Dreamtime Images Wedding Photogaphy

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Engagement photos in Rocky Mountain National Park
2008-06-03 16:24:00
Nicole, Gawain and I got to head up to Rocky Mountain National Park a few days ago to shoot an engagement session that was totally fun. These two rock! We wandered around Lumpy Ridge for a while and found some of the most beautiful aspen groves, and then we headed up into the Alluvial Fan area of the park for some more engagement photos. I’m so excited to photograph their wedding in August — it’ll be at an amazing overlook in Colorado National Monument, which is one of my most favorite places in Colorado. Awesome!
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New Wedding Venue in Estes Park
2008-05-26 05:02:00
I am so excited to be writing about the Della Terra Mountain Chateau, a fantastic new Estes Park wedding venue. Pam and her team are in the middle of construction, and I got to take a tour the other day — and I have to say I’m super impressed. The Chateau is up on Highway 34 about 100 yards from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, and the whole property borders the park. Pam’s pretty interested interested in green weddings, and as a result, the construction has taken environmentally friendly building practices into consideration. Yay! And della terra is Italian for “of the earth.” The property is located just below Macgregor Slab, a huge, 300 foot rock formation (with great climbing, by the way!) that’s super beautiful. The views up to the formation are outstanding, as are the views across the the valley. Della Tera is replacing an old campground, and instead of building a huge parking lot, Pam’s decided to convert each campground ...
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Brandy & Tony at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas!
2008-05-16 01:17:00
Wow! That’s all I can say. Brandy and Tony are so awesome, and they put together one of the best weddings ever. Don’t even know where to begin — it was a whirlwind. Be sure to read the whole post — there’s a slideshow at the end. It was a cool six days, and shooting at the Atlantis Resort was one crazy experience. It’s a photographer’s dream, really — so much interesting architecture, vibrant colors, cool textures. I flew in Thursday and shot a dessert welcome, followed by a rehearsal dinner on Friday, followed by an awesome wedding day on Saturday. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were all fun! Here are a few of my faves (Yes, there really was a fire dancer! How cool is that?!) The photobooth was out, for sure, and lots of ridiculous images showed up on my flash card, including this one, which was the last pic of the night. It’s like Christmas all over again when I download the photobooth cards. It’s so much fun, and...
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Radiopoppers review — a trial-by-fire field test
2008-05-12 04:31:00
Radiopoppers. I now have five of them, and they are awesome. What follows is a field-test user review from Brandy and Tony’s awesome Bahamas wedding. A slideshow of their day will come later this week! To sum it up, I think Radiopoppers are the best thing to happen to flash photography since the invention of the flash. For those who don’t yet know, Radiopoppers are little flash gadgets that combine ETTL with the radiowave goodness of the trusty Pocket Wizard. That’s pretty amazing. Until now it’s been basically impossible to have reliable ETTL off-camera flashes. When I first started with off-camera flash photography, I’d use my ST-E2 infared trigger and put my 550EX and 580EX flashes on slave mode. Basically I had fully automatic ETTL flash. It was point and shoot, and it was oh-so-easy. This setup was awesome, or so I thought. I loved having spot-on flash exposures every time, but I soon grew annoyed. I couldn’t shoot outdoors at all, since the ...
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Inside the Album, Part VI
2008-04-22 03:36:00
So a while back I mentioned I was going to have some nice up close and personal tours with PictoBooks. Well, here’s a tour! Another one will come soon — that album will have a wood cover. This is a sample album I made based on Amy and TJ’s wedding last year in Estes Park. They were married at the Taharaa Mountain Lodge, which is a stone’s throw away from my home office, and before the wedding we spent some time at Bear and Lilly Lakes in Rocky Mountain National Park. They had some bold colors going on in their wedding and they came up with a really cool album — so cool that I had to make my own version of it. Their book had a green metallic cover, while this one has a green leather binding. Can’t go wrong either way! So, without further ado, here’s a PictoBook. They’re beyond cool… and they even come in that awesome box! You can check out a full tour with little comments here. .
