Congratulations to Christopher and Anthe Oliver! Monica, Gilfredo, and I shot this wedding on April 19, 2010. This was the second wedding I got the chance to shoot and I didn’t wanna do it on my own so I asked Monica and Gil to help me out. Monica was pretty excited about being able to photograph a wedding so she definitely had to come along with me. It turned out to be a pretty entertaining experience; although, I had tons of school work I’ve been having to take care of. Nevertheless, I took the time to edit the pics and this is how they turned out. I hope you guys like them.

Went to the park with Monica, her Aunt, Uncle, and the kids. We bought bags full of prizes to hand the kids after they hunted for easter eggs. There were many memorable moments, especially the time Kaili (who is about 10 years old) whined like a baby when JJ and Danica ran to pick up the same easter egg she was attempting to get – mind you, she had more eggs than all of them put together lol. If you wanna see the other photos you can head over to Monica’s blog at monicacatral.wordpress.com

I decided to log onto my blog today because I have a photo of Danica that I took a few months ago and never got around to actually editing it until last night. The photo was taken on the day I took photos for the Fashion Club’s pamphlet cover. Danica was pretty tired — because her and Monica waited for me all day — but we made her pose for us anyway lo. Here’s the shot:

Danica turned 3 yesterday and it was a definitely a birthday Monica and I will not forget. We decided to take Danica and JJ to Playland, located in Rye, NY; Playland is an amusement and water park all-in-one. To get there we had to take the Metro-North railroad and it was my first time ever taking that train so with as many precautions as I had already taken – hopstopped the directions, sent them to my phone, viewed a map of the town, checked the train schedules, checked the park rates and hours – I was still anticipating confusion along the way.

There is one thing we did forget to check, though, the weather… As soon as we arrived we ate our breakfast and the rain gladly greeted us with a cold welcome. It began to pour as if we were stuck in the middle of a rain forest! Either way, we decided to make the best of it. We ran like maniacs through the rain and it was amazing. We had the time of our lives

Although most of the rides were closed due to the weather we still managed to scare the living crap out of the kids in a haunted roller coaster ride lol. I just wished I could have taken pictures of their reactions while we were on the ride, but even at 3200 ISO my camera was only taking pitch black photos. Afterwards, they rode on an air-balloon-swing-around ride that Danica got totally freaked out on because she thought she was going to fall from it.

Next, after letting them hop on another coaster we walked on over to the swimming pool. The nice thing about being at an amusement park in bad weather is that there it is virtually empty. There was literally only 10 to 15 visitors, including us, in the swimming pool. We really enjoyed being in the pool because the water in the pool was much warmer than the water hitting us from the rain lol. The bad part about that was that the pool was only 5 feet high, at the most and we had to come up often or we would be kneeling most of the time. We had to leave the pool within 30 minutes of entering it because we began to freeze our behinds .

Forty minutes later we took the kids on another ride then headed to a boardwalk that was attached to the other end of the park and was also completely empty. We were the only ones there for at least 40 minutes. We took tons of pictures, but had to leave because the rain had subdued and we were afraid it was going to come down hard on us again.

When we arrived home Monica and I left the kids at home with Monica’s brother while we ran out to buy her a few cheap gifts and a birthday cake at Baskin Robbins. I will be putting up all of the pictures in a day or so but I do not have the time to finish all of them in one day. In the mean time, however, I only have a picture of the cake that I would like to put up and a picture of what Danica used to look like when she was a couple of months old.

Hello all,

This past weekend was something to talk about; I ran into a very awkward situation when I was asked to photograph the funeral, or rather the viewing, of my girlfriend’s relative the same day we were supposed to go to a birthday party. How much weirder can that be? – celebrating the death of a mother’s child and the birth of another, all in one day? .

Anyway, we were supposed to arrive at the viewing by 4:00pm and we arrived about an hour and a half late. When we arrived, my girlfriend, Monica, had to ask her relative for permission to take the photographs, even though it was her relative who originally wanted us to take them. When we were given the go-ahead I didn’t realize just how delicate of a matter it was to shoot a viewing; There were at least 40 people in the room and every time my shutter went off I was afraid one of them would get up and scream at me for being an insensitive douchebag. Somehow or another, I managed to get two semi-decent shots – which were not as sharp as I would have liked them to be – out of the many that I shot.

Finally, after I got that out of the side, I decided to take a seat with my girlfriend, while our two year-old daughter ran around like the maniac that she is; as if she was not enough to handle, conditions got worse when more children showed up at the viewing. Monica and I decided to take them out until the ceremony was over and as we waited outside her 5-month-old niece showed up and it turned out to be the best funeral/viewing we have ever attended. At one point, my daughter, Danica, said she wanted to go back to “the fun place,” when referring to the funeral home.

Here is a picture of Monica’s niece and a large bag of chips we were eating:

and another of her:

Eventually, after the funeral was over, we headed to the train:

and later hopped on Staten Island’s Ferry, landing ourselves at the birthday party; which was over when we got there because it was a sweet sixteen, and the kids had curfews, but we enjoyed ourselves nonetheless because we were amongst our kin-members. I had long conversations, and drinks, with Monica’s family members, whom I have never spoken with before. I did not really take pictures of the party because there was no party to take pictures of, but i did end up taking pictures of the food we were served for breakfast – right before we completely devoured it. Here are the pics: