of seeing since; this past summer in Calgary and again next week in Mexico.

In the summer the Yup’ik and Cup’ik people of the Bearing Straight lived traditionally near their river, stream, and native hunting areas in small family groups, but once the winter came everyone returned back to what could affectionately be called the city.  And during the winter, once each family’s sons were old enough the family would send them to live in the communal qasgi.  There’s not a lot of privacy in the qasgi, it’s essentially a big open wood-beam lodge underground. The main entrance dips below the floor level of the qasgi so that heat can’t escape and in the center ceiling there is a cut out for smoke to escape from the fire.  Bunks line nearly all of the walls, floor to ceiling, and in the middle there is plenty of room to dance, sing, drum, teach and make things.

But the part that really resonated with me was when I read this quote:

When I started going to the qasgi, my mother would say to me, “Go and try to steal.”  I am very afraid of stealing.  She was actually saying that I will steal information if I listen and learn from the person who is giving instruction, even though I am not literally taking anything.  If I learn things that I will recall, I will live by those things all my life.

To steal knowledge!  I feel that way every day, with every person that I meet.  I think what stealing actually entails is the ability to listen, listen real good!, absorb that knowledge and then adapt that knowledge to my life, to my own plan and through my own method.

I think all present day knowledge has been “stolen” in this way.  Knowledge is stolen, that knowledge is adapted to ones own unique circumstances, physical being, or quirk of personality, stolen knowledge, while still at its heart the same, is then stolen again, and adapted by the next generation…and so on and so on….until us!

The reason I think that the idea of the qasgi and stolen knowledge resonated so strongly with me is because I see my photography in this very same light.  Myself, the artist believes that I can say it better, do it better through adaptation and that my way of saying a core idea is more relevant to what we are experiencing contemporaneously.

In this way you the subject or viewer of my image are connected to my life experience and stolen knowledge, and by default you are connected, through my image to the greater human consciousness, the stream of stolen knowledge that came before that moment and continues on after.  Through my image you have become more human.

Honestly, I wish that I could transport everyone here to Portland and relive the event.  And although I can’t be with all you guys again in the same place and time, I do hope to see all of your faces in person soon, even if we have to do it piece by piece.

Many thanks to Kristin and Michelle of The Dazzling Details for the constant professionalism, service, and design work and day of coordination.  Beginning to end, the experience every time I work with you…you guys rock it.

Steffani and Ashuante’s day-after-session from Playa Conchas Chinas will be posted on Thursday so check back.  Enjoy the photos!

I went to our Portland Wedding Group “Office Holiday Party” last night and I had a conversation with Vida Ice about everything I’m about to say below, that is, What your wedding photography actually means. And most importantly, How do I possibly transmit a complex and nuanced idea like that to my clients and interested people reading my blog?  The first thing I thought was to be honest and straightforward, write what you think and write what you feel.

I very much see my fine art career and my wedding photography business as symbiotic and I think they are symbiotic in two ways, structure and content.

First, structure.  The business, marketing and networking skills I learn while running my international wedding photography studio, directly translate to my fine art business.  I think it’s important for me as an artist to think of myself and my work as a brand, and the international art world as an industry comprised of similar businesses. Currently I’m working on three bodies of conceptual art.  I think the skills I mentioned above have served my fine art career well and will be a huge asset moving forward, especially once I move to New York City.

Secondly, content.  The experiences I have at weddings, the connections that I make and the lessons I learn about myself and about life; the feelings I feeeeel!, directly inform the content of my conceptual art and at the same time the conceptual art process directly informs the shape, feel and style, of my wedding photography.  As I work to understand my own emotions and my life experiences, I analyze and filter those experiences through process.  This process changes who I am, and it reveals to me new things about myself.  These revelations about my true self become the person I project out into the world,  the person I believe myself to be and I’m confident I am.  And guess where a lot of this self-projecting occurs?  Weddings!

What I am arguing for is that I believe honesty, truth through genuine emotion, and clarity of thought are the central themes of my work, and that these themes translate through both artistic and commercial mediums as well as inform the other through the process of both mediums.

Here are some concrete examples to illustrate my hypothesis.  First I will take you to two pivotal images, they for me are reference points, one at a wedding, one from my personal work.

Starting point #1 is the image below shot in September of 2009 at Amber and Jared’s wedding.

The first time I saw this image I thought, I love this! And second, I don’t know what it is about this image but some quality speaks to me personally on a deeper emotional level, what is it? I spent the next two years trying to figure that out.  Why I think the image speaks to the viewer is that it doesn’t ask the viewer to believe in an unnatural event or pose, it’s simple and it’s honest.  There is no suspension of disbelief required of the viewer for entry into the image.