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Estes Park Elopment in Rocky Mountain National Park
2008-04-20 08:42:00
Had a great time this past weekend with Jen and John, who came all the way out from the Michigan to elope Colorado style. That means wedding gown + suit + hiking boots. Jen and John just wanted to wander the Estes Valley and Rocky Mountain National Park until they found a place that inspired them — so they really had no idea where or when they were going to get married when we started the afternoon. We began at Lumpy Ridge and then drove up into the main area of Rocky Mountain National Park, stopping at a few places before we finally arrived at the Alluvial Fan area near Endo Valley. I’ve photographed weddings at the Alluvial Fan before — it’s absolutely stunning, and even more so in the winter/spring. The colors on Saturday were so crisp and punchy, and there was a little flurry of snowflakes spinning around. They looked around, decided the Alluvial Fan was as good a place as any, and they got married. In Colorado, you’re allowed to marry yourselves...

Awesome story on green weddings at the Vail Trail
2008-04-18 19:45:00
If you’re interested, Sarah Stewart wrote a great story on green weddings for Vail newspaper, The Vail Trail . You can also check it out below, but also, here’s a link to the story. I got a chance to be interviewed by Sarah, and I think she did an awesome job — the story is full of cool ideas and tips. ‘I do,’ the green way Couples choose to make their weddings more environmentally sound Sarah L. Stewart April 16, 2008 At first, Rae Lori Sandler didn’t even want to send invitations to her wedding at Vail’s Donovan Pavilion — she wanted to save paper and send out e-mail invites instead. When friends and family convinced her that was tacky, she settled on recycled paper. “I just want it to be as low-waste as possible,” says Sandler, who will marry Joshua Simon in October. The couple, who live in Denver, also vetoed their caterer’s suggested menu of Chilean sea bass, given that fish’s precarious population. Now they’re considering an all-or...
More About: Story , Weddings , Awesome , Green

Green wedding photography with carbonfund.org
2008-04-15 11:24:00
A few weeks ago I formed a small business partnership with Carbonfund .org to offset all of Dreamtime Images’ carbon emissions. My offsets cover my air and car travel, my energy use, and anything else the business does to release carbon into the atmosphere. I’m really proud of this since it touches on the core of my business. Pretty much everyone who hires me has a deep love for the natural world, and they want me to capture images of them surrounded by the beauty of the outdoors. So I’m pretty excited to do my part in preserving it. The minimum partnership requirements for offsets were actually a lot bigger than the carbon footprint of my business, so the business offset spills over into our personal life. Our home, personal travel, and all other emissions we’re directly responsible are offset through three types of carbon reduction projects. One project involves reforestation in Nicaragua. Paso Pasifico has partnered with Carbonfund.org to help private reser...
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Inside the Album, Part V
2008-04-10 15:28:00
At the WPPI tradeshow in Vegas, I got to poke around about 10 billion vendor booths in a conference hall bigger than many small countries. You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff there — everything from studio management software developers to album vendors to companies that print your studio logo on stickers and buttons. Buttons? Anyway, I stopped by the PictoBooks booth and was floored. Every once in a while I make a PictoBook, which I think are about the coolest book out there, but I haven’t had a chance to look over their entire collection of albums (which they had on display at the booth). Wow. I’m kind of realizing that a lot of flush mounted wedding albums wind up looking pretty similar, but the PictoBooks really stand out in the crowd. The cover materials are all unique — you can get them with metals, woods, leathers and even a faux-graphite material that looks pretty neat. I also like the way the cover cameos are made; the prints are covered ...
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Vegas, Baby!
