New Friends!

This crew at Brooks is awesome!

We're taking a break so I wanted to post a quick picture of us! We've been having a blast and managed to get through everything in two days! ...and we even got some fun pics of JD and Jasmine last night during our night shoot!

JD and Jasmine

Who else thinks JD and Jasmine are the most amazing people in the world?

PartnerCon Pics!

Kristin Renee just sent me these pics so I had to post them!!! SOOOO FUN!!! Now I really miss you guys! Also, be sure to read Mike Colon's blog! He's such a stud! ok...gotta get back to preparing for tomorrow! Yikes!

What an amazing experience the 2nd Annual PartnerCon was and what a treat it was to get to meet so many of you! I always get a little sad after things like this are over because so many of my friends live in different states and sometimes the only times during the year that I get to see them is at the conferences so I'm glad that I've been super busy today otherwise I think I would've had to think about how much I miss everyone.

I really think it's incredible that Pictage puts these things on and has developed such a wonderful community of photographers - they are true lovecats.

I'm gonna be awol the next couple of days because I have a workshop at Brooks tomorrow and so I've been preparing like mad today and it's gonna be a lot of fun! We're going through a bunch of new "permission based" marketing stuff tomorrow and then we're gonna do a night shoot downtown SB! Sunday will be a complete hashing through of setting up a studio for freedom through automation and outsourcing.

So I'll try and post tomorrow night but probably not till Sunday.

:)
DJ

OSP PartnerCon Party!

I can't even begin to describe how incredible it was to see everyone tonight. Wow. I love you guys so much...we need to do this way more often!

Sleep well everyone!
DJ

Back to Blackberry

I really love simplicity. It seems like our lives are full of so much stuff we don't need and that became really evident in my replacement MDA phone. It had tons of cool features (some of which I liked) but it had way to much stuff that I didn't need so I took it back and got another blackberry. I was reading in Business Week this month about a cool new Blackberry "Pearl" coming with a camera which I'd really like on my phone but all the other jazz just slows it down I think. Nathan Holritz showed me this cool new service for reading magazines called Zinio Reader where you can just order magazines and get them on your computer and then you can search them for keywords and stuff which is way cool. I don't suggest peope read a lot of magazines "Fast Food Knowledge" but there are a few good ones out there.

oh yea...BTW....for the last month I didn't have any numbers in my phone so if you sent me a text or called or something I might not have responded because I didn't know who it was or didn't have the number but I'm syncing my new blackberry right now so that will be cool to know who is writing and calling. :)

Ok!!! PARTNERCON IS HERE!!!! WOOOHOOO! See ya'll tonight!!!

Slideshow! Yea!

Ok so here's a quick slideshow from last weekend! What an incredible day and I couldn't have imagined it going better!

CLICK HERE! for the slideshow!

Life is too short...

Sometimes people ask me if I only shoot gorgeous brides and my answer is "of course."

I seriously have thought every one of my brides was beautiful but today folks - wow! I'll post a slideshow tomorrow but here are a few pics of my buddy Peter's bride! I'm not claiming to have a "type" but if I did...

BTW - all these shots were taken before my Mark II went down again (I think she's just getting old) :(

Cool shot!

Kristin Renee has been helping me out this summer because I knew I'd be outta town a lot and I always think it's funny because she always wants to come and shoot weddings on the weekends even though she's been working all week so I decided to peek back in to the last wedding we shot together and this was the first shot of hers I clicked on and wow! I love it! I dunno why she wants to shoot with me b/c this is way better than any shot I got that day...and it's even cooler because she was actually in shooting the cocktail hour when she noticed this composition.



Great job Kristin! Thanks for all you do for me and sorry I don't talk much when you're here and I always leave and go shopping...and speaking of shopping - I got the coolest stuff this weekend at Z Gallery. I got this pot thing for my bedroom and it took me about 30 minutes to figure out what kind of branches to put in it but I think these work



...and then I also got this little droor thing to set my keys and wallet on when I come inside because if I don't put them in the same spot I'll lose them...and I also got a blanket rack but I didn't take a picture of it.

Cool

So the last couple of days I haven't had much to do because Kristin has been jamming out all the weddings. I think she got 5 up in the last week and she only works for 5 hours a day. The workflow is so fast - I love it...and so today I was surfing the web and I saw one of my pics on the front of Rebecca St. James site! That's so cool!

I guess somehow it got passed to them from a Showit Web show and they stuck it up there. Rebecca St. James is the princess of Christian music and I think one of the reasons she's so successful is because she's always doing somethng new and so is her webite! Everytime I log on there is new info on the front page and it makes me want to go back.

Anyway, just thought that should be something for us all to think about as we develop our next generation of websites.

:)
DJ

Rohit Chander

This morning FOUR of my good friends forwarded this email from this person Rohit Chander - rohitstudios@gmail.com - who is asking everyone for a password to Showit Web. I seriously laughed because of how bold this joker is...honestly - talk about no shame. I'm not super big on security but a few months ago Todd implemented a new registration system that tells us who registered the application and how many times it's been registered so it's pretty simple to see who is sharing their codes.

What's even funnier is that now when somebody googles the name Rohit Chander or Rohitstudios.com this post will come up and they'll see it and read about it.

Today is blog day!

Tonight at Rocks (right across the street from my place) Dom from Reality is playing and it's gonna be sweet! There's a 5 dollar cover charge but I'll take care of that for anybody who wants to go. He is awesome! Here's a shot of him with Pastor Britt and Pastor G.

Sweet! He's on at 10pm so get there or come to my place beforehand and we'll cruise together!

Love it!

It isn't very often that I'm impressed by video. Video is just incredibly difficult to make it artistic and simple which is how I prefer images to be presented but I just saw this video today that Scarlett from Captivating Studios put on her blog and thought it was fantastic so check it out! I didn't see how much she's charging for this type of engagement video but it should be several thousand dollars because this is awesome!

