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Just got the results from the 2012 Year End contest from the WPJA, and I found out that I won my 28th, 29th and 30th awards. Two images placed in the Getting Ready category and one in the Rings category. 

More shortly — I have been in Costa Rica and Thailand since early January and have a lot of catching up to do! But you can swing over to my Facebook fan page to check out what I’ve been up to in Thailand — lots of rock climbing photography.

WEDDING PHOTO CONTEST WINNERS | WPJA Year End Contest, 2012 is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.

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Liz and Jeff got hitched just after the New Year in Cancun, at an awesome place called Now Sapphire. I posted their day after trash the dress cenote session just after the wedding, and recently wrapped up the entire collection. I loved these guys and had so much fun getting to know them and their family and friends. It was a real privilege to shoot the festivities. I can only hope they soaked up enough sun to last them a while, since they had to return to their home in northern Alberta, which is about the same latitude as… umm… southern Greenland. Congrats, guys — were you able to take a vacation from your vacation when you got home?

NOW SAPPHIRE CANCUN WEDDING | Liz & Jeff is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.

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I woke up on the 1st, hopped in the car, and drove to DIA to catch a flight to Mexico to shoot a wedding in Cancun. On the way there, I realized I’m starting my 8th year as a full time wedding photographer. I kind of tripped out at the thought, but it’s been an amazing ride. This year, my resolution is to stay up to date on the blog posts, so without further ado, here are some images from Liz and Jeff’s day after portrait session in some cenotes on the outskirts of Cancun, followed by a trip to Playa del Carmen, which was absolutely hopping. I’ll get the entire wedding online when it’s edited, but here’s a teaser. Happy New Year!

CANCUN TRASH THE DRESS | Liz & Jeff’s TTD Session in Mexican Cenotes is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.

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Right at the end of 2012, Meghan and Dom came up to Estes Park for a winter engagement session. Weather was bluebird and beautiful at the start, but it quickly degenerated into cold, windy and overcast — and it began to snow as I drove home. We braved a 30 minute uphill trudge through knee deep snow to get to one of my favorite locations to shoot around here. My hands froze into claws a couple of times and I had the screaming barfies as they warmed up. All in all, a great day, and stoked for the wedding in May.

ESTES PARK ENGAGEMENT SESSION | Meghan and Dom is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.

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So this is an unusual Estes Park family portrait session because, well… just look at the first picture. 

Mindy, Jacob and the boys came up to Estes Park to get some pictures of the whole fam and we got totally hosed by the weather. Literally. After about 10 minutes, the clouds opened up and it started to dump on us. Amazingly everybody was pretty stoked about it, but the day came to a quick halt. They went home and we had to reschedule a few weeks later when the summer weather was less twitchy. Mindy had seen an image on my landing page and wanted a family picture that was similar, with the Milky Way in the background, so we tromped out one more time and managed to get what we were after. I had a lot of fun bush whacking with these guys up to a really cool location I tend to shoot in a lot.

Here’s some stuff from the rest of the shoot.

RAIN, SHINE, STARS | A family portrait session in Estes Park is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.

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Here are a few more images that won awards in the latest Round 10 Fearless Photography contest. Check the whole gallery of winners here: http://www.fearlessphotographers.com/galleries.cfm – there are a ton of fantastic images in there and it’s worth a few minutes of a day to browse through them. There were 7,500 entries from 650 photographers. Out of those, 312 won an award. I scored 3.

Pretty stoked about these. There are a lot of so-called awards floating around, but very few are truly legit ones that are judged by a blinded jury of my peers. I take a pretty cynical view on this kind of thing, since most are popularity contests sponsored by television stations and bridal web sites that ask users to vote for a favorite photographer in order to collect email addresses for future advertising campaigns. Other awards are handed out simply for linking to a web site, paying $600 to $3500 a year to join a “Best Photographers In The World” club, or getting just one positive feedback a year on a review site. This kind of thing really makes me frustrated because it’s not merit based in any way whatsoever. Fearless Awards make me proud because you have to make good pictures to get them, and I get psyched when I see the awesome work everyone else is producing out there.