2008-04-08 15:21:00
In March I hit up Vegas for the 2008 WPPI wedding photographer convention, which made Sin City even weirder than it was before all us 12,000 photo geeks showed up. (12,000! That’s not a typo!). I cruised out there with John Heisel, enduring lots of stormy weather and perhaps the mankiest hotel room on earth in Cedar City, UT. The convention was definitely an eye-opener — lots of inspiring talks by some of the movers and shakers in the industry, an out-of-control tradeshow the size of several football fields, lots of random photo shoots, and, of course, partys! Woohoo! The convention took place at the Paris hotel and casino — the domed ceiling is actually painted like the city skyline, complete with clouds. The elevators up to the guest rooms had movie ads on them, so I took some self portraits with Jack Black, et al. I’m a dork. Sorry. In that last post I mentioned I got to check out all the vendor booths at the trade show, and I signed up with a new online...
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Featured on Don’t Box Us In
2008-03-31 14:11:00
Ahhhhhhh!!! I’ve got so much to blog about and I’m so behind. Palm Beach, Practical Horseman Magazine, Sierra Magazine, The Stanley Hotel, the craziest wedding photographer convention on the planet, Vegas, perhaps an awesome new studio space — the list is endless! I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll delay the inevitable and instead post a link to an interview with me that just showed up on Don’t Box Us In. It’s pretty humbling an enormous honor to be up there, because I found out about all my wedding photography heroes (literally) from seeing them on the site. Check out the link! Also, thanks to Terje Aamodt for the headshot on a recent climbing trip to the Sierras. I think it’s the only one where I don’t look like a total dork.
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Awards for some Colorado wedding photography!
2008-03-07 06:08:00
Word! The Wedding Photojournalist Association just released the results of its 2007 year end wedding photography contest, and I managed to snag a few awards. Hooray! One, in the Ceremony category, was for this shot from Heather and Todd’s Vail wedding. They were married at the top of the mountain on the wedding deck. A storm was brewing all morning and things looked a little ominous, but they decided to go for it and risk the rain. The sun was fighting its way through the clouds for the whole ceremony, and as soon as they were pronounced husband and wife, the sun broke through and splashed them with a crazy ray of light. Everyone was talking about it afterward. This next image picked up an award in the Reflections category, and it was one of my favorite shots of the year. You have to stare at it a while to figure out what’s going on. The bride’s mouth is poking through the hole in the hand mirror, and she’s also the one whose face is in reflected in the han...
More About: Photography , Awards , Colorado

Imitating my hero
2008-02-25 15:47:00
I guess imitation is the biggest form of flattery, so along those lines I’ve been trying to replicate the crazy look of Tim Tadder, who is my photographic hero. He is an absolute lighting master, and I think the best in the business when it come to edgy, modern outdoor commercial work. If you haven’t heard of him, check out his site. One of my favorite advertising shots of all time is his image a swimmer at the edge of a lake, shot from behind, pulling on her swim cap. See it here. It’s so beyond rad there’s not even a word for it. Tim’s a super nice guy and really gave me some encouraging words and good advice when I went out on my own and started shooting full time, but he wouldn’t tell me how he got his look! So ever since, I’ve been trying to reverse engineer not only his lighting setup, but his post processing workflow in Photoshop. The other night I was messing around in the living room and I created the closest replicate yet. Not as g...
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Book project in the works! Woohoo!
2008-02-23 04:48:00
I can’t really detail this too much right now, since this project isn’t completed yet, but I’m too excited NOT to say anything. To be super super super brief, I’m helping to illustrate a book on green living and green weddings. Here’s a note the author wrote to one of my couples: Hi, I got your contact from your amazing photographer Nathan. I am writing a book describing the path of an green wedding and portraying couples who have experienced them and the professionals who have helped them to manifest their vision. It is a lifestyle book, re-defining luxury as the chance to live consciously. I saw your inspiring pictures and would love to tell your story. Look for an updated blog post in the coming months! Here’s an extremely abbreviated synopsis from one of my couples: We used local indigenous flowers, conch shells, local palm trees as aisle markers, green transportation for the bride (a horse!), electric powered golf carts, local Bahamian food,...
