Last month while I was out in Oregon for Adrian and Anna’s wedding, I was able to spend a few days with some family members on the Oregon Coast! Here are a few fun silhouette shots we got at a sunset near Manzanita, Oregon.

On June 27th, I had the pleasure of flying out to Salem, Oregon, to shoot the amazing Adrian and Anna’s wedding! It was a beautiful day, and I really enjoyed being there! I had an absolute blast in Oregon, and I attached a vacation to the trip!  I’ll be posting shots from my vacation over the next few weeks, but first things first! Here are a few shots from Adrian and Anna’s amazing wedding!

Sadly, due to what can only be referred to as “issues” at the salon doing the girls hair, they didn’t show up to the park where we got lots of great pictures of the guys. It’s too bad we didn’t get some pictures of the bridesmaids near the rose gardens, but what can you do? The girls looked gorgeous though!

The couple had arranged for some traditional Mexican dances to be done. There were several, but this one was my favorite! I wish I could remember what it was called! I slowed the shutter speed way down to get some blur to show off their fast spins and quick movements. I really like this shot.

This was a fun moment too. Adrian’s brothers wrote songs to sing for the newlyweds, and performed them at the dance.

Did I mention Adrian is a great dancer! I had to speed my shutter way back up because he was spinning Anna so fast!

I caught this image May 22, 2009, on the trip to Jonathan and Ra Sheeda’s Wedding. I was driving east down the Interstate, and happened to look in my side mirror and saw a gorgeous sunset, complete with rays of light. I decided to stop at the next exit and try to get a picture of it, but started getting nervous because mile after mile was going by and there was no exits! I think 11 miles later, I finally found an exit, pulled off, found this beautiful scene! I think the rays of light were even more powerful a few minutes before, but I was still thrilled to finally get a shot like this! I hope you like!

Here are the rest of the pictures from Jonathan and Ra Sheeda’s wedding!

I just got back today from shooting my very first wedding as the primary photographer! I have second shot several times before, but I learned on Saturday that it is a lot more work being the primary! I am very excited too, though, because I am very happy with the pictures I came back with!

Jonathan and Ra Sheeda were wonderful to work with! Jonathan looked great, and Ra Sheeda was absolutely stunning! She was so calm and collected! I have lots of pictures left to edit, but I was so excited about this wedding I had to put up a few quick shots as a preview!

Spring is here! After a long and brutal winter, and then a long and brutal flood season, the river is down and the temperature is up! It hit 80 degrees today! I drove to a new park over in West Fargo, Rendezvous Park. I thought maybe I could get a picture of the sunset. As far as recreating, the park is nice. Lots of open space to run and walk! It could sure use a few more trees, but what brand new park in North Dakota couldn’t? hehe! There wasn’t a whole lot of photo ops, but I got a few shots of the sunset I like! Basically my shutter-finger was itchy after a long winter and I had to give it some exercise! I hope you like them!

Now that the flood waters are receding, and it seems the cities of Fargo and Moorhead were spared any catastrophic damage, it seems we can breathe a sigh of relief. 

I wanted to share with you this really cool post I found by a former resident of Fargo, who works for a visual arts company called concept3D. He came back to help sandbag, and then made this post to try to help people grasp the sheer enormity of how much sand was bagged and placed by the river. Here is just one of the great pictures he posted!

For a lot more great visuals, check out the rest of the article he wrote over on the concept3D blog!

So life has been pretty crazy here for the last few weeks. The National Weather Service started coming out a couple weeks ago and predicting a record flood for where I live here in Fargo, ND. As the days went by, the projected crest kept getting higher and higher, and calls for sandbaggers began to grow more and more urgent.  On Tuesday, I went to help some of my friends sandbag their homes to protect them against the rising river, which was starting to get pretty scary already. So far I believe both of these homes have continued to survive, but are still in danger.

