Mr. and Mrs. Charlton

I don't usually like posting photos of clients until they have seen them, so now that Mike and Melody have their photos, I am going to blog them. Of course, if you know Mike, and are friends with him on Facebook, you'll probably get to see them all pretty soon.

Here is their first dance as Mr. and Mrs. Charlton. I snapped this with the 15mm fisheye lens I try so hard to use sparingly. It was perfect for this shot, but really hard to get away with. I shoot with prime lenses exclusively, which may seem like suicide for wedding photographers, but it's worked out pretty well so far. I use two bodies and four focal lengths to choose from in my shoulder bag. I could use some more telephoto lenses, but my style centers around the wide angle more than the tight crop, as you can see by the photo above.

Family Is Everything

This is a picture of the Soto kids during a recent family photo shoot.

Shot with my 15mm fisheye lens while laying on my back. Triggered a hot shoe flash with a pocket wizard that was laying on the ground next to my head, under a shoot-through umbrella that was stuck in the ground.

If you're looking for some fun family portraits before Christmas, I'm booking dates the weekend of Thanksgiving in Hampton Roads as well as December 14th through 17th.

Someone Else's Camera

This was shot at The Norva while Over the Ocean was playing on Sept. 11, 2009. As I'm walking from one side of the crowd to the other, I see some bloke raising his camera in the air to get a shot of Jesse, and I snipe his shot. Ha ha sucker. It's my photo now. Totally mine.

And yours too. I'm sharing it with you here.

Nate At The Norva

My friends are in a band. That band is called Over The Ocean. They are brilliant.

This is a photo of Nate Crawford slaying people with his rock at the Norva in Norfolk, VA on September 11, 2009.

I had one hot-shoe Nikon SB-28 flash mounted on the balcony camera-right, and had my shutter speed somewhere around 1/30th. I used the 15mm Sigma fisheye lens that I bought specifically for Africa, and waited until the lighting guy gave me some really heavy back-light.

Right Before The Lions Got Him

This was taken on the Masai Mara in Southern Kenya. I snapped this photo seconds before the lions pounced and ruined our trip.

Just kidding.

It didn't ruin our trip.

I'm now offering 8x10 prints from my trip to Africa, as well as from various other photographic experiences at prints.levibethune.com but you can purchase limited edition prints straight from this blog.

Wearing a Kenya Hat

I was just telling my good friend Craig that I never posed anyone while I was in Africa earlier this year. I always had my cameras on and around my neck, so I would grab whatever photo I could, whenever I could. Because I was pulling double-duty by recording video and still images, I had my mind going in two different directions at all times. The subject matter made it easy to always get a good shot. It's a target-rich environment in third-world countries, you can basically just close your eyes, lift the camera, and snap away.

This woman had just returned from the field where she was either herding the goats or hunting. She was my favorite woman in the village we were at during the day because of her glasses. Plus, you can't beat that knit cap in the middle of an African Summer.

East Africa, Old West

This is a photo I took while in Africa last February. I never really noticed it before, but while sorting through photos to get printed, I realized how "old west" it looks. I could totally see that building in Arizona somewhere. Instead, it's in Kenya.

Branches And Sky

One of the rare "clear skies" day in Africa. This was taken toward the end of the day, hence the long shadows, right before we got to the safari park in the Masai Mara.

Buy Prints

You can now order prints of my photos directly from my blog. You can stop trying to drag the image to the desktop, open it in Paint, erase my watermark, and print it on the HP printer that you got free with the purchase of an Emachines desktop from Circuit City five years ago only to find that the photo you stole is a low-resolution version anyway.

Get glossy prints of your favorite photos from my blog with simple clicks through Fotomoto.

This is one of the photos that I brought back from Africa when I went with the zao water project in February of this year. Click on "Buy Print" below the photo to purchase it in your choice of 3 sizes.

Nearly all the photos on my blog are for sale through this system, and additional sizes, including direct to canvas, are available by contacting me. Some of the larger sizes are limited edition, and prices are low right now, so get while the getting is good.

Check out more of my photos from Africa.

Luke Stasi

This portrait was shot using the Sigma 15mm f/2.8 Diagonal Fisheye lens I bought specifically for my trip to Africa with The ZAO Water Project earlier in the year. I don't usually use this lens for portraits, mostly as an exercise in self-control. I want to use it ALL THE TIME, but I try my hardest to refrain. The sky and the subject were just too well suited for the angle this time around and I just couldn't help myself.

This is Luke Stasi being a good sport in 98% humidity during our little Zoolander excursion.

Lightning on the Highway

If my wife knew how many times I almost died in order to get this shot, she would kill me.

Over The Ocean 1 of 2

I was playing around with two off-camera strobes, with slow shutter speeds. These are some of my best friends in Virginia. I really miss being around them. They sounded great, looked awesome, and smelled even better.

Elevator Number 5

My very good friend Rhonda came by today and we snapped off a few shots for her newsletter. Despite it being a little claustrophobic, we were able to fit myself, Rhonda, two bags, a light stand with a half-collapsed 60" umbrella and a Nikon SB-28 flash in the same elevator. I used a 15mm fisheye lens on the D80 to grab Rhonda in what I like to call her "Muppet Face". I told her this one would hit the internet.

If you're in the Charlotte/Fort Mill area, I'm running a special on portraits until the end of June. $25 per 'look' with a minimum of 30 minutes and one location per look. A 'look' is basically a change of clothes and hair. You'll walk away with at least 3 photos per look. Single portraits only. Contact me if you're interested.