More About: Project , Book , Works , The Works

My awesome dog
2008-02-21 06:01:00
Took a break from designing some stuff and took a picture. What is he saying?
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Yoga to avoid postpartum depression
2008-02-15 05:51:00
Here’s a cool little project I got to work on the other day. Sona Dimidjian, a psych professor at CU Boulder, is doing research into how yoga helps pregnant women avoid postpartum depression, which apparently 10 to 15 percent of new mothers experience. That’s a surprisingly large number! As part of a community outreach program, Sona asked me if I’d be willing to photograph a pregnant yoga instructor doing a series of poses, with the end goal of publishing the photos into a poster and an e-book. She is also considering making a small bound book to give to them women who are taking part in her clinical study. I figured this was a really awesome opportunity to help people out, so I cruised down to Boulder a few days ago and we did the shoot in Sona’s living room. Huge props to our instructor — I have no idea how she does it! Her baby’s going to be a yoga master! The shots for the poster were more for illustration than anything else, but I did snag a...
More About: Depression , Yoga , Avoid , Postpartum

New Web Site!
2008-02-15 01:55:00
It’s been a while! Just a short note saying ‘check out the new web site’ for those out there with an RSS feed or who subscribe to this blog. It’s a sweet looking site! Click here to visit. More updates coming soon, promise, it’s been a hectic winter. Spent a week in Florida photographing horses, revamped the office with all sorts of technonerdy stuff (new computer, w00t!), photographed a pregnant yogini for an outreach program on how yoga can help prevent post-partum depression! Word up!
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My dad’s site!
2008-01-06 19:10:00
So this is just straight-up cool. My dad has his own photo web site that you have to visit! About mid-career, he basically stopped taking pictures all together because he got too busy, but a few years ago my parents moved to an island off the coast of Seattle and prepared for retirement. My dad took a job that required a lot less time in the office, and he’s been devoting a lot of his spare time back to photography. Recently, he scored a job as a stringer at the local paper up there to the tune of $15 a week. W00t! Now that his shots are appearing all over the place, I decided to give him a web site for Christmas. It’s yet another rip-off of my editorial site, so it might look familiar, but the images on his site are better. So check it out. I think there’s some super classic stuff there. It’s at http://www.davidweltonphoto.com.
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The Mouth
2008-01-03 18:37:00
Back in Cali kickin it with the crew. Miss it here. Good times, great friends. Toots got his first chance to visit one of our favorite places on earth, the stunning mountaintop boulder field at Lizard’s Mouth , home to the best moderate sandstone bouldering anywhere. And actually thanks to our buddy Bernd, a bunch of new hard lines have gone up in the last year. Here we are on one of them, an unnamed route overlooking the ocean. We spent sunset here taking pictures. If you want to know how it’s done, I used a really fast prime lens at f/1.4 coupled with a single flash bouncing off a gold reflector disk. Reflector was pointing up from ground level, flash was triggered via a PocketWizard. Very low ISO (100) allowed me to get the dark blue sky at 125th of a second. It also let me have a very noiseless image. I passed off the camera later on and Bernd grabbed it to take the last two shots, one of Steve and one of me. Quite possibly the highlight of the day was seeing Alicia&...

New contest winner
2007-12-19 01:30:00
Another image placed in a WPJA quarterly contest! This one placed in the ‘creative portrait’ category, which is pretty competitive since photographers are generally pretty on point with these pics and tend to shoot all sorts of crazy stuff. Funny story behind this image: Brad and Gina got married at the Vista at Arrowhead in Beaver Creek this past Labor Day weekend. While Gina was getting ready I asked her about what kind of stuff she and Brad do on vacation. And she said they take lots of pictures. Of what, I wondered. Well, she said, of signs. So we decided to make a bride and groom sign and see what would happen. Her dad actually got psyched about the whole thing and wound up making them himself, and then Gina, Brad and I snuck off after the ceremony for some couples portraits. Part way through we decided to bust out the signs… And, among other things, this is what happened. I totally love their faces. They were trying really hard to keep it together!
