Recent Portrait Outtakes

A few recent outtakes from photo portrait sessions here in Portland, Oregon....

Vancouver Man's Personal Touch Encourages New Members

This past week, National Public Radio's program Day to Day did a story on this great guy in Vancouver, Washington. He's memorized a few thousand names of people who visit or come regularly to his church, and he greets them by name every Sunday morning. And he's my dad.

You can listen to the story here, at NPR's website.

The Howley Wedding

If you know anything about my work, you probably know that I'm a sucker for photos of kids at weddings. This past weekend's wedding was no exception. Brian Howley and Sybil Weatherman were married at a family estate in Yamhill County. The light that day was awe-inspiring. There were probably about as many children as adults at the affair. Here are a few of them....

This is my new second shooter.

I mean, the picture is by my new second photographer Gretchen.

Gretchen wasn't wearing a fairy princess dress, although I'll have to rethink that rule.

View more kids at weddings on our Portland wedding photography website!

Faces and Facades

Faces and Facades: London, Kenya, Israel

England, Kenya, Israel. Three continents, three cultures, three weeks.

While my work in these places was to photograph those I was there to serve (a medical relief team), my eye was constantly drawn to the local faces and façades.

Whether in Kenya, where the mud structures that have been built for millenia may begin to crumble in a few years; or London, where history crowds each street with magnificent stonework; or Israel, where rubble and ruins signify over 5000 years of culture; wherever you turn you see the texture of civilization.

In among these vestiges of the past, faces reveal themselves: at Hell’s Gate, in Ceasarea Philippi, the adolescent children of a kibbutz giggle and run rampant. In the slums of Eldoret, a woman caring for poor children speaks softly of her endeavors as she shows me her tiny schoolhouse. In Covington Garden, a young girl peers through the crowd at a street performer’s shtick.

While this is a disparate collection of images, there is the common element of the present interacting with the past: my feet on the Roman mosaic of Bet She’an, or a Kalingen elder draped in furs, or a Jewish man at the Wailing Wall with tallit and phylacteries talking on his cell phone. Past and present, stone and flesh, young and old, faces and façades.

Click here to view the gallery.