gwyneth colleen photography » portsmouth, nh wedding photographer

joanna and i met in september of 2003 when my friend luke showed up at his flat with a poor, homeless american girl.  i’d just spent 3 weeks up north cleaning a backpackers and living in a campervan…and i was over it.  sure that’s what a real, cool, hippy backpacker does, but…um, it didn’t actually PAY, and i wanted to earn some money.

there were 5 people living in the weird old house…luke, joanna, amy, whatshisface–the lanky vegetarian from up north who was incongruously a total rugger-head (that is, rugby enthusiast), and laura (joanna’s sister.)  laura enthusiastically suggested, “share my room!”  (her room was quite large and had this lofted cupboard thing that she slept in…so there was plenty of room to throw a mattress in the corner for me.

eventually luke shifted out, laura left, other people moved in, but i stayed in that room sleeping on the mattress in the corner.

a couple years later, in 2005, joanna came to north america for a big inspiration tour…she wanted to see the artistic expression, street art, graphic design happening in the cities.  we met up and went on a massive road trip…slept on various friends couches, in a dodgy hostel in montreal, in the car in toronto after a blue jay’s game, walked around the shores of lake michigan, swung by niagara falls…it was a great trip.

she’s now co-launched her own design/art/media company called we love inc and is working her little tail off, because they’re crazy talented and busy…but i insisted that we needed to take a day and have some photo fun.  and oh DID we.  we took turns styling one another and driving around the city to shoot.  (and of course, we couldn’t do something like that without incident…we had to swap the rental car halfway through because it was protesting driving up hills.  that’s like getting a car that can’t go up hills in san francisco.  just not going to work.)  without further ado…the beautiful joanna.

it was SUCH a fun shoot…if you’d like to see any of the others, you can view the gallery here.  (and, of course, when i’ve got more than 2 teasers of the ones she took of me…you’ll get to see ‘em!  but, i’ll leave you with:  peacock feather, dead body in graffiti-d trash den, gwyn hepburn in roman holiday…)

first, a bit of background…
*i used to date google. no really, i did. all of my friends knew this and would, in regular conversation, refer to “asking gwyn’s boyfriend”…we’re not together anymore, but the whole thing still amuses me endlessly.
*i am a kickass googler. (googler?) my friends and family know that when they have exhausted themselves searching in vain on ye olde interblags…the time has come to turn to gwyn. something in my very…special…brain helps me find awesomeness. either i’m just more savvy when it comes to search strings, or my attention span and perseverance are a little out of control…either way…it’s one of my talents/crosses to bear, and my friends know this.

fast forward to today…my good friend matthew emailed me because his wife becky’s laptop is a mac. he knows i know more about macs and photo editing software than he does. matthew also loves google and all its (well, really “his”) minions, but unfortunately, picasa doesn’t work on macs. (which, incidentally, is false information. it DOES work on macs, but only the newer intel macs.

so i flexed my fingers and began googling. and i hit the jackpot!

i’m posting this here because i do semi-regularly get questions from other photographers, friends or clients about cameras, lenses, photo-processing…and i thought this might help someone else.

first i guess i’ll mention the software i use, the price, how i use it, and then the FREE alternative.

adobe photoshop lightroom (LR): $299 (less if you qualify for an educational discount!)  i shoot in RAW format, which is sort of like film in that i have a negative that needs to be processed before it’s in any sort of usable state.  i import all of my photos into this extremely powerful program, use the library mode to decide which are keepers and which aren’t, and then i do exposure and colour adjustments in the develop mode.  probably THE main reason i love LR so much is that it is geared toward batch processing…i can do individual tweaks, or i can apply the same change to 500 images with one click.  there are entire books written about this program, so i’m going to just leave you with the free alternative.  blue marine

adobe photoshop (PS):  $699 (less if you qualify for an educational discount!)  this is the gold standard for digital image manipulation.  again, books upon books have been written, and there’s basically no limit to what can be done w this program.  i use it mostly for retouching and sharpening…giving images that extra bit o’ love.  this blog post lists several free alteratives, which platform they work on (mac vs windows), and what their strengths are.

i’ve heard good things about iphoto and picasa, which are both included/free.  i am a mac girl, so i started off using iphoto, and immediately fell in deep, deep hatred.  now, when i get a new computer, the first thing i do is delete it.  that said…i have different priorities and do different things w/ my photos than an average user, and it IS pretty intuitive and well-organised (except for saving 17 versions of a photo if you make 1 measly little change thereby eating up hard drive space.)

