Back from Yosemite!

It was SUCH a great week getting away to my favorite family vacations in the Sierra Nevada. I'll be posting some more photos on sunday. I have to get to bed for an all day shooting tomorrow. Cheers..

Keone & Anna

Ok, this is my favorite wedding I have done so far. Nestled in the foothills of the Sierras, this wedding was amazing and had such a blessing of friends, familiy, history, legacy and a divine presence in. Starting back over 2.5 years ago, in early 2005 when Anna 1st met me at a bridal faire, later I find out that she loved my work (which is a HUGE honor) and wanting to have me photograph her wedding was a priority for her. So when she contacted me and told me the story, I felt indebt and excited to work wiith her, despite the fact that there were a few other pending interests in that same date. I told them it was taken and told Anna that My wife and I were STOKED to be working with them. So after meeting a few times to do some e-session shoots, and meeting up a at a few weddings of their friends who worked with us as well, we got to know them pretty well! So when the wedding came around, and Keone asked me to play golf with him the morning of, well you can guess how honored and stoked i was!

So here is the best of the best, from tonights images, I will be gone for a week in Yosemite, but i wanted to post some of my favs. Thanks to everyone who was there, and shared so many feelings. Have a great weekend and stay in touch!

Thanks again Keone & Anna

Yosemite Bound!!!

I will be in yosemite with my wife and family until friday the 30th on vacation. This is our 26th annual trip up there for an entire week. Have a great week, Caio!

Keone & Anna Slideshow

Here is the slideshow from their wedding!

Meet:Liz & Bryan

This sweet couple is getting married in less than 2 weeks! June is a busy month, but we fit in some time shooting them in Santa Barbara, the next day after Aaron & Yoko. We did a little bit of shooting up at Knapps Castle, which is now a highly requested spot. Thanks to recent shoots such as Comon & Vineda. But we had a blast shooing with Liz & Bryan, they had so much flavor, and one of my favorite things about our couples is that they are relaxed, have fun and be themselves, and we get to capture who they really are as a couple and how much fun they have. Now Bryan, who looks like a young James Dean, fit perfectly on the Vespa, thanks to the local Santa Barbara Vespa dealer>Vespadealer. The owner was amazing and let us borrow one of his vespas to shoot with, we had a blast wrapping up the shoot on a warm evening in one of my favorite beach cities.

Aaron & Yoko

This sweet couple contacted me a few weeks ago for their upcoming wedding in Carmel, Ca. at the Amazing Highlands Inn We shot their session in San Francisco, and in the middle of the shoot, the most horrible thing happened, they got their car broken into, We felt so bad, and ended the shoot with plans to finish the next week. Bouncing back from that, we had pt2, another amazing session with the couple, which ended up being a treat to hang out with them again. Then later we took them out to a sweet dinner at Scomas on the water in the city there Scomas. a family favorite for decades. Thanks Aaron & Yoko. We are really looking forward to your ceremony and wedding day!

Camera Toss Over Cement?!

I normally throw my camera up over grass, but here i had no choice, and all there was, was cement. So I did what a responsible photographer could do, throw it up and just be forced to catch it! Here is the shot! My wedding party and the bride and groom last saturday expected no less!

Amy & Tanner

There has been SO much that I have shot in the last 2 months, so i wanted to share some of the most recent stuff. To give you an idea, let me give you some of the stats: traveling over 5,000 miles by car, 18,000 by plane, and with 451 gigs of new images, totaling 74,750 images roughly, there has been some amazing shots, great relationships developed, and fun times. Here i begin to share in the next 10 days. This will be the recap of the "best of the best" along with some long awaited updates to the website in full size, so that means you can view the website on a 30' screen on "full screen" mode!

Here are Amy & Tanner, a couple who I am blessed to be photographing their wedding coming up in September. They had so much fun shooting for hours on the beach, then we went into town to one of our favorite walls and shot some more. Its always challenging shooting on the beach to get something different. But they made it easy for me, and the weather was amazing!

New cover!

I am so thankful becuase the cover of one of my favorite books, by bible just got back from a 2 week trip from Sam Goodwin, who owns, Preserve the Word. I read this book for 10 minutes or so every morning, it keeps me grounded, humble, learning, and every day it makes such a positive difference in my relationships with people, and in my business as well. So THANK YOU SAM for fixing and rebinding it! Sam is AMAZING & TALENTED and i would highly recommend her. Here is the before and after of my book! Check out her website. Have a blessed day....

the old binding...

the after..

Epic Surf...