Thankfully, the crest appears to have happened already at just under 41 feet (the worst case scenario had risen to 43 feet!).  It is still the highest water level ever recorded in Fargo, and there are still calls for urgency in maintaining the dikes. However, people are starting to have hope that the worst may be over and that we may escape major flooding and mass evacuations. Here are some pictures from the last few days I wanted to share!

Here are some shots of the group I helped and the houses we sandbagged.

The following shots were me just shooting as I drove. I tried to show a few different methods of sandbagging and diking that various homes were using. I also tried to capture the chaotic feeling and sense of urgency there was this whole time. Don’t worry, I was in the area en route to and from sandbagging, I didn’t just drive in here to shoot pictures.

There were many places to volunteer, such as the Fargodome.  Some people were used filling bags all over the city, and others were bussed to the danger zones to help actually place the bags. Schools and NDSU were closed and all students were encouraged to help sandbag. Businesses were encouraged to close, both to keep traffic off of main roads, and so workers could help volunteer. Here you can see a bus bringing volunteers.

A digital billboard in Fargo changed from showing advertisements to being flood information and telling people where they could volunteer. And yes, during the most necessary and stressful part of the flood fight, after we had found out the river could crest even higher than expected, we received a massive and awful snowstorm which dumped 8 inches of snow on us.  The roads became horrible as all of the big equipment that would have been used to plow were needed at the dikes. On the other hand, the cold temperatures are what slowed the melt and runoff into the river, and helped the river crest lower, so I guess it wasn’t the worst possible thing ever.

This was one of the neighborhoods most in danger. Huge trucks and tractors were dumping dirt everywhere to make the dikes higher, and you can see urgent sandbagging happening too. By the way, the river is normally on the OTHER side of those trees.

These final shots were taken as we crossed over the Red River the last few days. The river is so high that it was absolutely unreal. I can’t even describe the magnitude of it via pictures, because the river was so wide and covering so much land that you would need to be shooting from the air to capture it!

I only had my point and shoot with me when I took this picture, so I wasn’t able to leave the shutter open as long as I wanted to...hopefully you can see that at this point on Thursday night, the river was already higher than downtown, and the dikes were the only thing protecting downtown from being under a few feet of water!

These final shots were taken Sunday while the river is cresting. This is the first exit in Minnesota on I-94.  It has been totally closed down and the dike built right over the road. Sadly, I tried to take a few pictures when it was being built, but for some reason my point and shoot camera made a mistake and didn’t save them! Doh! It was an amazing site. There were literally scores of trucks dumping dirt, tractors, etc. I had never seen so many flashing lights in my life.  I really wanted to go back and reshoot, but traffic was so bad I wasn’t willing to do it again. Here it is today, though.

Overall, this has been a very stressful experience. But at the same time, it has been impressive. The Fargo-Moorhead community really pulled together.  There were thousands of volunteers willing to help in whatever neighborhood needed help, and the National Guard has been amazing at patrolling the dikes and fixing any problems found with them. Now that it appears there is a good chance we may not lose massive parts of the city, we can hopefully begin to destress.  There is still a lot of work to do, as all this will need to be cleaned up after, and some people that have lost their homes will need to be helped, but overall the battle seems to be being won. 

Nate and Sarah are good friends of mine, and so I can’t even tell you how excited I was last year when I found out they are having a baby! We went out this past weekend to do some pictures, as she is getting very close to her due date. They have some names that they like, but they want to see him first before they decide what his name will be, and so I have nicknamed him JJ. Sarah is definitely a glowing mom-to-be, and I love these shots we got of her and Nate. And of course, none of us can wait to meet JJ.

For this last one, we wanted to do something artistic. I think/hope we succeeded. And don’t worry. Although this might look cold, she was only actually here for a few short seconds.

I will add a few more pictures to this post later when Nate and Sarah finish picking out their favorites from the proofs! Check back later if you’d like to check them out!

During my last senior shoot with Kaleb, he wanted to take a fun shot of himself playing the guitar. I forgot to post it earlier with the original post and decided to make it a quick 1-picture post today! I added a little radial blur to make it look like the sound wave is comin’ at ya! I hope you like it!