in digital photography, the software used is a huge part of the overall process.  working on an image after you release the shutter can take it from “eh” to “wow!”, and having the right tools makes that a much more pleasurable process.  the really good tools cost a lot of money, so if you’re just an enthusiast w/o a trump-budget, hopefully these free programs will enrich your photographic experience!

if anyone has any geek-side-of-photography related questions…leave ‘em in the comments, and i’ll either answer them there, or write another post.

so, i think the last time i blogged about nz was, um…day 8.  (which was probably several days AFTER day 8, but…let’s not focus on that.)

on day 18, my friend jeremy from college was going to be in town for a day (which was confirmed, oh, the day before…so i was scrambling to find a car!), so i picked him up fron the airport, and showed him a few of my favourite sites in my neighbourhood.  after, of course, we went back to my flat so he could nap on the couch.  those trans-pacific flights are pretty wretched.  however, it was raining, so we didn’t feel bad crashing (why do flights have to get in at 7am?).  AND…by the time sleeping beauty had awoken, the rain had stopped, and we had nothing but blue skies.

first stop was, of course, kebab stop…then we walked up mt eden.  auckland was built on auckland volcanic field…so, there are about a bajillion extinct volcanoes dotting the city.  they’re referred to as “domains”, which is essentially city/government property set aside to be a park in the city.  these parks are kind of hilarious, because they are frequently home to livestock.
yes, that is a cow, and that is the central business district skyline, a scant 2.5 kilometers away (about 1.5 miles)  (i had my camera set on taking black and white jpegs, which disappointed me when i got home, because this was way cooler in colour.)

it was incredibly windy up there that day!
i told jeremy this was going to be his cd cover…but, uh, he’s not really a musician. so.
after dinner we headed over to mission bay for overpriced swiss ice cream. mmmmm. we stopped and climbed up bastion point first…it’s got amazing views of the city and of rangitoto, and there’s a bunch of old bunkers up there that are fun to explore. it was getting ready to storm and in fact rained on us a bit when we were up there, but the colours were freaking incredible.

then, um…day 26 or so…i went w/ my former flatmate andy and his relatively new wife beks up to long bay.  it isn’t a particularly exciting beach, but it was a hot day, and we were all feeling fairly lethargic, so an outing of any kind was a victory, really.  it was nice to float around in the coolish water and relax.  i left my camera in the car (better in a locked “boot” than unattended w/ a beach towel, right?), so these are photos from the car ride home.

victoria park market was one of the VERY FIRST places someone took me my FIRST time in nz…way back in 2001. (gosh, nearly 8 years ago! crikey! (and yes…i say crikey when i’m here. and knackered and munted and aye and all sorts of other funny words.)) i liked the way the angle of the road positioned it in relation to the sky tower…basically the symbol of the auckland skyline.

that’s it for this post…next up will be my trip to the south island!

nicki & shane also found me through cityside events. they were planning their fantastic new england fall wedding from very far away (when they first contacted me, shane was stationed in south carolina, and by the time their wedding rolled around, they’d moved to texas.)

i was super excited, because shane is a marine fighter pilot, and nicki is a photographer. (check out her website–if you need portraits or…anything…covered near corpus christi, she’ll do a fantastic job for you!)

and if that wasn’t enough, it was a GORGEOUS fall day, and the amazing shyla came with me!

(hilarious: we had the dress out in front of the motel where everyone was getting ready, and then i saw a bunch of uniformed men come out…and started freaking out. shane isn’t with you guys, is he?! as i tried to shield the dress w/ my 5′3″ frame…while it hung in a tree…apparently he was too nervous to really notice anything that was going on, so…it was ok.)

these gorgeous shots of nicki and her bouquet and the girls lining up to walk down the aisle were taken by shyla.

my view

shyla’s view

i happen to know that the one on the left here is one of nicki and shane’s favourites–they both use it as their facebook profile picture! (both of these taken by shyla)

and because the sabre arch was basically my favourite part of the whole wedding and about 94% of the reason i so desperately wanted to shoot a military wedding (and would be happy to shoot them once a month until i honourably discharge my camera), i am going to gratuitously post every slight difference in sword position. commencing…now:







yes, they stopped them and made them kiss at each point of the arch.
by shyla

whew. that’s about 400 photos, and i’m only at the end of the ceremony…i think i’m going to have to break this sucker into two parts, because there were some ROOOOCKIN’ family portraits, bridal party portraits, and general awesomenesses which occurred at the reception.

(ps, shane…i threw a special tag on here JUST FOR YOU!)