White Haute Blog

Today, we’re introducing a new, fun feature at the White Haute Blog…. Haute vs Naute (hot vs not). Once a week, I’ll reveal my list of the haute items, topics or events from the past seven days, as well as the worst things of the week. So without further adieu, we present to you, the inaugural

This week’s Haute items:

• My wife is #1 on the list ::  She is exactly one week away from finishing the school year, and having a well-deserved break from getting up with me at 6am and heading to deal with some crazy 8th graders.  But no matter how long her days are, or how tired she is when she gets home, somehow she manages to be the most wonderful, sweetest, most loving, and definitely cutest wife there is.  Thank you Sweet Sauce for making every afternoon one I look forward to when I head home to you!
• The Black Rapid R-Strap ::  I got this thing a few months ago and it has been a savior for me.  The normal camera strap would never stay on my shoulder, especially when you’re moving around, twisting in different ways, and especially when you need your hands free.  But the R-Strap goes diagonally over your shoulder and across your body, and is actually very comfortable, even when lugging around the 70-200 lens.  Plus, it’s pretty convenient to pull up and shoot away.  So if you’re looking for a better camera strap, this one is highly recommended.  (A little tip for you owners, when you screw the strap into the bottom of the camera, make sure you tighten the L-shaped metal screw first, and then rotate in the circular nut until everything’s tight, to prevent it from coming undone and your camera crashing to the ground.  Also periodically check to make sure everything’s still tight!)
• Sushi ::  I gotta give my props to one of the world’s greatest inventions.  Sure, it has nothing to do with photography, but it does bring a smile to my face and a warmth to my belly!  Give me some spicy tuna or sashimi any day of the week, and you’ll be my new best friend.
• Road trips ::  We went on one this past weekend to Arizona, and later this summer will be road-tripping it to eastern Washington for a family wedding.  These mini-vacations are always fun, and its great to be able to get out and see what’s within a few hours driving of our home.  We are so lucky to live in an area where we have so much nature at our fingertips, just a day’s drive away.  Plus, it gives us a chance to take photos of things other than brides, babies and bellies!

This week’s Naute items ::

• Summer Television ::  I mean, c’mon!  No Lost, 24, Office, Heroes, Chuck, Fringe.  For Erinn, there’s no Desperate Housewives or Grey’s Anatomy.  What are we left with?  Wipeout?  So you think someone cares if you can Dance?  Really?  That’s it?  Well, I guess in a sense it’s good, with business being extra busy during these next few months, it just means fewer distractions to keep me off the computer!
• File sizes ::  Even with how cheap memory is these days, it’s still staggering to realize just how much storage space we have to buy in order to keep all of our images safe.  My first big memory card was 1gb.  Now, I should regularly with 8gb cards,  four of them, plus several 4gb cards as well.  We’ll download 24-30gb worth of images after a single wedding.  I never thought of a 1.5 terabyte (that’s 1,500 gigabytes) hard drive would not be enough to store even one year’s worth of images!  Thankfully prices keep dropping and storage capacity keeps rising!
• Dust ::  It’s the devil for photographers.  One little spec in the wrong spot on your camera’s sensor can end up on the eyeball of your bride, ruining an image that was otherwise fantastic!  And no matter how often you clean or how careful you are, you can never get rid of them all.  I’m excited that cameras now come with the automatic sensor cleaners, but it doesn’t help us with our Canon 5Ds, as we were one generation too early to get that technology.  Hopefully we’ll upgrade to the new 5D MarkII and all will be right again.

Got back from our whirlwind trip to Northern Arizona, and had to post a few sneak peek images!  We hit the Grand Canyon, the Antelope Canyons in Page and Horseshoe Bend.  Full write-up and lots more photos to follow!

Erinn and I are up in our hotel room in Flagstaff, spending a long weekend in northern Arizona seeing the sights.  Today we decided to hit the Grand Canyon, a place she has never been and I hadn’t visited for probably 20 years.  We headed up first thing in the morning, and our first couple hours along the South Rim were greeted by dense fog rolling up the canyon walls, a result of earlier rains that were evaporating as the rising sun heated the valley floor.  The fog would completely cover the view of the canyon one minute, and completely disappear the next.  It gave us some very interesting perspectives for photography, but we were hoping for at least a little sun.  Our luck changed later in the morning as the sun broke through the soup and cleared the canyon for a spectacular afternoon of sunshine and billowy white clouds.

Towards the end of the day, when we had our fill of hiking and the crowds, we decided to head back to the car, a smart decision as we ended up racing a strong thunderstorm that was headed directly towards us.  We barely made it in before the lightning, rain and even hail started to envelope the area.  Not your normal Memorial Day weekend weather, that’s for sure!

We’re back in the room now, relaxing and getting ready for some sushi and sake for dinner, a great end to a great day!  Tomorrow, we’ll be off to the Antelope Canyons in Page, AZ, the most famous slot canyons in the world.

We’ll have a ton of amazing images to share when we return, so stay tuned!