Colour Academy 3 of 4

I ran lights for Public Radio the other night at the Visulite Theater in Charlotte. One of the opening bands was Colour Academy, and since I had nothing to do, I clamped a remote flash to a light bar and tried my hand at a few 'one light' live shots.

This is shot 3 of 4 in this 'series'.

Why Are You Moving?

This is a photo of Bound4LIFE director, and prayer intercessor, Matt Lockett in JHOP DC, and it has a lot to do with why we're moving.

Why are we moving? The biggest reason is that our house is an un-inspired, poorly-constructed, suburban nightmare, and I'm not even talking about the people inside. However, the people inside are making the living environment unstable, and thusly, unsafe, so I am making the decision to remove my family from that situation, for their protection and sanity.

But we're not stopping there. No, we're not only moving out of our house, we're making plans to move out of the state.

Merely weeks after finally wrapping up the last bit of paperwork tying us to Virginia, we have decided to move to... Virginia. Or rather, the Virginia side of the Washington DC metro area.

Why are we moving to DC? Well, logically it makes sense if we want to be closer to family and friends from years past and to get out of suburbia, but our reasons are based on more than merely logic.

A little over two years ago, Heather and I traveled from our home-town of Chesapeake, Virginia to Fort Mill, South Carolina to give Heather's younger sisters a ride back to their internship with TheCause. Katie and Melody Crane, my beautiful sisters-in-law, were in the middle of a prayer intercession internship with Chuck Mervin and Lou Engle. After their Thanksgiving break, we brought the Crane sisters back to the base in Fort Mill, and within moments both Heather and I decided, separately, that we wanted to move there. We didn't fall in love with the location, the ease of life there, or even the cheap gas prices, and we certainly didn't fall in love with the weather, we fell in love with the people that made up the movement. That movement was made up of a band of ruffians who wanted little else but to see America revived, and they were willing to pour everything they had into that cause through fasting, prayer, worship, and activism. We fell in love with the Justice House of Prayer.

After living here for over two years, helping to mobilize 70,000 people in a stadium, traveling across the country driving a box-truck, and changing addresses 3 times, we may have missed the train. Or at least we didn't catch the same one everyone else left on. The movement is alive and well, it's just moved to different places in the country. San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, New York City, and DC, are the cities which harbor this motley crew of prayer warriors now.

We got comfortable here in Fort Mill, and maybe a little lazy. I found a job at MorningStar doing what I love to do, and we had a baby. Cool story Hansel, all good stuff, but we started feeling more and more dissatisfied with our situation, and the lack of healthy community that rallied around a central cause that we had grown to love so much.

Now, with the fresh mergence of Bound4LIFE and JHOP in Washington DC, we have once again, like the Millennium Falcon to the Death Star, become drawn to that which we wish to live and die for. Justice in America.

Oh, and that Star Wars reference? It reminds me of another little blog I contribute to: http://fanmade.org

Details

This is a photo of a friend of mine. I love the detail of the beardliness.

I think I want to start a personal series called "Extreme Close-Ups Of Guys Wearing Big Sunglasses."

And I want to submit 'beardliness' for consideration to the Oxford English Dictionary. With this photo as the description.

Hooray for Nature

Isaiah loves playing outside. I told someone that and they said, "He's all boy".

Well, yeah, of course he's all boy. What does that even mean?

This Is Key

This is a new addition to the B-Room here at Bright City Studios in Fort Mill, SC.

I used to take piano lessons in school, but I was never disciplined enough to really focus on reading music. I could play tunes and memorize finger positions really well, and I had a desire to play, but when I hit a wall, I never really pushed through it. I'm actually grateful to my parents for encouraging me, but not forcing me to practice and study. No doubt, they made me finish my commitment, but when the time came for me to make a decision whether I was going to give up or continue, my parents let me make that decision.

I still have a desire to play music, and I still do, whether it be a solo guitar on the back porch, or an electronic, multi-layered synth sequence on the computer, I love creating tunes. However, even though it's a passion of mine, it's not a priority. I can't take credit for this, but I read somewhere that "Priorities are like arms. If you say you have more than a couple, you're lying or you're crazy". My priority is to provide and care for my family. The fact that I'm able to do that by pushing buttons, aiming cameras and typing on a keyboard, is outstanding to me.

I'm not going to give up my love for music, rather I'm going to take my love for music, art, movies and writing, and I'm going to invest that in my family. I can't give it up, but I can save it for a better time.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of this piece of history. It would also make a great prop or set piece for a portrait. In fact, I'm going to go shoot some right now. I'll see if I can find a willing subject.

Andrew and Sara

I wanted to share a 'treated' photo.

Although this was shot with the Nikon d80, this photo was a mistake. Like an amateur, I wasn't properly focussed, so I chose to put some 'action' on it in an attempt to save the moment.

I wanted to replicate the feel of a photo from the sixties, shot with a bad polaroid or diana camera, which has the tendency to be a little soft.

Dear Nerds: Done in Pixelmator after cropping and initial color correction and RAW processing was done in Aperture. Paper texture applied with screen overlay with brush strokes of multiplied color. I de-focussed the distant background(the part that I had in focus) and adjusted the curves to crush the blacks and give it a lot of contrast. Meh... it's art.

Dance It Up

This photo was taken at the Dugg Dugg opening afterparty.

I like taking photos of other photographers as they take photos of people posing for their photo.