Those of you who surf, know these days, at the right spots, the swell is going off. There is a North/South swell combo in the water and we left early enough to be at Jalama @ 7am hitting the waves as the sun broke throught the clouds. Dan, my buddy and I scored some sweet waves, and spite of my lighly sprained ankle, was able to ride my share. (Anna & Keone, if your reading this, dont worry, it will be better by your wedding on saturday!) Here are some images i pulled offline, to give you an idea of what an amazing spot this is. Get out and visit it if you have never been out there! Have a great rest of your weekend!


Above, you can see how glassy and peaky it gets, blow, a glimpse of the whole bay/beach area, sitting below the coastal mountains.

I LOVE BEING HOME! + Happy Fathers day.

We live in an amazing place, the California Coast. so refreshing, this weekend, was full of surfing, tennis, hiking, cycling, bbq's dinner parties, game nights, fathers day fun, graduation weekend meant that every hotel was booked out for a 20 mile radius! So we laid low in the day to avoid all the crowds.




And to my dad, Happy Fathers day! You are an amazing part of my life and still continue to influence me. Thanks for everything you did and do! Here is a photo of me and My dad and Rachel, my amazing wife. Its taken from a my old camera phone, yea, 24k photo, totally 1990's technology but, its cool. Cant wait until the iphone comes out. That would make an awesome fathers day gift!

Mentor Session Fulfillment....

I have had the honor to mentor almost 30 photographers this spring, and its been a HUGE blessing to both sides. We have really enjoyed working with these photographers, helping them out, Fresh off a great mentor session in Tahoe with Nicole Miller Photography.

A few weeks ago we were able to mentor Christine, a newly married couple doing business together, a growing trend in this nation. She was awesome and to hear about the success story and how she is now "making it" is SO great to hear. I know that she is going to really go big someday! Here is a sweet quote from her that i got a few minutes ago!:
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"Mike Larson's mentoring changed our business forever. His conventional wisdom and amazing people skills were translated in a way that I easily understood and immediately was able to apply to our own photography business. Mike's hope inspiring advice also helped my husband and I personally, as he encouraged us to find purpose in all we do - in life and in business."

Have a super-weekend!
Christine
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I share this because it is such a blessing and an honor to be a help in others lives, and see them succeed, be fulfilled and have a purpose. I look forward to the rest of this year, and the future photographers we are scheduled to meet and work with.

Click on her opening webpage image below to check out her site!

Cameron Ingalls on "Love & Communication"

One of my local buddies, photographer extraordinary, Cameron Ingalls wrote an amazing piece on his blog about love, you got to check it out. Its men like Cameron who inspire us, in fact we all inspire the people we come into contact with in some way, but how much more powerful is it when you influence someone in a way that blesses their life through a better marriage. They say, "give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime". But how about, give a man a gift of sorts, and make him happy for a day, share your gift wisdom of how to have a better marriage and make him happy for a lifetime". Check out his blog here for the article click on the image below, its short, sweet and packs a heavy punch. Well done Cameron. I am inspired.

Blog Down

I know its been a while since I have posted, we recently switched servers, and so it was down, and due to my travels, i didnt have time to get it going, but thanks to my amazing tech, web designer, and friend; Jon, was able to get it working finally. Thanks JON!!! So i have a backlog of posts, and exciting images and adventures, as we have driven over 2,000 miles in the last 10 days. Stay tuned!

Salmon Fishing

Every Year all the guys in our family go out fishing, we love deep sea fishing, fly fishing, spear fishing, trolling for trou in the sierria's. Its all good. This summer we kicked it off with a trip out of San Francisco, waking up at 4:15 to get to Emeryville and board the boat before its light, Today we are set out to get our limit. Going past the Golden Gate bridge and up the coast towards Stinson Beach, our captain searches for fish. Once we drop our lines, we troll for the best ocean fish in the world, King Salmon! The tender red meat that is OH so good. After 2 hours i caught 1 of the 4 salmon caught, but the deckhand shouts out "green" which means the endangered Coho salmon, so we release them. Soon after the captain askes if we want to head out to the farralon Islands to catch some Cod, he says we can catch our limit. So we do, and we all catch our limit, we keep following the fish, in water about 100-180 feet deep, we drop our lines to the bottom, as we pull the fish out, their eyes bulge out as they come up to the surface, under no pressure. My brother brings up a cod, and then the prized Lingcod bites onto the smaller fish, and the deck hand shouts out, "hitchiker" which means he has to spear the fish, because it will let go once the smaller hooked fish is out of the water and the net will surly scare him away. All in all, we catch 30 fish between my brother and dad. Heading back to port, with our catch and thoughts of fresh sushi and fillet for dinner.