My friends: Liz and Matt are a couple of very young, yet very successful photographers from Panama. They invited me to the El Palmar beach on the Pacific cost of Panama to create their anniversary portrait.

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Later in the evening, during low tide we had some light painting at the rocky beach:

El Valle is a beautiful mountain town less than 3 hours drive from Panama City. Thanks to high altitude and proximity to the equator it is one of the few places privileged to enjoy spring  weather all year round.

I had a chance to visit el Valle accompanying Mathew Aftre of Lizzie Photography and to take photographs at a very colourful  Panamanian wedding.  Acting as a guest photographer I could skip the formal portraiture and focus on the most interesting part: wonderful fiesta and people’s emotions. I hope to be able to share at least a tiny  bit of the great time I was having there with my pictures!

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Anna and Sasha got married in Kaliningrad, Russia and came to Prague for their honeymoon trip.  They had a luck to come in possibly the most photogenic season in Prague – Autumn and to enjoy beautiful weather.

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Sandra lives in Los Angeles, California and is an author of a popular wedding blog. She wrote an enthusiastic article about my work more than a year ago.  Many months later I found the blog entry when looking for references to my website, it ended with the following paragraph:

Grateful for her help with promoting my work, I wrote Sandra that I could possibly come to Paris and cover her honeymoon trip.  Another couple of months and a dozen of emails later the idea materialized, here are the results:

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Jeanne and Desmond came from Hong Kong to attend their friend’s wedding in Budapest and they took the opportunity to take pre-wedding pictures in Prague and in Vienna. On the way we also stopped at the small town of Mikulov and took some snaps in there.

J & D are a fun couple to work with, I honestly envy the lucky photographer who will get to shoot their wedding in Hong Kong!

Big thanks to my assistants: Saneesh and Raifa for their contributions!

The make-up artists in Prague and in Vienna were Lucie Budinska and Alice Retzl respectively.

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Some of my regular readers might be wondering why I am updating my blog so seldom in  the middle of the wedding season in Europe.

Well, apart from being extremely busy taking pictures, I have a new time-taking hobby: the darkroom. I decided to fully enjoy the analog photography while its still possible.

Unlike my digital setup, which is top-notch and completed without compromises, the equipment I am using for making black and white photography is fairly spartan. This is because I do realize that the future of photography is fully digital, I am making analog prints only for a special and unique experience. Darkroom skills these days can hardly be monetized or even appreciated by most people. It is hell lot of fun though and it reminds me that I was fortunate to be born in very interesting times of technological revolution.

I would like to thank my friends: Petr Chytil, Anna Kazanova and others, who provided me with equipment and technical advice during my beginnings as well as my flatmates for their patience and understanding when I was occupying the bathroom.

The picture being enlarged above was taken by Gleb Kolobov, whom I am also trying to “infect” with the passion for analog printing.

Lucie-Anne grew up in New York, Cleber is from Brazil. They live in Paris, but they decided to get married in Prague, the city of Lucie-Anne’s ancestors.

The ceremony took place in the catholic church of St. Joseph in Mala Strana, just next to the Charles Bridge. What made this wedding very special from my point of view was a fabulous Brazilian music played by a band that accompanied the couple during the ceremony in the church, on the way to the reception site (Restaurant Konírna) and then all over the evening.

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Saneesh Sukumaran was my assistant/second photographer during this assignment.

Jana and Matt just came to Prague from Australia to get married in the picturesque country of  Jana’s ancestors. I will be documenting their wedding this weekend. Here is a few snapshots from a quick warm-up photo session last Sunday:

The purpose of setting up a small photo session before the wedding is to build more confidence with the couple and make my work smoother on the actual wedding day, knowing clients’ temperament I can better plan the wedding shoot.

I was assisted by Saneesh Sukumaran during this assignement.

Earlier this year I got a Leica M6 with two lenses: Summicron 50/2 and Nokton 30/1.2 because I wanted to see what all the “Leica buzz” is about.

I’ve already published the results of my first experiments with it some weeks ago. Encouraged by positive response and fact that the new camera actually seemed to help me to take different pictures (more on that later) I continued to use it for photographing my friends, family and some street scenes.

Here is a  new collection of pictures I took with the M6 this spring:

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PS. I recently replaced the Summicron 50/2 with Zeiss C-Sonnar 50/1.5 and many of these pictures were already taken with it.

Angela and Hok got married a week ago in Hong Kong. They flew to Europe for their honeymoon trip and chose my services to create their wedding portrait with the backdrop of Prague.

Unfortunately they had little luck with the weather. It was just the beginning of the heavy rains that caused serious floods around Central Europe. I took some unusual steps to prepare to deliver memorable pictures in spite of such weather: the lighting equipment was waterproofed with a plastic wrap and we had 3 extra voluntary assistants.

Luckily after a short shower the skies started to clear out and we also managed to get some shots without umbrellas.

I would like to give a special credit to my main assistant on this assignment – Saneesh Sukumaran. He actually took some of the pictures from the gallery below:

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Big thanks to Raifa, Florin, Lucian and anonymous group of Malaysian tourists, their help was also substantial!