Ok wow.

I was hoping to post up more fun pics and stuff yesterday but my laptop ran out of power and I didn't have my powercord so I had to wait till today.

Anyway...Janey posted up a fun slideshow here so be sure to check that out! and this picture is from the second night when it was just us photographers...also I think I found out the trick to getting the best presents on your birthday so for all you kids and grownups who love presents the trick is to ask that nobody bring presents. I seriously am so bummed that I didn't figure this out when I was five because this year I asked for no presents and I got the coolest stuff and now I feel like I wasted 26 previous opportunities! Live and learn I guess.

...and then I just had to show you the Barlow-Birthday-In-A-Box! In it there is all sorts of sweet stuff including a whoopie cushion which will be great for times when Gary Fong is not around and all my favorite stuff AND a coupon booklet which is killer!!!



I seriously am so lucky to have the friends that I do and at dinner I thanked everyone for all the love, support, and encouragement and I want to say the same to all of you! Getting to know everyone in person and virtually has been such a gift for me and I'm so amped to meet more of you as we continue on this journey together.

Much love,
DJ

Birthday preview

My birthday was perfect! I was so stoked to see so many of you last night (email me your pics) and then tonight we just had a small sushi night and then the ladies came back to my place for some cake that Amy and Janey made and it was so good! Here they are singing happy birthday.

Amy Nave - thank you so much for putting all of this together! You're amazing!

...and I have more fun stuff to post but I am so so so tired so I have to go to bed but I'll be able to get more stuff up tomorrow.

Here is a video of the cake. :)

...and thanks to everyone for the emails, phone calls, and packages! I got a very special "Barlow-birthday-in-a-box" that I can't wait to show you...and props on Colon's blog. :)

:) 'night!
DJ

Inspired!

I had the chance to work with Scott Corridan and his crew for the first time and they are incredible.



I've honestly never seen a wedding like this one and it was inspiring to see how they managed the day and I heard a saying once that there's no such thing as a perfect wedding but after today I must disagree.

...I would've added more pics to the show but I've gotta be up in a few hours for church and then I'm helping my buddy Dane shoot a wedding so it's double duty for me this weekend!

I'll post more pictures and talk more about today's experience on Monday...until then enjoy the show.

CLICK HERE!

:)
DJ

p.s. Most of the sweet shots were taking by Raya Carlisle.

My baby is back!

When I was in Italy I busted my Mark II and it's been really difficult for me to be without her. Don't laugh. But yesterday I got her back from Canon and she's all better and I wanted to test her out today and I was pleased to see that she was as excited to be back with me as I was to be back with her. I really do think the Canon 1d Mark II is the perfect camera for wedding shooters and over the last month I've shot weddings with the 30d and the 5d and those are great cameras that will get the job done but nothing matches the Mark II.

So another question I have deals with how you all shoot. I've always been a huge fan of shooting all Manual. I don't know why but I just think with digital it really is the easiest and best (most consistent) way to go. So does everyone shoot mostly manual?

Tonight I shot the rehearsal for a wedding I'm shooting tomorrow and I shot it all JPEG but I shot it the same way I'd shoot it if I was shooting RAW and so you can see exactly how all the pics come straight out of camera (despite a little bit of flattening and darkening b/c of the compression) and so this style of shooting combined with some automation settings in post production leaves me with almost zero work to do after the wedding.

Here's a link to the gallery which is almost finished uploading and other than a few shots I deleted while I was shooting they are all there with their meta data.

:) This weddings is gonna be pretty insane so check back for the slideshow!

Ooops

Sorry for all you who tried to make orders or go on OSP tonight. I guess I shouldn't send out my newsletter to everyone at once because it keeps getting bigger and there is just over 4900 people on there so after I sent it this afternoon there was tons of people taking advantage of the good sales and even more on OSP and it maxed out the server.

The situation with forums and e-stores is they run off of server "resources" because it's possible that 1000's of requests are being made of the server at the same time from hundreds of different people and so it's super gnarly on the server and there really isn't much of a way to prepare for a big rush so I think I'll try and send my newsletters out to only 1000 people at a time next month.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience and b/c of the max-out my email has also been stalled but it's starting to come in now...it was kind of nice though because my dad saw that my site was down and so he called and I got to chat with him and mom and they are so busy I don't get to talk to them much so that was something good that came out of the server being down.

:)
DJ

OSP - 100,000 Posts!!!

I wanted to say a HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to all of you because OSP hit 100,000 posts! This is incredible and the family that we have here is truly one of a kind. Whenever people would ask questions at the PUG groups I would always be so excited to tell them about OSP and how all their questions and all of their life problems would be solved if they'd just get connected in with all of you! :) Thanks for continually growing and giving! It really is the best way to live.

So yesterday I returned home from Kona and I must admit I'm excited to be home for a few weeks. I haven't been home for more than 3 days since the last week in May but it was a total rush and I loved it. There's something eerily peaceful about being on the road. There's almost a sense of security in it that I haven't experienced before. When you're constantly moving it seems like problems have a tendency to fix themselves...which is really nice because I have a lot of problems :)

Anyway...I really just wanted to post up some pictures of the wonderful people I met and I know that so many of you have more pics so please send'em over because I'd love to have them and I'll post'em up.

I can't wait to see you at PartnerCon in just a few weeks!

Brett Golfing

FINALLY made it back to SB! Yea!

Anyway - My video guy Brett is a stud golfer and so instead of being a little girly man like me he decided to go out and golf and then make a video...it's funny (or at least he thinks it is) LOL

CLICK HERE for the VIDEO!

ENJOY!
DJ