The Expressive Blog

Recently, and old school buddy, Mark Martinez, asked me to do portraits of him and his two children, at the Santa Cruz Beach and Boardwalk. Of course I loved the idea, and we recently did the portrait session. Mark explained how he loved the action-oriented portraits of kids he had seen on my website in the family portrait gallery, and wanted to know if we could do something like that at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. He was not looking for the traditional style of portraits, but preferred more of a lifestyle portrait, that would show them all just having a fun time together. We also did a few shots in a traditional portrait style, because we could, and also because I know parents and grandparents also love to see those! Here are a few of my personal favorite photos from this fun portrait session. I hope you enjoy them!

I also want to acknowledge Mark, for his recent accomplishments in publishing a new book, that is very relevant to our times. It is called "The Myth of the Free Market: The Role of the State in a Capitalist Economy". Congratulations Mark!

Okay, here is a sampling of the cool photos from our session at the beach and boardwalk, in Santa Cruz...

I recently met with Julie and Christopher, for their Santa Cruz engagement session. We roamed around Santa Cruz, and eventually made our way to the beach, where we finished with more photos on the beach at sunset. Here are a few images from this fun portrait session...

View proofs for session here.

Kathy and Ed did a lot of laughing and smiling, during their Santa Cruz engagement portraits... Not because I asked them to smile... I don't ask people to smile when photographing them, because it usually results in those "fake" smiles that nobody likes to see. Actually, we just had such a playful photo-session, that we spent much of the time laughing. But we created so many cool images, that it's not even funny!

Here are a few of them...

We concluded the photo-session on the West jetty of the Santa Cruz Harbor. This happened to be the night of the full moon, and we captured several very romantic portraits of Ed and Kathy in the moonlight.

Many thanks to Phuong and Jeff, for allowing me to do an extended engagement session with them. We photographed in Capitola and Santa Cruz, for almost four hours! At first, this post will only have four photos, but over the next several days I will add more. I hope you enjoy them!

Steve and Cherie Kilian's wedding was not so long ago. At least it feels that way. Time has ways of passing by quicker than I realize... Anyway, it seems like when they had me photograph their wedding was just a couple years ago. It was a pleasant surprise, and a reminder of how fast time is passing, when they asked me to create family portraits for them. Their son, Jack, was already about 2 years old, and the second child was expected in a few weeks! We had a great time capturing images of the three (actually four!) of them, at Natural Bridges State Beach, in Santa Cruz. Here they are...

Kilian family

Jack

To see more Santa Cruz family portraits, and other beach family portraits, click this link to visit our main portrait galleries..