Category: Family and Friends

A few pictures taken of Happyfishers who came to visit, and enjoy San Diego (in no particular order, though I’m sure enjoying San Diego was an afterthought :P).

Congratulations to Jeffrey and Grace for their beautiful wedding! Of course, the rest of us have been completely tired out from the endless amount of chores in the background… 

Without further ado, let’s see the bridesmaids…

and groomsmen… 

here comes the bride…

Here are Mr. and Mrs. Ma!!

and the traditional bouquet toss…

Of course, Karen and I needed a picture with the focus of the event…

For more pictures, go to Jeffrey and Grace’s Wedding section.  Once again, congratulations!

A couple weeks ago, Karen and I flew down to L.A. to attend my brother’s wedding.  If you know Mark, you’d know he likes to be… different… so he decided to get married on the Yacht, Endless Dreams.

Unlike the Seattle sub 60 weather, Long Beach was quite nice…

The yacht was divided into three levels, and the ceremony was on the top level…

I was the Best Man, but of course, I had to pretend that I didn’t have the ring to lighten things up…

The Unity Candle is very common in a wedding, but Mark and Sy opted for … the Unity Sand.  I haven’t seen this one before, but it was neat.

After the ceremony, we went downstairs to the lower level for the reception.  Then we came back up to the second level for the dance floor, where my brother busted out his moves…

After that came the bouquet toss and the garter toss… at least that’s what others would have had.  Instead of the garter, Mark did a little digging…

And came out with an unexpected object!

One of Mark’s groomsmen, Mark Anderson, was the happy recipient of this artifact…

Anyway, for more pictures on Mark’s wedding, check out Mark & Sy’s Wedding in the photo gallery.  Congratulations, Mark!

Sorry for waiting a whole trimester before posting these.  I wanted to share some shots of kingkongrahrahrah’s newest addition to the family, Kenzie:

Congrats for the all-natural birth of their new baby girl!

I took a little break from blogging to take a little breather, but I think it’s time to resume the action.

Today I attended a very unique wedding.  During the part where the pastor asked, “If anyone has any objections, let him speak now or forever hold their peace”, the uncle raised his hand.  So the uncle gave a speech about being troubled for not meeting the wife earlier than a day before the wedding, and proceeded to read a letter in the form of Chinese poetry from the father in China, saying (translated to English by yours truly):

The rain is coming
Mother is remarrying
It’s all destiny
Let him go

Then the uncle said that despite the despair, he has to give his blessing–after all, the groom is still family and he made the decision.

After his speech came the rebuttal from the groom.  He thanked the family and bowed, then also produced a letter from the father giving him support for the wedding.  The scene was so dramatic it seemed like a Chinese drama unfolded before our eyes.  The tension in the audience was high, as no one has seen this before, and there were tears in the audience both sympathetic and awestruck.

I commented to a pastor afterwards, “Bet you haven’t seen this before!”  and he replied, “Sure, but you know what?  This is the best wedding I’ve been to.  It really demonstrates true love between two people.”  I suppose I can only agree.  It’s when you persevere in these situations that you truly see the love and commitment you have toward one another.

For these two newly weds, I wish them the best in their journey of life together.

On Saturday, Karen and I attended Jerry & Eva’s wedding.  It was in a cozy, wooden Lutheran church with a very Lutheran pastor, who interestingly could speak Mandarin.  You can see him in the picture denoted by the … head.

Afterwards, we headed over to the reception.  It was funny for Karen to have been enlisted to bring salad before we even RSVP’ed, but whatever.  🙂

Call me a carnivore if you will, but apparently Karen’s salad was the only item I didn’t try that night.  The roast beef was good, though…  it was prepared by someone whom I haven’t seen for a decade!

The last time I recall seeing the Chef was back in 1995 when I attended College Fellowship at ECC.  All I remembered was heading to his Greenlake residence with a few other CFers after jogging where he, a student of the culinary arts, gleefully produced cooking oil by placing huge pieces of lard on the frying pan.  That was my only memory of him.

