“A birth certificate shows you were born. A death certificate shows you have died. A photo album shows you have lived.”

These days, I am veering more and more toward wanting my clients to have albums and prints. The magic of images isn’t on the computer; it’s in holding a photograph in your hands, caressing it with your eyes, lingering over the details.

Order prints and books from your photographer — doesn’t have to be me, just my advice. Your photographer has found the best resources to make your image look its finest in printed form. A computer doesn’t last forever. Hard drives fail. They are more likely to fail than say, heaven forbid, your house burns down or an earthquake strikes and all you could grab was your children and pets and… photo albums. Everyone wants their photos. Their memories. Not on the computer, but on paper.

I have been thinking about this for a while. I want all of you to have your images in printed form. Even if you have some on the computer, get prints. Nice ones, not cheapie drugstore or department store ones. It is something you will never, ever regret.

It turns out, the Venice canals were commissioned by the city’s founder Abbot Kinney beginning in 1904 and originally consisted of 16 miles of waterways! Venice became part of Los Angeles in 1925 and the city decided, sadly, that the canals and cars were not a good match and proceeded to fill in most of the water. What’s left of these waterways — six remain — has become one of the most prime pieces of real estate in L.A. with houses listed in the neighborhood upwards of $1 million. I can see why, it’s so quaint and charming. At 8 in the morning, the water was like glass, broken only by a few mallards coasting along the surface and the oars of a rowboat powered by an old woman.

So these images were taken along the Grand Canal, mostly. The walk continued on to Venice Beach with its pier and boardwalk consisting of its renowned weirdness (I think the whole area smells like poo, piss, incense and ganja) but right at Washington Avenue, I ran into a couple of friends of mine and we ducked in to a little cafe for breakfast. Now that was a great morning!

These images were processed with Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2 Film Noir 1 preset.

And I was inspired to do the PhotoWalk when I remembered that my friend and photographer extraordinaire Doris Rudd took part in it last year from her home in North Carolina. I didn’t want to miss out on the fun this year! Check out her blog, she’s wonderful.

It’s the most exciting thing I’m doing these days… setting the stage for a couple to interact with each other while I stay in the recesses, taking pictures. I love it.

The emotions are so pure, so authentic. This session captures Candice and Mike, college sweethearts who have been together for three and a half years.

We went out to the wildness of Malibu Creek State Park. It’s primal California… grasses and oaks and brush. They read each other a love letter… they made each other blush… and they told each other how devastated they would be if one of them had to leave the other. And they laughed. There is love and laughter in a Beloved session.

Click to view slideshow.

I photographed Clay when he was just three months old and again, I caught the cutest expression.

Sadly, his birthday party was the last one he’ll have in California for a while. He and his family just moved to New York and I won’t be able to get my camera pointed at this little man for a while.

But he sure can churn out the expressions!

I’d been wanting to photograph my spinning instructor, Cindy, since the summer. I was on a 4-mile run in Arizona listening to a song, the remix of “Unwritten,” that she sometimes plays in spinning and it struck me that she’d be amazing in front of a camera. It was sort of funny because to be honest, I really didn’t know what Cindy looked like… I usually sit three or four rows back, the room is pretty dark except for some blue or red lights, and even though at that time, I’d been going for just shy of a year, I wasn’t quite sure what she looked like, just that in that lighting and from a distance with my bad, old eyes, damn, she looked — how can I put this? — hot. It wasn’t until I got up the nerve to ask her if I could photograph her that I actually saw her up close. Yeah… perfect.

Getting her to agree to it was the easy part… getting her to actually set a date, well, that wasn’t so easy. But nearly four months later, there we were, on our way to the most stunning beach in Southern California — El Matador State Beach in Malibu.

Along for the shoot was my favorite makeup artist, Amanda Martinez, and Meghan, another photographer from my Maura Lanahan class, who was assisting me in carrying all the equipment down the long, steep path to the beach. Here it was, at the end of October, and it was broiling on the beach… it had to be in the upper 80s. And the tide was coming in and the sun was bearing down intensely on us. Not ideal shooting conditions. At. All. But I picked the time and I picked the place so I had to deal with it.

An incredibly fit woman, Cindy was game and gorgeous once she warmed up to the lens pointing at her. And even though most people are seemingly drawn to her awesome physique, I just couldn’t take my eyes off her face.

For this photo, which has become one of my favorites ever, I put on a neutral density filter to cut the light, slow down the shutter and open the aperture wide to blur the background. That let me use my flash in a brolly box for fill and the sun to backlight her hair. And it’s obviously not straight from the camera… it took about six hours of post-processing to create this image, probably the most time I’ve ever spent in front of the computer for one picture. But I’m besotted by the way Cindy looks… simply beautiful.

I’d heard of Disney Hall long before it was built in 2003. Frank Gehry, the architect, finished his plans in 1991 and it took years before the funding was locked down. I remember seeing models of the hall, this bizarre looking building with few straight lines in sight.

Then the frame went up. It looked like the skeleton of a prehistoric animal. I bought season tickets to the first year of world music and was invited to preview the hall before it opened. It was spectacular.

So last Friday, we headed to my car and did a drive-by of Disney Hall. Wow. It still takes my breath away.

Walt Disney Hall, Los Angeles

We had a model there, Tristyn Heldt, who was just awesome. We built a little ghetto set out of a table, camera bags, and some coats. We had a candle, like the Vanity Fair portrait, so we needed the f-stop at 5.6 and the shutter speed at 1/30 or even lower so that the flame appeared. We put a background light on the black seamless, gridded it and gelled it in yellow (as if the candle was casting the glow) and I think it was one stop slower than the main.

And this is one of my pictures I really like. A bit desaturated, lots of burning and dodging, some skin softening and cloning, and judicious use of the liquify tool. But gorgeous.

I was pondering this question while on a bicycle ride. I have a sweet little 12.5 mile route that I like to do… it runs along part of the Orange Line busway in L.A. As I was heading under the 405, I saw it. Under the overpass! That’s it! I can shoot there. There’s a lot of filtered light there.

Later that same afternoon, I picked up Ron, a flinty Clint Eastwood type if ever there was one. Once near the overpass, I dropped off him and my assistant and a boatload of equipment, parked along the street, and went back to shoot. Didn’t need the extra lights at all. Just threw a little reflector back onto the dark side of his face and had some nice, headshot lighting. This is the first picture that Ron and his agent selected out of the couple hundred we shot that day. Me, it’s not my favorite… I like him with a bit more of a surly look although he is anything but surly. But this does catch him as a handsome, friendly guy.

Gotta say, Ron was fun to shoot, too. Since this wasn’t his first rodeo, he knew how to pose, which is always a pleasure. Every time he heard the shutter click, he struck an entirely different look.