More About: Contest , Winner

Nature Girl Designs
2007-12-19 01:23:00
So back in April I had the pleasure and honor to photograph Rudi and Russell’s totally rad wedding in the Bahamas. They were married at the Abaco Club on Winding Bay, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful beaches anywhere. Anyway, Rudi is starting her own business called Nature Girl Designs making really cool hand-made buckles out of their big red barn back east. Check out her site if you get a chance and are looking for something really unique. She’ll even turn a photo into a buckle if you’re interested. Anyway, Rudi’s been touring SoCal and the Boulder area setting up new vendor accounts for her buckles, so she stopped by recently for a few head shots and advertising pictures to use to get the company rolling. Here’s what we came up with on a sunny but absolutely frigid afternoon in Estes Park. Kudos to her for enduring the miserable weather!

Inside the Album, Part IV
2007-12-15 00:39:00
This post will be about the ZookBinders PhotoBook, which I think is the absolute perfect book to use for parent albums or for turning your engagement images into a signing book for your reception. Here, we’ll meet a few parent albums, both of which were mini versions of Megan and Andy’s ZookBook and Joe and Elitia’s ZookBook. These things are totally cool. The covers are available in either a plain linen or a wrap-around photograph. I think the wrap-around option is what makes them so unique. Here’s Joe and Elitia’s cover. And here’s Megan and Andy’s Here’s another shot of Megan and Andy’s book, but with a better view of the binding. And an inside shot of Megan and Andy’s, but with more binding views. Again, like in the big ZookBooks, these books have no gutter in them so you don’t lose any part of the image. An inside shot of Megan and Andy’s: Like I said, these books are rad for parent albums. You get th...
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Inside the Album, Part III
2007-12-15 00:32:00
Here’s another tour through another ZookBook so you can get an idea of the available variety. This album, Megan and Andy’s, has a more traditional feel to it compared to Elitia and Joe’s book, but it’s still got the contemporary coffee-table feel on the inside. Megan and Andy chose a classy black leather with some silver stamping with their names and wedding date and location. I think this sort of cover is totally timeless; when they pull this thing out and look at it on their 50th wedding anniversary, it’ll still fit. While Elitia and Joe chose black gliding, Megan and Andy chose silver gliding. I think it looks damn snazzy — and it matches their engraving. Once again, check out how nice those pages are! They’re so thick! It’s awesome. Also, note that nice lay-flat binding. Here’s an inside spread of Megan getting ready; I don’t think the gutter margin takes away from the look that much. Here’s a close-up shot of ...
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Inside the Album, Part II
2007-12-15 00:20:00
I figured I’d continue the Inside the Album blog posts with a post about mypublisher.com and iPhoto photo books, which are made by the same company. All my packages come with a rights-released CD, so you can opt to make one of these books. The upside is they’re really inexpensive and they’re easy to make at home, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it for your wedding album. Once you hold one of these in your hands and compare it to a ZookBook or a PictoBook, you’ll understand why; the difference is a zillion-fold, and I can’t overstate it. If you want, you can get a pretty big iPhoto or mypublisher.com book for around $100, so they’re cheap, but if you want to create a long-lasting family heirloom, I’d seriously consider a ZookBook or PhotoBook. Guaranteed, I wouldn’t be pulling out my iPhoto book in a decade and be terribly happy. I don’t want to knock these things; they’re great for certain applications and they’r...