Apparently his memory was better than that as he called me by name on the way to the wedding on Saturday!

Anyway, my sitting around while waiting for Karen didn’t sit well with the other helpers, so I was enlisted to help fold the napkins around the utensils.  By the end, I was an expert napkin folder who outshined all the others–a rare gift.

In the meantime, Karen was busy setting up the wedding cake…

By now you’re probably thinking that this is a very DIY wedding, and you’d be right.  I suppose every wedding has its own character.

Finally we were able to sit down and relax.

After dinner, the bride and groom toasted each table…

When they came to our table, all the helpers were gone busy doing stuff, except for me.  I would have helped, but I wasn’t feeling well because…  let’s just say that I forgot Lactaid that morning with my cereal.  The helpers never came back and I never got to toast the bride and groom!  Wats up wit dat?!

Still, I wish Jerry & Eva the best on their new marriage.  🙂

First a word of wisdom from the Proverbs of James (this has nothing to do with the wedding by the way):

What I did today I shall blog later.
What I did yesterday I shall blog now.
What you call procrastination I call a strategic delay.

Let’s rewind to June 11th, 2004…  oops, I mean 2005.  It was Huey and Debbie’s wedding day and at their request, I became one of their photographers.  My scope was limited to taking pictures during reception when they go around the tables.  Cutting of the cake and everything else will be covered by the main photographer.

A couple weeks later, Huey amended that plan to include pictures of everyone who attended the wedding, but not necessarily mug shots.  Uh huh… as if I can keep track of anyone, seeing that I remembering names poses quite a challenge already.  I ended up just asking people for their mug shot as they come in anyway.  Despite my systematic approach in blockading the door with the effectiveness of a police line, I still noticed some undercover ninjas managing to sneak behind me.  Anyway, here’s one of the mug shots:

Then the wedding party decended down the stairs.  I noticed Pastor Sam checking his tie in the mirror, and I instinctively held up my camera and snapped.  In trying to capture the moment, I ended up with camera settings as far off as the moon is to the sun, so I ended up with:

Thankfully I shot in RAW, so I was able to salvage the picture with a little digital magic:

Amazed?  So was I.

Anyway, then came the ceremony.  The backlit background and the vicinity of the first row of seats offered no room for photographs without also capturing some audience member’s mesmerizing widow’s peak.  I didn’t want to be a copycat and duplicate the main photographer’s work, so I decided to crawl bootcamp style under the bar and to the left side, where I was able to capture this shot:

Then as I squatted in the front row, someone must have decided to head to the john because I saw a basket sitting on the floor with no one around.  I thought it would be neat to take a picture of this:

After the ceremony and at the announcement of food, the vultures headed upstairs for this:

Hmm, I’m salivating even looking at that picture.  Anyway, while waiting we decided to take some Happyfish pictures.  We started with the all-girl pic, but there was a disturbance in the force…

After settling down, we were able to take some nice, classy group photos such as:

Then we headed down for the reception.  That’s when I realized the main photographer was taking off before the cake cutting!  Oh oh, flashback to the nightmare of red-eyed monsters.  Anyway, after taking over main photographer duties, I first went around the tables with Huey and Debbie.  Of course, no reception is complete without some wacky games, like eat the ends of the noodle until the lips touch:

I have no idea what that dude in the middle is doing… practicing or catching his breath?

Afterwards came the cake cutting.  Thankfully there were no red-eyed monsters, but we did get one big, hungry cake monster who gobbled the cake in one byte!

Then after some speeches and toasts, Debbie changed and it was time to make an exit.  The guests formed two lines.  This is great, I thought, because I can try experimenting with various shots and angles and see what happens.  Yeah right. Before I finished my thought, Huey had already carried Debbie in his arms and darted toward me at 120 MPH!  If he had gone any faster, his head would have speared straight into my lens!  Thankfully I was able to pull off a couple of shots before Huey was literally 2 inches in front of me:

Then they were married and lived happily ever after.  Hmm, where have we heard that before recently?

