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We woke up to some excitement this morning.

What better way to celebrate the 4th of July than spending a blisteringly hot day on the National Mall? After volunteering all day at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, I stuck around for the fireworks behind the Washington Monument.

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Celebrations on the National Mall

The past two weekends, I volunteered to document the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall. This year’s themes were Mexico, Asian-Pacific Americans: Local Lives, Global Ties, and Smithsonian Inside Out. I love the Folklife Festival because I get to meet amazing people from all over the world and right here in DC. The festival brings together talented musicians, cooks, artists, craftsmen, and others to share and celebrate their culture. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here’s a taste of the festival right here on this blog! (cross your fingers – I’ve never tried using this gallery before)

My new website is up! I’m super excited to have a new face on the web and a new beginning for photographic meanderings. Better website = better photos, right? I think so. I hope you do too.

My favorite cousin,  Gally Articola, did a stellar job making my vision come to life because she is so much more awesomer than I am at all that html stuff. Two semesters of web design and all I’ve accomplished is to appreciate the frustration of coding on a deeper level. Besides being a great web designer, Gally is an amazing artist. If you ever need a sequential artist, illustrator, or colorist, drop her a line. Seriously. She’s awesome. You can check her work out at her website www.beezooka.com and at your local comic book store. She’s restoring old Marvel comics for their encyclopedia, kind of like I do for old photographs.

Everyone come look at my beautiful photographs and their beautiful new home!

This is also a test to link this blog to my Facebook page, so let’s see if it works. I’m sorry if anything strange happens.

Luke and I shot Adam and Gina’s medieval-themed wedding a few weeks ago and are still sorting through 32GB worth of pictures. The wedding was beautiful and everyone got dressed up for the occasion. Here’s a preview from the hair dresser’s.

Gina places her crown on her head.

After months of struggle, I have finally been able to log in to WordPress and update my blog. For reasons I can not explain, WordPress hates me and didn’t want to let me login. It kept trying to tell me that my username, password, and email didn’t exist, while at the same time emailing me every day just to taunt me.  Today, WordPress had a change of heart and let me login with the very information whose existence it didn’t acknowledge just last week. I hope this temporary truce will lead to meaningful negotiations and eventual reconciliation and peace.

Contrary to what you may believe from the neglected and somewhat dilapidated nature of my blog in the past few months, I have been very busy with work, photographing, and a vibrant social life. … Oh wait, nix the last one. In the next few posts, I’ll share with you some of what I’ve been doing.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending hours editing a photo only to bring it onto another computer and have my perfect colors destroyed by an imperfect monitor. Every screen displays colors differently and every printer prints them differently. A hue that seems a neutral tan on one surface is suddenly bright yellow on another. It is rare to find a monitor and printer that are perfectly calibrated. Even at the professional photo lab where I work, where we check and measure the colors daily, the correlation is not perfect. I always have to make a mental adjustment when switching from one monitor/printer to another.

When I capture an image, I want everyone to see what I see. I’m recording my vision to share with the world. But nobody will ever see as I do, even when my vision is bared before you, stretched out on a canvas like a flayed animal. Look at the walls around you. The same paint on the wall in front of you looks like a completely different color that the wall next to you. I can’t control everything. Perhaps that’s part of the beauty of it.

When the shutter closes, only half the work is done. All photos must be edited, and sometimes retouched. This is a very time-consuming process and the results should not be obvious unless you compare them to the original negative. I’ve decided to upload some “before and after” images so you can see what happens when an image is worked over.