Thanks for stopping by crismitchell.com, this website serves two purposes. First the homepage is my personal blog, my way to keep you current on what i’m working on, things i find interesting and a way to share images I take on a daily basis. Second it serves as an information portal to find out more about me, my work and my services, hopefully in the end, leading you to hire me to shoot your Portrait, Wedding or Special Event. If you have questions beyond what i have listed within this website please feel free to contact me directly either by email or the old fashioned way by telephone. All my vitals can be found by clicking the the Contact button.
According to the weather forecast we have about 4 days of rain ahead of us, you’d never know it by the great weather we’ve been having lately.
I went down to the beach this evening to take in the sunset and even after 5 years of living on the coast it still amazes me to see kids playing in the ocean in January.
When I returned home to copy my camera card to my computer a handful of the images that I shot had gotten corrupted and are lost forever. These are the perils of living in an all digital age. I was able to salvage some of the shots and present you with the two below.
Well another year had come and gone and as always I have a laundry list of New Years resolutions of which shooting more photography is always at the top of.
This year I am going to do my best to post more often to this site, every year I have grandiose plans of posting an image/blog post a day, something i’ve wanted to do for years but have never attempted. So I am going to try to be a little more realistic this year and say at least 1 post/image per week and more if time if time avails.
Other resolutions this year also include finally designing a real portfolio site for my work and establising Coastal Wedding Photography, my wedding photography business. Also this year, i’m also hoping that ProPhotoResource.com, the website that i publish for professional photographers finally becomes a profitable site, last year we increased membership by 4,000 members which was really exciting, but now is the time to reap the fruits of all my labor over the past 2 years. Oh yeh and all those other resolutions that i make every year like eating better, getting more exercise and generally just taking better care of myself. Let’s take it one step at a time
This evening I upgraded the software that drives this website to accommodate a really cool new image gallery plugin which will allow for more interactive presentations of my photography on the site as well as interactive slideshows without having to scroll down the page a mile to see all the images. The first gallery below is a handful of shots i took this afternoon around the county, the first two were taken on a trail just off the Cuesta Grade in San Luis Obispo and the the remaining were this evenings sunset taken from the Dinosaur Caves Park in Shell Beach.
Enjoy and as always prints of these images and others on this site can be purchased by contacting me at cris[at]crismitchell.com
I love winter here on the central coast, one day it’s rainy and cold and the next we have days like today. A day before New Years Eve and it’s 75 degrees, so with such nice weather my wife and i decided to take a drive down the coast and spend the afternoon in Los Olivos, the once home of Michael Jackson and his Neverland Ranch.
For those who have never been to Los Olivos, it is a small quant town filled with art galleries, expensive eateries and lots of wine tasting. Located just one block off the main drag at the lightpole in the middle of town is Corner Houe Coffee, a great little coffee shop with free internet Gelato Ice Cream and Peets coffee (which by the way is my favorite, a hold over from my days of living in the bay area).
While my wife sat in the coffee shop and read her latest romance novel, I decided to walk around town and play with the new Lensbaby, which i’m currently in a love hate relationship with. I have never had a greater appreciation for autofocus lenses than i do now. While meandering around town, I ran into another photographer shooting with a Lensbaby 3G, the next better version than what i have, we didn’t speak a word to each other just admired each other’s toys and went on with our shooting, the photographers code of silence i guess.
Below are a few more Lensbaby experiments from the day.
This month I took the advice of fellow photographer and ProPhotoResource.com contributor David Jay and bought a new tool to try and help stir up some new creativity in my photography. For the last couple years i’ve had my eyes on a strange looking little lens called a Lensbabies 2.0 and while in Santa Barbara with my wife yesterday decided to finally bite the bullet and picked one up. The lensbabies lens is an odd looking lens unlike anything you’ve probably ever seen before, it is a fully manual lens which you push, pull and bend to get parts of your image in focus while other parts of it get blurred out, creating interesting and wild effects. Shooting with a Lensbabies lens can surely try your patience as you end up with more trashers than keeper shots, but every so often you end up with something that is truly interesting and unique.
Below is a picture of the Lensbabies Lens.
Today I spent some time shooting around Shell Beach and then went out to Montana De Oro to catch the sunset. Here are a few shots from the days outing, the first three are shot with the Lensbabies lens, the final image was not.
Prints of these images as with all other images on this site can be purchased by contacting me directly at cris[at]crismitchell.com
Well the week is finally over, Christmas is just a few days away and I think all my shopping is done except for a few minor odds and ends. Even with all the holiday chaos I was able to squeeze in a headshot session for a young actress from Santa Maria, Linda Mondragon. Linda is heading to Nashville next month to try to make her dreams of becoming a theater actress a reality. Linda was great, full of energy and alot of fun to shoot. We wish her luck on her journey.
Winter arrived with a bang this week here on the Central Coast. We were greeted with several inches of rain and flooding in some locations, like they say when it rains it pours and that is just what it did the past few days.
This afternoon we got a reprieve from the storms so I snuck out and did a little afternoon shooting. It feels good to get outdoors and spend some time in nature or the wine country as it be.
I took a quick loop from my house in Pismo through the back country into San Luis Obispo.
Below are a few of the sights I found along the way.
I know my posts have been almost as non existent as my photography these days. I like all other creative’s have found myself in a bit of a slump as of late.
From time to time in my life i go through these dry periods where taking my camera out to shoot anything other than my dogs seems to be laborious and trying to find inspiration seems almost daunting.
I picked up the new book by Christopher Grey titled Canon DSLR The Ultimate Photographers Guide and was pleasantly surprised to see that one of my images had been published in the Canon User’s Gallery. For a brief moment I felt inspired again, seeing your picture in a printed publication is very cool afterall! While I had a brief bit of momentum, I decided to email a model that i’ve worked with in the past to book a session lets see if I can break this FUNK i’m in, maybe i’ll head out into the great blue yonder tomorrow and see if i can find some inspiration outdoors.
Hopefully the next time i post it will be with an amazing new picture and i’ll be back in the saddle again!
I know it’s been a while since i’ve posted anything here and the last thing you all want to see is some video of my australian shepherd catching his frisbee We’ve been taking our little monster down to the beach in Cayucos lately where he gets to enjoy his two favorite things the ocean and his frisbee. He’s obsessed, i threw the dang thing for almost 2 hours and he still didn’t want to stop.
Anyways enjoy and I promise to start posting some actual photography related stuff real soon.
January 4th, 2007 by 
Cris Mitchell
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