So, being a wedding photographer isn’t as easy as it seems.  It’s fun, though, especially when you have the privilege of bossing people around by saying lines such as “Official Photographer Business! Ma’am, please step aside, thank you!”  Then you just flash your badge of authority–the overweighted camera–and all is forgiven.

For more information regarding this topic, in the form of pictures, you can visit The Happyfish Picture Gallery.

Here are a few pictures from the one-month celebration of Madeline at the Kam’s.  First of all, here is Madeline, at one month old…

Okay, she was not in the most comfortable and relaxing position.  Anyway, let’s rewind to the beginning of the day.  We started with lunch and funky behavior from Eddie…

Madeline wasn’t impressed with such childish behavior…

Her expression turned to frowning as Jimmy approached.  Maybe Jimmy looked like a thug…

Meanwhile, David was still keeping his priorities straight…

Here were the photojournalists at the scene capturing impromptu moments…

Here was Johnny getting in on a piece of the action…

That’s when Aaron joined us.  To appease him, some sacrifices had to be made…

Back to Madeline, who continued to be miffed by the thug…

Some went the extra yard to get the attention they desired…

Anyway, that’s the glimpse of what happened on Saturday.  😛  Maybe I’ll post more pictures if I have the time.

First of all, congratulations to Erick and Phoebe for getting married!  For their wedding they had asked me to help play the violin…

Oops! Looks like I needed to wipe those strings down!  Anyway, after practicing for the past three weekends, no embarrassingly rude screeches came out during the ceremony, so mission accomplished!

I’ve known Erick and Phoebe since the old College Fellowship days.  Back then they were newcomers…  how much have things changed!

Phoebe seemed nervous and stressed before the ceremony, but as we can see in this picture, joy took over as the ceremony progressed.

Once the ceremony was over, everyone started snapping pictures! This was also when Erick, who had to exercise restrait from his inherent goofiness during the ceremony, reverted back to himself as we can see from this next picture:

and receive the consequences of his actions by roasting his finger…

The following picture is most indicative of the marriage life of Erick and Phoebe…

…a life of goofiness.  Hmm, sounds disturbingly similiar to my marriage.

Afterwards we went to the Columbia Winery for the banquet, where Erick and Phoebe arrived in style…

Later we had dinner, slideshow, toasts, the cake cutting…

and the bouquet and garter tosses…

By the way, about the slideshow, two weeks before the wedding, Phoebe came to me with an emergency request of redoing the slideshow.  Apparently the videographers’ version and was a plain vanilla slideshow with cheezy music, nothing you would want to show at your wedding.  So night and day I toiled, staying up until 7am the night before working on it… well, excluding the hours I played the XBox game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory during this time.  😛  What can I say…  I get more inspiration at night!  Anyway, so by the end I was pretty proud of my achievement, showed up at the winery by 4:30pm to work out the technical details for the projector, laptop, sound, and everything was perfect.  Just perfect.  I was excited as I played the slideshow for everyone.  Nice large picture, fabulous sound, excellent content, and wonderful entertainment.  As the slideshow came to the end and I awaited for the response, the final subtitle came on and it showed…

Erick & Phoebe
May 28th, 2004

2004?!!  Oh no!! Apparently I typed in the wrong year for their wedding date!  How could I have been so silly to have missed that?  Doh!!

As the crowed yelled “TYPO!”, the blemish has entered my masterpiece, tainted forever.  Oh well.  As they say in Good Will Hunting, in the end it’s not the things that are perfect that you remember, but the imperfect.  Now it’s no longer just a slideshow.  It’s a story.

Yes, there are more pictures, but I didn’t want to clog this blog.  Maybe I’ll post it at some point in the future, in my convenience.  🙂