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Inside the Album, Part I
2007-12-13 17:19:00
I got quite a few responses to a blog post a few weeks ago about wedding albums and album design, so I figured I’d write up a virtual tour through several wedding albums and parent albums. In this edition of Inside the Album , I’m going to focus on the Zookbook, made by Zookbinders. It’s sort of a ’standard’ album; it’s got a nice classy look to it, I love that I can make them square so the images have that widescreen aspect ratio, and there are a zillion really beautiful cover options to choose from. One of the best things about the Zookbook is that you can create miniatures of them and have them bound into a product called the PhotoBook, which makes fantastic parent albums. Here’s Elitia and Joe’s super cool Zookbook. Elitia had awesome taste and chose what Zookbinders refers to as a Napa leather cover — it’s basically a highly textured suede and it comes in a variety of colors. Her color, called Pear, really went well w...
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Beware of dog
2007-12-10 23:18:00
If I were a dog, I’d want to be my dog. He’s just that rad. Flying through the air dressed in a jacket, pouncing on big dogs. Alicia thinks he looks like a bat, while I think he looks like a Gremlin, the kind with those huge ears after you spill water on them. Certainly he’s a lot cuter than an evil Mogwai. Anyway, these two were having so much fun the other day.
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Brides Magazine Photo Contest
2007-11-30 00:01:00
Hoooray! I just found I had an image place in the first ever Brides Magazine photo contest. Here’s a link to the contest. This pic here scored 8th place in the dancing category. Big honor! National contest in a national magazine, judged by at least 3 Pulitzer Prize-winning photogs. Sweeeet!
More About: Contest , Photo , Photo Contest

Horse pics awards
2007-11-29 23:02:00
Would have posted this on my editorial site, http://www.nathanweltonphoto.com, but I don’t have a blog there, so I’m posting it here. Just got the results from the 2007 American Horse Publications awards ceremony, which covered all stories and photos published in 2006. I shoot for Practical Horseman Magazine covering dressage, hunter/jumpers and eventing, among other things, and I shot a cover for them for their breeding issue. The cover won an Honorable Mention for covers, and that was in the largest circulation division. Cool beans! The magazine also also picked up a third place award for a story called “It’s Equitation, by George” written by one of the editors there, Kip Goldreyer. That was another cover story I shot, and was an awesome experience. Can’t wait for Florida this year! Each year we go to Florida for a huge annual horse show near Palm Beach, and we are just finalizing the agenda for this year. It’s a pretty fun week because w...
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Awesome feedback
2007-11-29 20:17:00
Wow, this is just beyond cool. I got an email recently from Lara, whose wedding I shot over Labor Day in California. In it was a message from her mom. It’s about a zillion pages long, but here are some excerpts… This thing made my day! Here’s a slideshow from their wedding. Hi Lara, Yes, they’re all on line and they are totally wonderful! I sat down in my pajamas to see them this morning and emerged a couple hours later feeling so full of love and wonder at the beauty of the event. Really I felt as if I relived it. How great! Like you, I was so taken by certain pictures I just looked and looked. I love so many of them I don’t know where to start to tell you, but the ones that grabbed my heart were of you and Mica by the barn in black and white. There’s a stunning photo of Mica in black and white too. There’s one close-up of you which sent a jolt to my heart, it is so beautiful! I think these photos must surely remind you of moments of...
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Zookbinders PhotoBooks for Parent Albums
2007-11-22 22:07:00
Here’s another option for folks trying to figure out what to do about their album and parent albums. It can be difficult with so many choices, so I wanted to show what Elitia and Joe decided on: they made the Zookbinders Zookbook for their main album and the PhotoBook for the parent album. You can learn more about Zookbinders online at www.zookbinders.com. When couples choose Zookbinders’ albums, I offer two options for parent albums. One is a duplicate of the main ZookBook, but in a smaller size, and the other is a new product called the PhotoBook. The PhotoBooks feature hard linen covers with wrap-around dust jackets that are custom designed from a photo. Since the cover isn’t a premium leather, the books are less expensive — and you can get a really unique cover to boot. Here’s the front of their parent book: So the right hand side of the image will be what you see on the front of the book. The spine will be in the middle of the image, and the back ...
More About: Albums , Photobooks , Parent , Pare