On Saturday Ashley and I had the privilege of attended the soft launch for Onyx Coffee. Since meeting Edwin and Aaron watching the World Cup Soccer Matches at Kendrick’s, I’ve gotten to know and respect their knowledge, passion and hard work with Coffee. If you remember back to earlier this year, I had the opportunity to travel down to Guatemala with Edwin and every time I hang out with Edwin I try to have my camera in hand because there are always great opportunities for photos. In this case people gathered to celebrate Onyx Coffee and the grower that provided the coffee beans for the roast, Villaure Coffee. Yes, it was pretty cool to show up and be served a traditional Guatemalan breakfast, meet the man responsible for growing the coffee (Aurelio Villatoro Castillo) and then taste the coffee freshly roasted by Onyx… and then taste the coffee paired with Ashley’s Desserts and fresh fruit. I hid behind my camera a little bit which is easy to do for me, but had a great time and enjoyed the experience. Check out the Onyx Blog, when Edwin isn’t traveling the globe he writes some great posts.

Onyx Coffee is about people. A genuine and simple commitment to quality as a core value towards building sustainability in every relationship. Excellence does not happen by accident.

In November Boone and I shot a very fun and intimate wedding out on Lummi Island (which we’ve yet to post about!). It was enjoyable but still a long day. It seemed late when we drove off the ferry and Ashley called to see if we wanted to stop by the Kitchen to take some photos. Did I mention we were super hungry after shooting in the kitchen at The Willows Inn on Lummi? Well it worked out nicely in the end because we stopped by and ate some amazing food and had fun snapping some shots. I thought I’d post some of the images along with a slideshow and let our readers know that the cooking classes start this week. They are teaching a little bit of everything from preparing for the super bowl to braising and perfecting meat. I’m pretty excited to take the knife skills class tomorrow where I don’t chop off a finger and learn the proper technique to cutting! Yes! Check out the new In the Kitchen Blog for their class offerings.

Last week I had the opportunity to shoot a small surprise party for none other than my Junior High Jazz Band instructor: Mr. Freeman. A few weeks back I received a call from his daughter (who was about 9 or 10 when I last saw her and is now in college) about a surprise party and I was surprised myself. I haven’t really been in contact with the old Marysville Junior High Thunderbirds crowd, but I have a lot of fond memories of Junior High and playing bass in Jazz Band. Mr. Freeman was probably one of two teachers that really influenced my life in a positive way so it was an honor providing some photography. And yes, he was very surprised.

Gabe and I spend only a chunk of our time actually shooting. After we get back from a shoot, we typically download the RAW files (images) from our CF Cards, burn them onto backup DVD’s and backup the files to an external hard drive. Then onto post processing… which can become time consuming. What we do on our computers is like what people used to do in the darkroom with film. Dodging and burning, balancing exposures and color correcting. Post processing often takes 3 or 4 times longer than the actual shoot, especially for Gabe since he’s a PC guy and I’m a Mac guy… (jk…) Anyways, I’ve been really loving black and white images lately and have been enjoying going back to older photos and reprocessing them differently than I would have a month ago, or a year ago. Here a couple of Ally who lives down the street from me in North West Portland