Today’s been a pretty fricken awesome day. I’ve got the biggest smile on my face and a feeling of lightness in my body, and I have to tell the world.

I write from Stockholm, where we traveled for our green card interview for my wife, Rannveig. She’s now legal! A convoluted and extremely stressful year-long immigration process has now come to a close, and it feels like an enormous weight has been lifted from our shoulders. Seeing the consular officer bring out our three inch thick immigration packet was pretty emotional for me. I had flashbacks to the weeks on end I spent working on it, collecting every document on the planet, double, triple, quadruple checking every last tick box and signature line, and stressing out like I never have before should I screw something up and be separated from Rannveig by a really big ocean and a whole lot of red tape. It’s been the most epic process of my life.

The lady smiled at us, asked us a couple of questions, and wished us well as she sent us on our merry way. That’s it? I asked. We’re done?

It was so anticlimactic I started laughing, but DAMN!

THIS FEELS GOOD!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

The icing on today’s cake came after a wandering the streets of Old Town Stockholm with our heads in the clouds. I learned the results of the 9th Fearless Photographers awards contest. Fearless is a really awesome organization of about 900 wedding photographers, and the Fearless Awards are given out to super cool pictures. There are no placings and no lower or upper limit of awards per contest. Judges  (a panel other Fearless members) simply pick photos they deem worthy, and the whole thing is blinded so nobody knows who shot what.

I joined Fearless about a month ago and and just heard the results of the first contest I participated in. About 5 percent of the submissions won an award, and five of those shots were mine. Pretty stoked about that.

If you want to check some super inspiring wedding photography, swing on over to the Fearless gallery from Round 9. The stuff in there wasn’t just mind blowing — it’s mind blasting. For Russell Peters fans out there, let me say it again: mind BLASTING!

Meanwhile, catch ya on the flip side. We’re going to Turkey for a week of celebratory rock climbing on some beautiful limestone, surrounded by pomegranate and apricot orchards.

Irina and Danny came all the way from Canada to get married in Huatulco, an off the beaten little resort area on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Flying in on a little prop plane over was huge mountains was awesome. They had a spectacular celebration at the Secrets Resort, and I was down there for three or four days to capture all sorts of fun moments on boat trips and beach days. It was a super fun wedding to shoot becuase of the super strong connection between everyone. Here are some favorites from the wedding day itself.

Here are a couple of faves from Sara and Nick’s recent engagement session. These guys were total troopers, hanging out with me in a frigid parking lot well past sunset to get this first image. Fun times, though a bit cold. I’m super excited for the wedding this July — maybe we’ll re-create it in the summer when it’s above freezing!

The Wedding Photojournalist Association just released the results of its most recent year-end contest for 2011 and I was thrilled with 7 awards in total, bringing the annual count up to 8, and my career count up to 27. Three images won blue medals by placing in the top five within a category, and two images won gold medals by placing in the top three. Pretty stoked about this. The competition has become absolutely fierce as the organization has expanded and matured in recent years. Check out all the winners here.

The first image here placed second in the Found Details category:

This one won a 20th place in Emotion:

And an 11th place in Found Details:

This image placed 5th in the Ceremony category. The bride and groom are my dear friends Kristin and Yishai, who run and operate an adventure racing company and a climbing gym in San Luis Obispo. It’s only fitting that the path to the cereony was cordoned off by climbing rope and they’re charging back to the reception, where, I should note, the centerpieces were made of climbing holds.

This image placed 3rd in the Groom Getting Ready category.

I love this shot from a wedding in the Bahamas last May, which was 10th in Creative Portraits.

And last, my 11th place finisher for the Food and Drinks category from Larry and Laura’s wedding in Tulum.

Wow, there are a lot of images in this post. Sorry if it takes a while to load, and apologies for being behind in blogging.

Anyway, here’s a beautiful destination wedding from Tulum, Mexico in late November, just a week after Larry and Laura had their wedding at Ana Y Jose.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking and try to keep it brief, but it was a really touching few days. Lots of really amazing connections between everyone, and a lot of emotion and love. And a curious lizard who thankfully didn’t run off with the rings (check out the second to last pic). It was a real treat to photograph.

I also had the privilege of working with Malisa, a former client (check out her wedding photos in Tulum) and intrepid traveler who now runs her own destination wedding planning firm. She is an incredible resource to anyone planning a destination wedding.

