You’d likely get a variety of answers if you were to ask different photographers to name the most important trait a photographer should have, but I think we’d all agree that confidence is pretty high up there.

Though I’ve known Herb Manila and Mike Hanson (aka Herb & Hanson) for well over a decade (indeed, it was I that built their website, many moons ago), we’d never done a shoot before. We’d just never gotten around to it, I suppose. So when they suggested doing a shoot while I was in D.C. last weekend, I was completely on board.

When Joyce approached me to update her headshots, the short time frame made finding an affordable studio pretty much impossible so we opted for shooting in my apartment. I’d never done any shoots in the new digs, and was excited to try it out. Our living room / kitchen was big enough and had a 5′ white wall on one of the long ends. Not huge, but workable.

Chuck and Julie are two of my favorite people around. I have friends I’ve known longer or friends I know on deeper levels, but when it comes to just simple, unadulterated (keyword unadult) fun, Chuck and Julie are a tough act to follow.

One of the more common signs you’re getting old is when your friends start having kids.  More often than not, it’s casual friends or people you haven’t heard from in a while that have kids first.  An old classmate here, a distant cousin there.  But as you get older, it’s your own personal friends that start to have kids.  And when it comes to personal friends, few are nearer or dearer to me than Hawk and Marimar.  They’ve been some of my favorite people for eight years now (I was Best Man at their wedding) and when they had twins earlier this year, it was a definite “Holy crap, we’re grown ups!” moment.

The very first leg of my three-week trip back to the West Coast was to visit L.A. and see a good friend of mine get married to a stellar gal. Eric and I go back a few years, and having bonded in part over the fact that we were both single guys dealing with those crazy dames, it was especially heartening to see him find a dame crazy enough to take him in.

My first real memory of Stefanie is of acting beside her in a Federico Garcia Lorca play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. She played the butterfly. I was the beetle that was hopelessly in love with her.

Had my shoot this weekend with Lex and Tina (from the last update). We met up at their apartment in Bay Ridge and visited some of their favorite local haunts where they told me about the neighborhood as I photographed them. Apparently a lot of mobsters live in Bay Ridge. Who knew?

Internet forums are interesting places. There are few other places, either real or online, that are as effective at gathering like-minded individuals into one place to discuss everything from the brilliant to the banal. It’s like being in a college classroom with thousands of other people from all over the world, all different walks of life. One of the biggest perks about internet forums is that they’re a great place to go to for free advice from experts who are there because they love to share knowledge. The downside, of course, is that on the internet, everyone’s an expert.

Shot an engagement party for a lovely couple on Friday night. It was held on the rooftop of a building in the Lower Midtown/Koreatown area. The shot above is the view from the south side of the rooftop. You can actually see the Brooklyn Bridge, a good three miles away. I can’t begin to imagine what it’d be like to have that view waiting for you every morning.