The image of the guest grabbing a beer at Larry and Laura’s Tulum wedding at Ana y Jose has gotten a fair bit of mileage in the contest circuit. The other two were from Rebecca and Grant’s wedding on Abaco in the Bahamas (and yes, that’s a grandmother getting freaky with a band member).

FEARLESSNESS | A few more awards is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.

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I have not updated this blog for more than two months, and I wish I had no excuse. Unfortunately, I have a reason, and it’s one of the worst reasons I can imagine.

I was involved in a huge climbing accident in Turkey. Due to an error in ropework, Rannveig fell 50 feet from the top of a cliff and landed on a platau of hard limestone. I may post a full recount of the story here at a later date, but the long and the short of it is that she miraculously survived but suffered severe injuries. Starting from her feet and working up, she broke 3 metatarsals, 2 tiny mid-foot bones, both talus bones (the weight bearing bone of the ankle), a heel bone, a fibula and a tibia, her pubic bone, her sacrum, 2 vertebrae and her ulna. She had two ankle dislocations and bones protruding from an ankle and an elbow. Thankfully had no neurologic or head injuries.

I stabilized her spine until an ambulance arrived nearly an hour later, and throughout that time I had no idea if she would live or die. She was bleeding from her scalp, did not know where she was, and was in great pain. A 50 foot fall borders the death zone, where your internal organs separate from their blood supplies upon impact. Thankfully, about a dozen other climbers from around the world were there to help.

We were rushed to a hospital in Antalya where she underwent emergency surgery that night. I spent a nerve-wracking 5 hours waiting to see what would happen. The first thing she said when she woke up was: “I’m alive. Fuck yeah!” Quote of a lifetime, and my sentiments exactly.

She had another surgery the next day, and within a few more days thanks to the help of some incredibly empathetic and kind strangers, we were repatriated to her home country of Norway on an air ambulance. As soon as we arrived in Trondheim, she insisted on having some weights to keep her only functioning limb in shape. I was sitting on the couch and looked up to see this. Keep in mind both her legs are in casts and she’s got a pair of 8 inch pins protruding from each ankle.

After we cleared an MRSA quarantine, she had a third surgery, where her elbow and ankles were stabilized with plates and I can’t even remember how many screws. We bounced around hospitals and rehabilitation centers for the ensuing 7 weeks.

Although she faces months of rehabilitation, she is now walking, doing push-ups, and is able to hang on a pull-up bar with her elbow. Not once has she felt sorry for herself, felt depressed, or even complained. Instead, she approaches each new challenge with poise, grace, and courage. At one point, frustrated that her hand exercises were benefitting only her, she asked her therapist to give her a job so that she could produce something for someone else. Instead of squeezing a hand trainer (actually, in her case, grains of rice — great forearm exercise), she began to squeeze oranges.

If you’re wondering how this impacts Dreamtime Images, fret not. I’ve shot 4 weddings since June 15 in Colorado, and have lots more to come. I’m spending my July 4th editing photos, but understandably I’ve fallen horribly behind on blogging. Please bear with me. I promise, I’ve got some good stuff to show.

THE SILENCE | A little bit of where I’ve been for 2 months is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.

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Today 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. I’m going to Turkey for a week of rock climbing on some beautiful limestone, surrounded by pomegranate and apricot orchards.

A PRETTY FRICKEN AWESOME DAY | Green Cards & Fearless Photos is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.

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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.

HUATULCO WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS | Irina + Danny | Huatulco, Mexico is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.

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Hi Stumblers, thanks for visiting and for liking this post! The traffic has been awesome and I wish I could thank you all personally. If you could do me a huge favor, I’d really appreciate if you could +1 me if you have Google+ and Like me on Facebook. Please use the links below. Thank you so much!

Anyway, 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!

ENGAGEMENT PHOTOGRAPHY IN COLORADO | Sara + Nick | Estes Park, CO is from wedding photographer DREAMTIME IMAGES. Please visit our wedding photography blog.