Happy Holidays, everyone! It’s Christmas day and I just wrapped up Larry and Laura’s fantastic wedding at Ana Y Jose’s in Tulum, just down the coast from Cancun and Playa del Carmen. Tulum is one of my favorite places to get married on the Mexican Riviera due to its laid back atmosphere and lack of high rise megaresorts. Larry and Laura had my wife and I down there to shoot their wedding, and we had so much fun with their friends and family.

I’m going to embarrass Larry for a minute because he’s got one of the coolest proposal stories I’ve ever heard: the two were at a parade, where every year, ping pong balls are shot into the crowd with certain deals for local businesses printed on the balls. Larry was about ten steps ahead, so he found himself a ping pong ball beforehand, split it in half, and hid Laura’s ring within. Then he pocketed it and headed out to the parade. Sure enough, the ping pong balls were shot into the crowd and Larry enthusiastically jumped to the ground on his hands and knees to find one. In a stroke of luck, a newspaper photographer was standing right behind them and captured the whole thing. Once down, Larry rose to one knee and showed Laura his hollowed out ping pong ball with the ring. Well played, sir. Well played.

At any rate, the celebration lasted for a couple of days, with a welcome lunch and dinner, a beautiful beach front wedding, and a day-after trip to Hidden Worlds, a cool cenote adventure park in the jungle. What follows are some favorites from the wedding day itself. Larry & Laura, congratulations, and thanks so much for having us down there. You’ll be pleased to know that those goodie bags you left us with were most appreciated! We’d love to connect again, so if you’re out in Colorado you have to give a shout.

Had a cool fall engagement session up here in Estes with Taylor and Cory, who are out in this neck of the woods contemplating a move from Texas. We went to a favorite place of mine just outside of town as the sun set, and found ourselves some gorgeous golden light to complement the bright fall colors. Here are some favorites. Congratulations, Taylor & Cory!

Ally and Scott were married recently in Beaver Creek, just down the road from Vail, in the Beaver Creek Chapel, and had a great wedding reception afterward at Beano’s Cabin on the side of the mountain. The wedding was gorgeous, and Beano’s was in perfect form. The grass was green and carpeted with wildflowers, and the sun cast some incredible light across the Rockies as it set.

Ally and Scott’s wedding had a number of firsts in it, the best being a unique toast given to the kitchen staff for a tasty meal. A groomsman led the way, and had every single guest at Beano’s raising their hands in the air, shouting and clapping for the food. I’ve also never seen a ring bearer sprinting down the aisle with a teddy bear in his mouth (though I have seen one dressed literally as a bear), nor have I seen people jump up and down with so much enthusiasm that they destroyed the paper globes hanging from the ceiling. That means only one thing: people were having a LOT of fun. At one point, a wedding guest grabbed my camera and starting to take pictures with it.

Anyway, great vibe, great party, great couple, great wedding. Congrats to Ally and Scott, and thanks to the awesome folks who made this happen: Carolyn Moorman at Artistan Events, Fred Hammond at A Great Time DJ, the Shamane’s Bake Shoppe, and Vintage Magnolia for the flowers.

Here’s a fun screen capture from the homepage of Pictage, which is the printer/album bindery/order fulfillment company of myself and the about 11,000 other photographers around the world. Recently they ran a a contest where they asked their members for images of fall for their homepage; this image of mine, along nine other images, were the contest winners. To get this photo I had to scramble to the top of the spindly little aspen tree you see on the bottom of the frame. It was about eight inches in diameter and I was probably 20 feet up. Luckily there was a nice fluffy bed of leaves to land in had it fallen over!

I need to interrupt my regular scheduled programming to write a little blurb about the new iPhone 4s. I keep reading over and over again how great the camera is in it, especially in low light, but few seem to have compared its pictures to the pictures of anything else. So while the word on the street is that the camera does as good a job as a point and shoot, and that it basically makes having a second camera kind of redundant, nobody’s really shown any substantial evidence to back that up.

I didn’t want to take the tech pundits’ words for it, so tonight I drank a PBR, put the can down next to a cool Vespa calendar, and decided to make my own little comparison. I scrounged up every camera I could get my hands on and took a picture of my PBR/Vespa scene. The list of cameras included the iPad 2, the iPhone 3, the iPhone 4s, Panasonic’s DMC-FX500, Canon’s G9, the Rebel XTi, the 40d, the 5d, and the 5d Mark II. I fitted Canon’s 24-70 f/2.8 L series lens to the dSLRs just to make for a fair comparison. I mean, the optics in a Canon L series lens are about on par with a phone’s camera, right?

