Cherokee Ranch wedding pictures Part I | David & Shannon in Denver, Colorado

Getting married this year at Cherokee Ranch? Email Chris to see if I'm available to photograph your wedding! Tweet Kimball's Castle is a pretty amazing place of photos.




David & Shannon know how to a pick a venue! Wander through the rolling hills south of Denver and you'll come across Cherokee Ranch perched atop a bluff overlooking the entire Front Range, from Pikes Peak to beyond Longs Peak. Its centerpiece is the Tweet Kimball Castle, and I was lucky enough to capture David & Shannon's wedding Saturday.

The persnickety Colorado weekend weather didn't stop for nobody, and the ominous clouds kept rolling in. Everyone was thinking, "Inside or outside?"


The bride getting ready...

Shannon is one of three sisters and they are wild together. They all helped Shannon look radiant for the ceremony (Jenni on the left is engaged to marry in December)...



Silver-sequin Pumas!

White-gold rings::


The third (and youngest) sister helps the official flower girl get ready herself::


Love it. The former owner of this castle (Tweet Kimball herself) apparently was an avid art collector, to the tune of acquiring paintings by masters like Peter Paul Reubens, John Constable, even some pre-Renaissance Italian works. Oh and here are the groomsmen helping each other with ties::


They're ready! David (the handsome groom) is in the middle. Both he and the best man are from New Zealand, which was fun because half the attendants had cool Kiwi accents. Magic::


One last toast before the dress. (7-Up for the flower girl!)


Gorgeous bride on her wedding day...



iPhone to the rescue! There was a last-minute glitch in the ceremony music selections, so the bride borrowed someone's iPhone and downloaded the tracks for the DJ mere minutes before the ceremony. It was pretty sweet.

It looked like the stormy clouds weren't going to let up, so the Ranch staff quickly prepared for a very cozy inside ceremony.


Photos from the rest of the day coming up in Part 2! Stay tuned...

Flatirons engagement pictures | David & Shannon in Boulder, Colorado

Meet David and Shannon! They live it up in Boulder doing the graduate school thing and keeping each other warm during windy frigid engagement shoots! David hails from New Zealand, and of course one question I had to ask him was if he was part of the Lord of the Rings movie crew (I think it employed the entire South Island or something).

Thank you both for being good sports in the wintry climate. Now it's summertime and you're getting married!

I'm really excited to shoot their wedding next weekend. It's going to be at the Cherokee Ranch down in Sedalia. Apparently there is a stunning view of the Front Range from this fairytale venue, so it should be a beautiful wedding inside and out. Can't wait.

How many stars in the universe? I pull out the calculator to find out...

Carl Sagan got me thinking (as he usually does).

I wanted to know just how many stars there are in the universe. This is almost impossible to figure out, as we can see only so far away. One of the more impressive images ever taken by humans is what's called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field::

This is a composite of many hours of exposures of a small part of the sky that isn't too crowded with nearby stars. That way the Hubble telescope could really expose for the darkest regions of that space without nearby light pollution clouding up the image.

So NASA counted around 10,000 galaxies in that picture. *Only* 10,000. The thing is, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field captures only 1/13-millionth of the entire sky around earth (this includes both hemispheres). Whoa. So the novice astronomer in me did the math.

10,000 galaxies on average x 13,000,000 bits of sky = around 130 BILLION galaxies in the observable universe.

Holy crap. This is of course a very rough calculation, because this is only takes into account the observable universe. The 'actual' number of galaxies could be many times more, depending on the actual size of the universe (if it has a limit).

So... with 130 BILLION galaxies out there, I calculated how many stars exist in the observable universe. On average, a typical spiral-arm galaxy like our own Milky Way (and the nearby Andromeda) contains around 100-400 BILLION stars. Whoa. Let's plug the bigger number into our equation.

130 BILLION galaxies x 400 BILLION stars each = around 52,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.

That's 52 sextillion stars in the entire universe.

That's very difficult to grasp. We're familiar with millions (my uncle is a millionaire). And billions (there are 6 billion people in the world). And perhaps even trillions (the US is $11 trillion in debt right now). People get lost with anything adding up to quadrillion. Or quintillion.

So 52 SEXTILLION stars???

It's inconceivable.

I searched the internet to see if astronomers actually did a more accurate study of how many stars there are in the observable universe. And it looks like they did, in 2003. They came up with 70 sextillion stars within range of modern telescopes (I was in the right -illions range, so I win!)

Thing is, it's almost silly to 1) grasp at the quantity of 70 sextillion, and 2) consider even that a 'rough estimate'. Galaxies are so far away that they appear as mere blobs of light when seen through telescopes on Earth (you only get the crisp images with individual star details when you take very long exposures, to let the light burn in).

Plus, some recent surveys suggest that our Milky Way may contain many more stars than previously observed, to the tune of 3 TRILLION stars. Or about 500 stars per person on earth.

It's humbling to realize that the universe is perhaps too large even for the human brain to quantify. You start thinking about distances, and it liquefies any reasonable sense of grasping the size of our universe.

For example, the Milky Way is roughly 100,000 LIGHT YEARS in diameter. That's about 580 quadrillion miles across. Or, if you drove 80 miles per hour in your car, a road trip across the Milky Way would take you about 827 billion years to drive across it, not counting stopping for gas.

What are the chances of life only occurring on Earth? It's inevitable that conditions for life has already occurred on a planet peacefully revolving around at least a handful of those 70 sextillion stars, giving many billions of years of (theoretical) existence here in the universe. Is it all beyond human comprehension?

The questions pile up.

Happy Mother's Day, Mother!

I love you very much, Mother Enzaldo! Not just on Mother's Day, but on all days of the year. Someone (I forget) said something so very obvious, but so very profound about mothers: you only get one.

Sorry I turned out to be such a goofy kid. (You get one of those eventually.)

Coming up next:: engagement session, Flatirons-style. Stay tuned...

A daily peek inside the Obama Administration, on Flickr

One way you can tell there's a new President in town is in how this new administration is providing transparency in hip, Web 2.0 ways. The White House is not only on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, but now on Flickr.

This is where photography and politics meet. The White House has its own official photostream and it's updated almost daily, showing what's going on with the Prez and his friends. The official White House Photographer is Pete Souza, a university professor now on official "hiatus". He also photographed the latter years of President Reagan's term, plus he traveled all around the country with the Obama presidential campaign.

Sweet job, I must say. Mr. Souza has almost unlimited access to the President.

There's even a Photo Office inside the White House. It's really fun to browse these photos to see just who this Barack Obama is, beyond the speeches and the aura of fame and grandeur. He's just a hard-workin' dude! With a lot of connections.

You can spot Pete Souza occasionally if you ever watch Obama on CNN's video section, following the President wherever he goes. What's best, all these Flickr photos are available in hi-rez! So you can print out your own little Obama shrine. Some of my favorites::

Every photog has seen this reaction before. "Just, why are you taking my picture right now..." (Nothing but love for ya!)


That's cool that he still signs books when he's on the road (go get em on Ebay!)


Nothing but the best for Barack!


I'm really hungry right now so I'm going to get a burger. You can check out the whole Flickr photostream here.

You can also check out Time's daily White House photo here. (Callie Shell is another great photographer who has amazing access to the President.) Time frequently posts slideshows too.

And if that's not enough, you can check out this slideshow gallery on the White House's own website. It's sporadically updated.

And even if all that isn't enough to satisfy your Obamamania, check out the official White House blog. Photos and movies are posted all the time and they're all downloadable. Go get it!