Fresno Wedding Photographer Craig Kohlruss

New web site

Craig — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:47:21 +0000

After three years and 94 posts I’m going to cease publishing to this blog. In 2008 this was my forum for kick-starting my photography business and it went really well. I had a lot of fun and got some great feedback from posting weddings, engagements, portraits and editorial work in these spaces. The problem was that I had a “portfolio” site and a blog site. The portfolio was based on Flash, which is bad for search engines. It also seemed a little weird to me to have separate sites and I was also looking for a design change. So here we are. I dumped my flash site and will combine the blog with my galleries so everything is in one place. I also hope to add extra information on venues and other vendors that will be helpful for wedding planning. And it’s all html friendly!

The new site is simply craigkohlruss.com.

I put it together with WordPress and a Graph Paper Press blog template. I did it all myself so I haven’t done a whole lot of collaborating. There might be some glaring errors or things that just don’t work so I would love to here your thoughts. Send them to me at my email address: craig@craigkohlruss.com

For former clients, it would be great to hear from you. A testimonial or two would be great to add to the new site to help give prospective clients some insight on my work. I’d really appreciate it if you could help me with one of those. And lastly, linkbacks are wonderful things. If you see a blog post on the new site that you like a lot and you have a website or you just want to say something on Facebook or Twitter, please do! It helps.

Thanks and I look forward to many more years with this cool site.

Craig

Big clouds over the Big Fresno Fair

Craig — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:07:02 +0000

I had quite the busy day on the first day of this year’s Big Fresno Fair.

My plan was to help out at the Fresno Bee booth with my Fresno Photo Booth. We got set up but then the skies opened up with a huge downpour. Luckily, I have a canopy to keep the booth dry. I was really worried nobody was going to come because it was so wet. But in another stroke of luck, the raindrops stopped by the time the fair started.

In the end we had quite a few kids, families and individuals come up to take a photo booth picture which we posted on the Bee’s new Snap photo gallery. I also shot a few candids, including moments from the Fresno Beehive’s facial hair contest which were added to Snap.

Toward the end of the day, I got a call from my photo editor that we need to get a dusk-time photo showing the mid-way at the fair to tell the story of the unpredictable weather situation on the first day. Great. Problem was, it was already 6:15pm and I hadn’t put away the photo booth yet. I had probably less than an hour before the sun would set and there would be no light left in the sky to make a picture. I had to hustle to break down the booth and make three trips out to my car which was parked about three blocks away. It was a cool day, but I tell ya, I was sweatin’!

So finally after everything was packed away I ran out to the mid-way with my two Canon 5Ds. I was excited that there was still a tiny bit of light left in the sky and the clouds looked really cool. Ideally, I would have used a tripod to get some motion in the rides, but I didn’t have mine with me. So instead, I just hand-held the camera at about 1/20th of a second. I set the iso and aperture to get some brightness in the sky without blowing out the lights in the rides. In the end it worked out really well and I got a lot of feedback on the Bee Photography Facebook site. All-in-all a pretty productive day. Whew!

Yosemite Valley wedding: Cristina and Ramon

Craig — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 05:23:03 +0000

Cristina and Ramon’s wedding at the Ahwahnee Hotel was my very first Yosemite Valley Wedding. Of course, I’ve been to the Valley many times, and mostly to work as a photographer, but never to shoot a wedding until now. It turned out to be everything I was hoping for and more. I think what made it even more special was just how cool the couple were! I owe a big thanks to fellow shooter Patrick Pike who works plenty of Yosemite Weddings and was kind enough to send Cristina and Ramon my way. I so appreciate that Patrick! The couple was running slightly behind – hey, it happens. But they still wanted to be sure and tour the Yosemite Valley floor to get plenty of couple portraits before the wedding ceremony. I arranged a quick “first look” so that they could at least have a little bit of a wow moment. Then we quickly did our shots in several spots around the Valley and still made it back almost on time! And the ceremony of course was awesome. It was set in the wedding lawn area south of the Ahwahnee Hotel and under the apple tree. The squirrels got involved too while helping themselves to a few apples during the ceremony. Afterwards, we did some cool family portrait shots with the hotel in the background and then went to do even more couple shots. I had a great time. It was like total creative license. Very fun. By dinner time everyone had retired to the Ahwahnee Solarium which is a pretty cool little venue in itself. After food, speeches and cake, it was off to the Winter Club Room for party time. By the time it was all said and done, I was pretty exhausted, but it was definitely worth it. I hope this is the first of many wedding shoots to come in Yosemite Valley

Tenaya Lodge wedding: Elizabeth and Brian

Craig — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:01:04 +0000

It’s always nice to spend a day in the mountains around Yosemite National Park and it was super nice to spend a day with Brian and Elizabeth shooting their wedding at the ever-elegant Tenaya Lodge. What a beautiful summer day we had with lots of sunshine and warm, but comfortable weather. I could get used to this!

Engagement: Alik and Garin

Craig — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:15:40 +0000

The first time I tried to get together with Alik and Garin for their engagement shoot, the skies over San Francisco opened up for a huge downpour. So we thought the middle of summer would be fine right? Not in San Francisco! Poor Alik was freezing and the sky remained overcast, but we made do and had a good time anyway. It was the second SF engagement with the second Hovsepian bride of the year. Crazy eh? Alik and Garin will be getting married in downtown Fresno on Oct. 1. Stay tuned for those photos.