I dimmed the lights in the room and created a scene with the following exposure: ISO 800, f/2.4 to 2.8, and 1/15th of a second. Basically, in layman terms, that means there was about as much light as a restaurant at night. Not a dimly lit one, and not a bright fast food place. didn’t use a flash and I shot with Auto White Balance on all the cameras. I actually took the first shots with the Apple phones, imported them into the computer to find out what their exposures were, and set the rest of the cameras to match. I’m sure there are all sorts of people who are going to argue with my methodolgy, but this isn’t really intended to be much more than a rough idea of how these these gadgets stack up against each other.

So what did I find? Well, the pundits are kinda right and kinda wrong. The iPhone 4s’ camera isn’t bad at all — in fact, it’s great (for a camera in a phone) — but I hesitate to compare it to a quality point and shoot, at least in the poor lighting conditions that illuminated my PBR/Vespa scene. Of course the 4s is way better than the iPad, and it’s also significantly better than the iPhone 3, which suffers from a soft lens and heinous color noise in low light situations. But to say it’s as good as a point and shoot is a bit of a stretch. The flash is underpowered and there are no manual controls that would otherwise let you milk a scene for the best results. There’s a fair amount of noise at ISO 800, even compared to my 3 year old Panasonic DMC FX500, and the iPhone lens just can’t compete with the more sophisticated lenses in dedicated cameras.

But — and this is a huge but — there’s something to be said about an 8 megapixel camera stuffed into a smartphone. For everyday purposes, this thing does outdo a point and shoot simply because it’s already in my pocket. And what’s more, in broad daylight, the gap between the iPhone 4s and the point and shoot cameras narrows dramatically (see below). I anticipate it’ll take two to three generations of smartphones to truly close the gap with point and shoot cameras. But meanwhile, I bet you I could make a pretty fancy looking 20×30 canvas print with my new iPhone 4s if I took a picture in well lit conditions.

Anyway, as I expected, the iPhone 4s camera came in just behind my Panasonic DMC FX500 from 2008. It got trounced by the Canon G9 from 2007.

Here are images from all the cameras, roughly resized to the size of the image from the iPad at the top. I realizing that resizing them doesn’t make for a fair comparison, but I’ll leave that to the camera review sites. Hopefully this will give some people a rough idea of how everything compares.

Some general thoughts:

• iPad 2 – The camera is basically a joke. I included it for reference only. It’s less than 1 megapixel and the noise is horrible.
• iPhone 3g – Check out the shadows on the right of the picture and you’ll see the color noise. This is hard to clean up. You can also see, when compared to the image below it, how soft the lens is.
• iPhone 4s – Pretty good, though there’s a lot of shadow noise. The good thing is there’s nowhere near as much color noise as in the images from its predecessor, which is impressive.
• Panasonic – This is the closest competitor to the iPhone 4s camera, but it’s still sharper and cleaner.
• Canons – These are in here just for reference. Notice how tight the grain is on the G9 compared to the iPhone.

I also decided to to check things out in daylight, the results of which are below. Realizing that the only real competitors in my closet were the Canon G9, the Panasonic and the iPhone 3, I left the iPad and dSLRs out. The results were still pretty much the same, though (as expected) the gap in image quality between the cameras narrowed dramatically. The G9 still stands on its own, but the difference between the iPhone 4s and the Panasonic is very narrow. There’s less chroma noise in the 4s, though its grain is really ugly. I found the white balance to be pretty good on the iPhone. Go ahead and click on that below image if you want the full res version.

I was intrigued by how the iPhone stood up to the Panasonic in daylight, so I decided to just take a picture outside to get an idea of what regular snapshot actually looks like. Pretty good, particularly on the web. Again, clicking below will get you a high res version.

But I was a little disappointed by the amount of noise present in the sky, which you can see below at a 100% crop. Otherwise, the lens performed well and is pretty sharp.

Anyway, all in all, not a bad little camera. The iPhone 4s is not a replacement for a point and shoot, but it’s pretty close if you have a cheap one or an old one and you shoot pictures primarily during the day. If you are traveling and want a good camera for your trips, consider investing in a good, modern point and shoot.

Now, enough pixel peeping. Back to the fun stuff: people getting married!