Springtime in the Neighborhood
By Rudi | March 18, 2008
Ok, so while my business is mostly about photographing people, this was a love and hobby long before I was doing it as a business. Spring time is such a great to be outside and see the results of our patience over the winter as flowers have been getting ready to welcome us! My wife Janie and I headed out to take a walk in our South Berkeley neighborhood armed with our camera. I took only my new LensBaby 2.0 lens with it’s Macro Kit.
For those who aren’t familiar with the LensBaby it’s a special bellows-like lens that fits where a normal lens would but is absurdly low tech. You push/pull it to focus and tilt it for different effects and to move the spot where the sharpest focus is located. It really gives a creative new way to see the world. It would be amazing for wedding details, ring photos, and some of the dancing. It’s definitely an art and not a science! Here’s my first effort around our neighborhood.
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Shaena
By Rudi | March 18, 2008
Yesterday I spent a little time with my friend Shaena.
Shaena and I have a somewhat unlikely friendship.
First she is a cat and I’m a human.
Second, and more importantly, I’m allergic to cats. Really allergic.
I’ve always connected well with animals, allergies non-withstanding, but Shaena and I had a rough start.
The first time I pet her I got a nasty scratch from her, the second time too. My downstairs neighbor Frieda is Shaena’s caretaker and she warned me that Shaena wasn’t easy to get close to or to pet. In fact since my nice downstairs neighbor adopted several more cats, they have taken over, and driven Shaena, her first cat, out.
Now Shaena comes by when the other cats aren’t around, sits perched up on the fence in a special spot where Frieda leaves food for her.
Over the year I’ve lived here I’ve learned a bit about Shaena. First, she really needs some love and attention. Secondly, she has a really hard time trusting that, and if one isn’t careful she is libel to lash out. In my own way, I can relate to that a bit. I’ve learned that it just isn’t safe to pet Shaena when she is on her perch on the fence. I have also learned that patience, gentleness and time can be healing.
Now when I see Shaena and have a little time, I call out to her. She comes down from her perch high up and comes up to me. We sit on the railing next to my home together. She lets me pet her, she crawls onto my lap and nuzzles with me. Then after a while I go inside and scrub my hands. I’m not as allegic to Shaena as I am to some other cats which helps.
Yesterday with my new Lensbaby lens, I took a moment to take a portrait of my friend Shaena. Here’s the unretouched image
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Getting ready to shoot!
By Rudi | March 12, 2008
I’ve been taking it pretty easy, taking time to heal after my foot surgery at the end of last year. It’s been a much slower process than I had anticipated. Now I’m getting about pretty well and have recovered from my long drive to LA and back for the convention a few weeks ago. It’s normally a long drive but not that big a deal for me but the challenge as I’ve learned with foot surgery is that the more time you spend standing (and to a slightly lesser extent with ones foot down while driving) the more the foot swells up. I lost a few days of progress with that trip but now have more than caught up.
In a little more than a week I’ll be heading down to LA again — this time by plane, to photograph a Bar Mitzvah for my good friend and fellow photographer Louis. It will be good to see Louis and to get back to work! Over the past week and from now until I leave I’m spending time every day walking to get my foot used to it and I continue to do exercises for my foot every day and spend lots of time in the gym getting my body strong again!
Rudi
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Pro Photo Expo!
By Rudi | February 29, 2008
Last weekend I attended the Pro Photo Expo in Pasadena. It’s produced by Professional Photographers of California and is an annual event. This was my first time attending and I made a special effort this year as I wasn’t able to attend the national show in Tampa. I attended with two of my fellow members of the board from our local PPGBA (Professional Photographers of the Bay Area) group.
There were some great speakers and the tradeshow was great as well. I was happy to see that at least one company, Rice Studio Supply is increasing their offering of products made from recycled paper. I spoke with several other vendors to encourage them to offer recycled and tree-free alternatives but I didn’t find anyone else already making an offering. I was hoping to see Hanamuele’s new Bamboo based inkjet paper but they weren’t represented. I’ve read good reviews and will be ordering a batch to test soon myself.
I didn’t take my SLR with me on my trip so this is a photo of Rice’s booth from my little point and shoot. Many, but not all of the products are made from recycled paper.
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Photoshoot with Green Event Planner
By Rudi | February 20, 2008
I had the pleasure of taking a headshot of my colleague and friend AJ a couple of weeks ago. AJ was the in house event planner at Back to Earth Catering and has recently ventured off on her own. It was a pleasure getting more aquainted with her and getting a great photo of her among the Redwoods here in Berkeley.