I think this image gives the viewer space to connect.  The image doesn’t force itself on you, it simply is, therefore, the viewer is able to project their own personal emotions and experiences into the image and empathize with the experience Amber is sharing with me and that I’m sharing with the viewer.  It gives the viewer an outlet and in that process of mutual human expression we all feel less alone.  Amber gives to me (without me asking) I create the image to share with you, and you project back onto the image your own emotional experience.   That I believe is the ultimate purpose of art.

Starting point #2  is below and was shot on my cell phone at the Cancun airport on my way back from Cynthia and Yves’ wedding last July.  Yes, the actual meaning of your wedding photography today involves the low res camera on the back of my Droid X.

One thing I strongly dislike about the images that come out of my Droid X’s camera is how they don’t seem to accurately reflect the way I felt emotionally when I took the image.  The original is below.

The way I felt when i made this image was that I’m alone and doing a ton of traveling.  I’m experiencing the emotions of anonymity and isolation, but a sort of anonymous freedom that is separate from my peer group, my friends and family.  No one knows my private life but me, and a lot of my life is very private.  I don’t have an office, and my commute is a lonely journey.  The Cancun airport where I made the above image, for me is emotionally charged with those thoughts and feelings I just wrote.  The physical space of the Cancun airport at that moment when I shot that image literally embodies those feelings.  Apart from that my experience at the Cancun airport exists only as a memory, a flash of a vivid and real experience, thoughts and feelings scribbled in a notebook and snapped on a cell phone camera.

The composition of the original image, I feel, reflects those emotions I explained above, the vast open space in the left two thirds of the image, heavy content on the edges although the content itself is anonymous and without definition or context.  Guiding lines without definition, lines there to guide but guide you nowhere, and flowing water, but flowing to where and from where?

Again, composition: Yes.  But, color?  No!  For me the original image lacked the vivid intensity of my emotional memory of that physical space.  For me, when I remember, it is the act of bringing forth in my mind very specific and vivid details about a particular emotional experience. One day, after a lot of experiments with editing my cell phone images, I finally hit upon it.  Contrast, intensity, high black-point and clarity.  There it is, that is the intensity of the original emotion I felt in the Cancun airport when I took that image.

You can see where this is going…wedding photography!  Around June 2011 I began editing my wedding images this way…contrast, intensity, high black-point and clarity.  I wanted my wedding images to not only compositionally reflect the power of my original emotional experience.  I wanted them to reflect the very specific and vivid details of memory.

I think this is one reason why I gravitated toward the image of Amber in 2009 I showed earlier.  It is both honest, genuine and truthful AND contains the vivid and specific details of a memory.  I knew I liked it, I just didn’t know why yet.  Now that I know what I’m looking for, what my process is, and what I want my end result to be, I can go and look for it all the time, at every wedding I attend.

Do you feel it yet?  This is what your wedding photography is actually about!  It is about so much more than the literal representation of objects, people, and places at one particular moment in time.  Your wedding photography is about the abstract human emotions that we as subject, photographer, and viewer project onto objects, people and places and share with each other.  What beauty in life!  What beauty in truth!  We are all in this together.

Three more wedding images are below that I believe embody my hypothesis on the amalgamation of emotion, experience, aesthetic, and composition with subject, photographer, and viewer.


Amber from Amber + Rob – Portland Armory

Pete from Pete + Amanda – San Diego

and Amanda from Pete + Amanda – San Diego

Thanks for the opportunity to come down to the Bay and hang out for a bit and even taking me to Tacolicious!  I greatly appreciate your energy!  We started out at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco (above) before heading out to the Golden Gate Bridge at Fort Point, and the East Beach.  It was a beautiful and sunny October Friday.  Portland was raining and I was glad to be there and to see Allie again and meet Tim for the first time.  I’m excied for their wedding next August in Carmel, CA.  Also…Happy Birthday Allie!

Immediately I felt warmth, love and welcoming.  I found myself caught in the subtle web of the moment, connected with the energy of other positive human beings.  Love the energy of being alive!

Thank you Pete and Amanda, your friends and family, I hope to see you all again very soon!

For photos of Amanda and Pete’s wedding details including the lovely color of terra cotta (that took some work) and the grounds at the ranch, visit License To Still on Facebook, here.

And with that heavenly respite of October sunshine we began early at the Hotel Modera in downtown Portland, a walk down to waterfront park and then a limo ride to the ceremony and reception at Lakeside Gardens in east Portland.

[Click here to see Carlyn and Kyle's engagement photos]

Enjoy!