Meet Keary & Justin. They are one amazing couple and also good friends of mine. I’ve known Keary for a little over a year through her own photography business, Keary Dee Photography. Earlier this year she married her best friend and amazing husband, Justin. I recently did a 7 hour day workshop with San Diego photographer, Dan Fields and at the end of the day he wanted to shoot a downtown bridal shoot so our good friends Keary & Justin modeled for us.

Keary & Justin are totally in love with each other but more in love with Jesus and the way they live their lives shows that. Our shoot started near one of my all-time favorite places, East Village near Petco Park. We walked the streets, shot inside of a fun hotel and even went inside Petco Park. The weather was so perfect and these two totally know how to rock the camera because they are SO good looking!

At the end of the session, we totally realized that Keary looks like Taylor Swift and Justin kind-of resembles American Idol winner Kris Allen? I don’t know… maybe thats just me. You can decide for yourself.

Last week while I was hanging out with my love Scarlett Lillian, we had the opportunity to take one of Jacksonvilles amazing couples Dustin & Candice out for a shoot in the backwoods area for a shoot with our new lighting rig! The lighting rig consists of a Vegabond Powerpack, Alienbee 1600 and a strip soft box.

I have been shooting with studio lights since my college days and I love to work with it any opportunity I can. When my good friends Zach & Jody Gray were in SoCal a few months ago to teach their lighting workshop, I went up one afternoon and there I learned how to shoot better images in camera but also how to travel with your studio lights onto a location shoot.

I love shooting with off camera light now because not only do you get killer images IN CAMERA (Yes… most of these images were done in camera and had little to no photoshop done to them) but you also get to capture images with perfect lighting. If you want to learn more of this topic then you should check out Zach & Jodys lighting IN-CAMERA workshops!! Click here for more info

Last February I was attending my very first photography convention, WPPI in Las Vegas. I was enjoying the trade show & after parties so much to the point that I wanted to have some more fun so I decided to crash a “workshop after party” at Rouge inside the MGM Grand. Little did I know at the time it was hosted by Scarlett Lillian.

We briefly talked with each other, and later on that night I added her on facebook. It wasn’t until this recently when I noticed she twittered something about her faith & responded. This opened up the door for the two of us to start communicating via email. In these emails were stories of our commonly shared faith in Jesus Christ, favorite music… we both love Jeremy Camp and dare I say N*Sync! Through our long emails, which stretched past 5 paragraphs every-time, our fingers grew tired from typing and this led to video chat for weeks followed by texting throughout the day.

After all of our communication, Scarlett informed me that she was making a trip to Nor-Cal to shoot a wedding and she was coming to San Diego to shoot an engagement session! What started with just hanging out as friends then turned into a few fun “date nights” followed by a few amazing shoots around San Diego & Orange County. Through our time together, we realized we had so much more in common!

Our trip first started when I picked Scarlett up from the airport. The amazing thing about our relationship is we have Christ as our center. The very first thing we did was worship Jesus at church together. The last thing we did before she went home that next Sunday was worship Jesus together. I knew that our connection to each other was something more than personal love could ever control and it’s a feeling between two people that can only be felt when you have Jesus in the middle of “everything”. As we heard the words of “From The Inside Out” being played, we opened our eyes, looked at each other and with tears running down both of our faces we knew that it was God’s love that brought us to be together.

I was lucky enough to take a few portraits of Scarlett during her visit to San Diego. I am so excited to have the opportunity to share them with you!

My good friend, Scarlett Lillian was in San Diego for a week. We decided to take some new head shots of each other. This shot is one that I was lucky enough to capture during the day. I especially love this shots and I really wanted to share it with all of you. Look for a blog post of all the great images from this shoot in the near future!!