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Jhos and Julie
By Rudi | February 15, 2008
On December 2nd, I had the honor of photographing the wedding of Jhos and Julie. This wasn’t their big wedding which happened earlier (the weekend before mine) but a civil ceremony that was the legal event. They still made this a special event and were able to invite guests that weren’t at their first wedding. For me it was quite a challenge as it was two weeks after my surgery and I photographed the event seated in one position! My wife Janie was kind enough to assist me and got some great photos herself. Just to be clear, they knew what my limitations were and I wouldn’t have accepted payment given my limitations but it was a beautiful event and I enjoyed the challenge!
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My Foot Surgery
By Rudi | January 9, 2008
On November 16th, I had surgery on my left big toe. So I’ve been out of commission for a while, recovering and now rehabilitating. The surgery was to remove bone spurs and reposition the bone to help save the bone joint. The alternative, a bone fusion would have meant that I’d lose the ability to bend my big toe! So far the healing is going well albeit more slowly than I hoped. I’m spending around 4 hours a day doing exercises and icing to help it heal so my apologies to all that I’m a bit slower to respond than usual. I expect a full recovery and should be photographing portraits and shorter events by late February and anticipate being ready for wedding season by March.
Meanwhile, I’m slowly catching up on posting updates that I wasn’t able to post and I’m back dating some of them to put them in chronological order.
Rudi
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Our Green Wedding
By Rudi | January 4, 2008
This article first appeared on our wedding website back in October and I thought some of you might be interested in what we learned. As an aside, Halbright Photography is currently in the process of getting green certified.
An eco-wedding in the making
It’s not easy being green
We are both concerned about the condition of our planet Earth. We have fretted about the environmental impact of our wedding. Yet we feel it is important to bring our community together to celebrate important occasions like our wedding. We have decided to take our environmental impact into consideration as we make decisions. It hasn’t always been easy; and yet, it has helped us determine our priorities.
We had some ideas that sounded great but didn’t end up being as green as we hoped. Rudi found a mail-order store in Israel that provides eco-suede kippot* made of recycled cardboard. Sounds green? We soon found that these kippot are made in China, shipped to Israel and then shipped direct to us in the United States. Not very green. Our questions to the store (via email) about where they are made and how they are dyed remain unanswered weeks after asking them. The solution? We are skipping the kippot. Anyone who wants to wear one is welcome to bring theirs. Many of us already have a drawer full of kippot from weddings and mitzvot so we can choose among them. If you have them, we would prefer that you wear a brown or green kippah to blend with our natural setting in the redwoods, but wear what you like or none at all.
*Kippot are small round caps worn by Jewish men and women. Traditionally, Kippot has been worn only by men, but in modern times the push for equality between the sexes in the practice of Judaism has led some women to wear Kippot. Some Jews only wear Kippot while praying, making blessings, or studying Jewish religious texts; more traditional Jews wear Kippot the entire day.
Our Invitations
Thanks to Nepalese Paper company for our beautiful invitations! Rudi took a flyer from them last November at the Green Festival in SF (over one month before he proposed). We love their invitations, the fact that they are tree-free is great, and we laser printed them which is better for the environment than ink jet printing. They are shipping in bulk from Nepal which isn’t very green, but we like supporting the Nepalese workers and the connection to Janie’s Tibetan Buddhist practice is a nice one.
Our invitations are printed on single sheets of 8.5 x 11 paper and cut to size. No staples or saddle stitching is used which makes them easier to recycle.
Catering
We were excited by a number of eco-friendly caterers including Back to Earth, located nearby in Emeryville. We ended up selecting a venue which provides its own catering and doens’t allow outside caterers. We are working with the Berkeley Faculty club to provide as many organic and local ingredients as possible. We will report on our results once we finalize everything.
Candles/Centerpieces
We have decided against petroleum based candles. We have decided to use LED based candles that use rechargeable batteries. One of the manufactures has stopped making these so we obtained as many as we could in time and found another company to provide the rest. Some of them have built in batteries with a dedicated charger and the others use AA batteries. We have used nimh rechargeable AA in those ones as we don’t like to through away batteries. These candles will serve dual purpose — as part of our centerpieces and as gifts to those who have helped much at our wedding!
Flowers and Plants
We are using local flowers and potted plants that are grown naturally. Many popular flowers used for weddings don’t last long enough so they are treated with chemical preservatives. We are selecting flowers that don’t require these and using potted plants as part of the decor.
