Babies are cute anyway, but when the baby is your newborn step-granddaughter you can multiply that by about a million.

This was taken at about 32 hours old. Isn’t she adorable?

Backlit by sunlight, the flag of the USA photographed on Independence Day.

We had a snap thunderstorm blow in almost out of nowhere one weekend, with sustained winds so strong I half expected the dogwood out front of our house wasn’t going to make it.

I love watching big thunderstorms like this, but It’s much more calm and dry on this side of the glass.

Sometimes the photographs you like the most are the unplanned ones.

Here, I was shooting a set of portraits of Kelli wearing blue jeans and a Union Jack t-shirt. White doors as a backdrop, strobe into a shoot-through umbrella, some digital, some on film. Brody and Chester decided they wanted in on the action and since everything was in the same place relative to the lighting, I went ahead and made this photograph.

A lone car passes by in the foggy early hours, leaving a trail of light which passes behind the trees. In the middle distance, lights from the local school’s grounds pierce through the mist.

One last shot from the trip to Northern Ireland, this one on the way back as we left Newark Liberty airport en route to Charlotte.

Out the window to our right, as soon as we left the ground and started to turn to starboard, the docks at Newark and Jersey City came into view with the Manhattan skyline off in the distance. I guessed at a reasonable aperture setting, set the hyperfocal distance, let the camera choose a shutter speed, and plugged away (winding manually so as not to freak anyone out with noisy motor sounds). The 28mm lens meant I had a good shot at getting something but this was definitely not precision composition, plus the distant skyline looks a lot more distant than it really was.

Nonetheless I love how the wing and tilted horizon form part of a triangle with all the really interesting stuff in the middle. I did crop out the window frame ending up with something very close to a square image. Also Ektar delivered with the color as always!

Another “story” picture from Darren and Sarah’s wedding. This is their first dance at the reception as a married couple. Sarah’s smile says it all, I believe!

I’ve never shot a wedding before, and being best man in this case I wasn’t doing anything with a camera during the wedding ceremony, being rather preoccupied with not dropping the rings or otherwise messing up what I was meant to be doing (plus, during the ceremony only the official photographer and videographers were permitted to shoot anyway, if I’d pulled out my massive Canon in the middle of the “I-do’s” I’d rapidly have become the “worst man”!).

However, I did get a chance to run a roll of Fuji Press 800 through the camera later on, at the reception. It was actually kind of fun, but it helps that nobody was depending on my photos, or paying me to make them. No pressure, you know?

They say the best photos tell a story, and that’s why I like this one so much.

Last weekend we were in Northern Ireland for my brother’s wedding. Sarah and him make a lovely couple, and Sam, our nephew, is just adorable.

We brought over a “Mr Potato Head” toy for him, which seemed to go down well.

This might be my favorite photo from the trip, depending on what I got on the not-yet-finished roll that’s in the camera now. Ektar 100 did OK on the skin tones here, but I definitely prefer Portra for that.

The worst of pollen season is over now, thankfully. But when I shot this spring was in the air along with huge amounts of pollen and the sound of sneezing.

The upside to all that pollen though is the explosion of blooms in the yard. We have a dogwood tree out front which, for the briefest window of time between being bare and fully in leaf, puts on an impressive display of white blossoms.