Jud Dagnall Photography Blog

Magda and I did the “Great Bridal Expo” wedding fair at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose today. Our booth was a new design, and we had a very busy and enjoyable time. Thanks to all the great couples who stopped by.

Kami and Kit had a great wedding on September 30th at the San Juan Oaks Golf Club. I was there again with Craig Smith, and we had a ton of fun. Kit’s a golfer, and we spent a little time on the driving range. They were definitely enjoying the day, and Kit even managed to get in a round of golf before the ceremony! Kami’s father gave an incredibly touching speech, and had the whole place in tears.

And now, the images:

Wow. So many weddings to post, but here’s a start. Golshan (what a cool name) and Manuel are such a great couple, and thanks to Craig Smith for this gig. It was quite a party, with outstanding food, relaxed and really fun family, a full mariachi band, and quite a bit of flair!

And now, the images:

Jodie and Mike had an beautiful, fun and low-key wedding at the incredible Kohl Mansion in Burlingame. They are such a cool couple, relaxed, fun and very classy. I was with Craig Smith and we had a great time.

Jodie looking radiant:

Kohl Mansion:

Mike met Jodie moments before the ceremony to give her the bouquet. It was a very emotional moment.

The guys:

Just before the ceremony began:

The families waiting expectantly for everything to get started:

Jodie with her father:

The first kiss:

The decor was top-notch:

Full of special details:

And the light was just right:

And what a cake:

Their first dance:

Jodie and her father:

Some traditional Greek dancing:

Did I say what a cake ?!

Kohl mansion after dark:

Last Sunday was a scorcher, but I got to spend it with a fun couple Rose and Jeremiah + Leonard Norwitz from lensphoto.

The ceremony was held at the Santa Clara mission:

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Rose looking radiant with a beautiful bouquet from www.flower-flour.com:

Lighting the unity candle:

What a great-looking couple!

Jeremiah with the girls!

The head table:

Their dance:

They had a spectacular cake:

And to finish off, Jeremiah successfully retrieved the garter using only his teeth, and Rose was laughing all the way through!

I’m sure they’ll have a great honeymoon in Hawaii!

Last weekend I photographed a fun wedding with a great couple, Vicky and Chris. The wedding was held outdoors at Ardenwood historic park in Fremont. I wish them the best and hope that they enjoy their Jamacian honeymoon! Here are some images:

Vicky getting ready:

The beautiful bride:

Chris looking sharp:

The bride waits…

Vicky arrived at the ceremony in a horse drawn carriage!

The ceremony

They had a horse-drawn carriage. I love the expression on the driver’s face!

Chris with all the ladies

During the dancing:

The first dance

I just returned from an incredible five day workshop with Cliff Mautner. It was exactly what I needed! His use of light is outstanding, and he was able to share with us many of his techniques and approaches. I went away feeling like I had a much better understanding of how to use light as the primary tool of photography, both indoors with flash, and outside using available light. His approach to making striking images with backlighting, silhouttes and minimalist is already having an impact on my photography! He kept us laughing and engaged all the way through, and I also had the opportunity to work side by side with some very talented and inspiring photographers from all over the country. I would definitely recommend his workshop to any photographer who wants a better understanding of light. Thanks Cliff!

Magda and I had a booth for Jud Dagnall Photography at the Brocade wedding fair last weekend in Fremont. It went very well: it was fun to speak with all the great couples and and we are looking forward to our meetings. We were happy with our gallery-style booth design.

Here’s a quick shot that we took (+ a little photoshop doctoring for mood ;)

I’m going to have a booth at the Brocade Bridal Show in Fremont on Sunday. The bridal show is at the Fremont Marriott (46100 Landing Parkway, Fremont, CA 94538) and runs all afternoon (11am 4pm). I’ll have some of my storybook albums there and other samples, and it’s a great time to ask questions and see my work. Stop by if you get a chance!

Wow! It’s been a long time since I posted anything! After quite a lot of time going back and forth, I have decided to create a separate site, http://www.dagnallphoto.com, devoted to my professional photography, and in particular, my wedding photography business, Jud Dagnall Photography . Although I may eventually move some of my fine art and nature images there, for now they will remain here on dagnall.net. In the end, a specifically targeted .com domain seemed like it would be easier to remember, particularly since another photographer already owns the dagnall.com domain!

Here are a few sites that I discovered recently:

Techniques and tips, including good information on measuring the black point of your printer:
zuperphotographics

Cool nature photos from the winner of this year’s Popular Photography contest:
soocool.com

Microsoft is getting into the photo game with some useful content:

Microsoft Professional Photography

Magda and I have now been married for over a month! And I’m finally ready to post some wedding pictures :) Most of the pictures were taken by stefanka photography, and by my friend Alex Meyer. I have cropped and/or edited all the photos, however.

See Magda and Jud’s wedding pictures

ImageMagick is an open source, free, cross-platform set of image processing command-line tools. I use IM to process some of my images for presenation on the web. The sharpening functionality (unsharp mask) is not very well documented, and I found a pretty thorough explanation of
how to use unsharp mask in ImageMagick.

Getting good information about flash photography can be difficult. Here’s a site that’s all about Canon flash photography.

I see a lot of questions regarding the resolution (DPI or dots per inch) of web images. There is clearly much confusion about how to size images for the web. So here goes…

The image DPI resolution does not matter for the web. I don’t know of any web browser that pays any attention to this setting. Image pixels vs. monitor resolution determine the size of web images. Monitors are at a fixed resolution (they only show a certain number of pixels at a time, typically between 800×600 and 1600×1200). So a 600×400 image will be about 1/4 of the size of monitor at 1200×800, regardless of the DPI setting. Just to confuse things a bit, most monitors the US are now at 1000×800 or 1200×1000 pixels, and this will continue to grow as larger monitors become cheaper. And finally, many modern browsers will resize large images so that they fit onto the screen, and then provide a magnifying glass (or some other tool) that allows the viewer to see the full size image by clicking on it.

Keeping your images under 600 pixels wide (and ~400 pixels high) allows the majority of people (on the majority of monitors and browsers) to see the whole image on the screen without having to scroll, including any other things that the website puts above/below/beside the image, like borders, navigation, ads, etc…

Because most monitors are in landscape orientation (wide not tall), the max height of web images should be smaller than the max width (once again to prevent scrolling). This is also an issue when using a digital projector… vertical format images get shrunk (or cropped) more than horizontal images.

For example (ignoring all margins for simplicity), if I have my monitor set at 800×600, I can just display a horizontal image that is 800×600 pixels. However, the same size image in vertical format (600×800) won’t fit (the image height at 800 pixels is greater than the 600 pixels my monitor can display). So I need to shrink the image down 25% to 450×600 pixels so it will fit vertically.