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Powering the event A PA System without power? After working a number of weddings which didn’t have PA (public address) systems and where everyone struggled to hear the ceremony, I knew having good audio was important. We are expected at least 130 people and have at least one person who is hard of hearing in the mix. Meanwhle we are in a park outdoors without any electricity. My hope was to use the same deep cycle battery that I’ve used along with my flexible solar panels to power our solar Sukkah last year and a low power lighting system for our camp at Burning man this year. The trees are too dense to allow enough light in for solar and based on my calculations my battery isn’t quite powerful enough to power an audio system for the entire time — so I’ve purchased a second battery (used) just like it the first one, and that battery will be resold thanks to Craigslist after the event. I will have two 55ah batteries hooked up in parallel to a 1000 watt pure sine wave inverter powering two powered PA speakers and a mixing console. These batteries weigh almost 50 lbs each so getting one larger one wasn’t going to work as well. This isn’t the ultimate green audio setup but much better than a generator as it’s charged from a more efficient source with more pollution controls (our local power station) and less noisy too! The original battery and inverter were purchased used via eBay and the only brand new part is the cables that connect the batteries to the inverter. |
Flatware for the wedding events, How green is it?
How green can paper plates be?
It would have been great to have limited ourselves to reusable plates and other items but with events at 4 different locations, no sink available at 2 of them and limited time, it just wasn’t practical. The plates we used aren’t made of paper at all but rather are made of pulp that is left over in sugar cane production. These are fully biodegradable so please do not through them in the garbage! We will provide a special receptacle for compostable trash!
Also, we opted for 3 section plates to avoid having separate salad bowls. These may not hold as much salad but there will be plenty for seconds!
Plastic cups? Now these can’t be green???
Our “plastic” cups are vege-based and are also compostable and made from renewable resources. These are made from a combination of corn and other vegetable products and are similar to the forks, knives and spoons we used.
We were hoping to buy all of these from local company Green Home www.greenhome.com but there minimum quantities were very high, except for the individually wrapped fork/knife/spoon sets which had too much waste wrapping, and we won’t need as many knives as the rest so it would have produced excessive waste. Instead we purchased items from Boulder, CO based www.ecoproducts.com who shipped them promptly and used biodegradable peanuts that Rudi will reuse in my business. The entire order of supplies was ordered together from one supplier to minimize the energy used to ship them.
Bottled water?
We were tempted to buy bottled water but that’s so much wasted plastic and we already have cups. PLA (plant based) plastic is tempting but expensive. We have decided to reuse the 5 gallon water bottles we purchased for burning man along with a simple pump. You can see these in action at the picnic.
If someone volunteers to refill them and bring them to our ceremony site we can provide water there too. Let me know if you want to volunteer! [Note: We ended up having water left over and someone did bring them to the reception site!]
Our Programs were also printed on paper from Nepalese Paper Company as were our Seating tent cards
At Halbright Photography I strive to be as green as possible while producing beautiful products for my clients. I use recycled paper within the business, drive a hybrid vehicle, purchase non-critical equipment used, sell or give away what I don’t need, and print as much as possible using environmentally friendly printers.
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My Wedding!
By Rudi | November 9, 2007
My wife (still getting used to calling her that!) Janie and I had a beautiful wedding under a canopy of Redwood trees in Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, followed by a reception on the Berkeley Campus at the Berkeley Faculty Club. We were a bit worried about rain but lucked out and had near perfect weather!
We had two wedding photographers for our special day. Here are some of our beautiful photos from colleague and friend Jennifer Skog who also took our beautiful engagement portraits!
My wife (still getting used to calling her that!) Janie and I had a beautiful wedding under a canopy of Redwood trees in Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, followed by a reception on the Berkeley Campus at the Berkeley Faculty Club. We were a bit worried about rain but lucked out and had near perfect weather!
We had two wedding photographers for our special day. Here are some of our beautiful photos from colleague and friend Jennifer Skog who also took our beautiful engagement portraits!
Topics: Personal, Wedding | No Comments »
Shira and Yoav
By Rudi | August 26, 2007
I was honored to be selected by Shira and Yoav to photograph their wedding, especially because Shira is such a talented artist and photographer herself and Yoav is an award winning writer and filmmaker. Their wedding was a heart-felt and spectacular event and it was a treat to witness it! An extra bonus for me is that their officiant, Arik Labowitz is officiating my wedding in a month!
Rudi
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