Wayne Toshikazu Photographer | the Blog

Two words: Amazing. Wedding.

Everything from the traditional Vietnamese tea ceremony in the morning, to the stunning gowns worn by both the bride and her bridesmaids, to the beautiful ceremony, to the amazingly entertaining reception, made November 1, 2008, a perfect day to get married.

Special thanks to Kim Le for bringing me along to help her document such a wonderful day. And to Virginia and Brian - best of luck to you both as you begin the next phase of your lives. You’re gonna love it, I assure you!

 

I’m on a bloggin’ roll this week. Can you believe it?

Here’s a sneak peak of a wedding I shot back in November with the uber-fabulous Kim Le. More pics to come soon.

Have a great weekend!

Hold on to your pants for this one.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email that the kind people over at Project Wedding had chosen me to be one of a select number of vendors to win their annual Best of Project Wedding award for 2008! Well yesterday I finally received a packet in the mail with some award goodies and a nice letter explaining the award, so I guess it’s official!

And honestly, how crazy is that?!

Obviously somebody is on somebody else’s payroll here, so if anyone can just let me know who to thank, I would really appreciate it. :) Actually, I can thank Caroline of Caroline and Stephen fame, who’s beautiful San Clemente wedding I shot back in July, for giving such a wonderful review of me after her wedding. In fact, that’s how I got listed on Project Wedding in the first place. Thanks, Caroline!

Apparently only 5% of listed vendors in each category in my area (Los Angeles and Orange County) received the award. I’m told that a list of recipients will be published sometime mid-January 2009.

They sure do know how to make a guy’s day! :)

And so it begins: Casa de Toshikazu is now officially drowning in poopy diapers and sleepless nights. :)

So with that I’m pleased to say that Jonas Toshikazu safely entered this world on Sunday, November 23, 2008, at 10:49am. He weighed 6 lbs. 6 oz. and measured 18 1/2 inches long. Mary had a planned C-section, and thankfully everything went without complication.

I can’t recall ever feeling the heartbeat of anticipation as much as I did that day. Every waking moment, every minute passing by, brought us one step closer to crossing the divide from what often felt like childhood and into parenthood.  It was a moment well worth the wait.

Watching it all happen was utterly surreal. I can’t even begin to describe the rush of emotion encapsulating the moment when I watched Jonas being brought into this world. Crazy! So many emotions were flying at me that I honestly didn’t know how to feel. If that doesn’t make any sense, then that just about perfectly describes how I felt, because it’s so difficult to describe.

In any case, here are just a few pics I was able to pull out from the first couple days at the hospital. We’ve been so busy since the birth that I really haven’t had time to do much else than to help Mary with Jonas and, more importantly, just to spend time with the two of them in these first couple of weeks.

Thanks for reading! :)

 

Tomorrow is the big day.

But before Mary and I leave the first stage of our lives together and move every so swiftly into the next, we thought we should capture some more pics before she loses that cute belly of hers. This coming Monday she would have been 39 weeks pregnant.

Despite doing these on the fly and in between packing and getting ready for tomorrow, we turned out this pic that both of us really liked. Amazingly, Mary told me to blog this one; I didn’t even have to ask, beg or bribe her! :)

Stay tuned for possible updates tomorrow as we welcome the newest (and first) addition to our family. For more immediate updates, be sure to follow me on Twitter. We’ll be up at 6AM and at the hospital by 7:30AM. I hope we wake up in time! :)

Happy Friday. :)

I hate to ask for this, but if you would like to receive updates in your RSS reader for my blog, then I would kindly ask that you update your RSS reader to pick up the following address:

http://blog.waynetoshikazu.com/?feed=rss2

Because I attached a subdomain to the folder where my blog is stored on my server, updates are unfortunately no longer getting pushed to the former address. I apologize for the inconvenience! I honestly had no idea that using a subdomain would cause these issues, even though technically both the old and the new address are functionally identical.

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Also, I have a new office number, so please take note of this if you need to get in touch with me by phone:

(949) 544-1837

Thank you, and have a great weekend! If you don’t hear from me tomorrow, perhaps you’ll be hearing from me on Sunday, and maybe even with pictures of our new baby boy! :)

First a few technical updates:

As you probably have noticed by now I changed the blog address to http://blog.waynetoshikazu.com. Unfortunately though I didn’t realize that creating a subdomain for the directory where my blog was located would create some problems, so I apologize if you’ve tried to access my blog over the last two days using the previous address and were greeted with an error message. Theoretically the two addresses are functionally identical, so I’m not sure why things turned out the way they did.

Now the good news of course is that we’ve got things resolved and http://waynetoshikazu.com/blog now correctly points to http://blog.waynetoshikazu.com. The bad news though is that it doesn’t seem to be playing nice with my image directory, so many of the images aren’t displaying (the larger images; the thumbnails seem to display just fine). Again, apologies for this and I’m working to get this resolved as soon as possible.

If you’re reeaaaaallllly dying to see some photos, you can always cruise on over to my new website. :)

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Now on to the baby updates. :)

The first baby update is that, well, there is no baby today. :( We got pushed back a few days, but now we’re locked in for Sunday, 11/23… fo. sho. I hope you guys all like baby photos, cuz this blog is about to get crazy Jonas-ified. I’ll try to mix in some other stuff too, just to provide some balance in the hope that I won’t totally lose all my male readers (like guns, UFC, beer, etc.). LOL.

It’s so weird being just four days away from going from just Mary and me to being parents. Four days! Even with all the preparation we’ve been doing in getting the condo ready and making sure we’ve got all the clothes and necessities we’ll need, I don’t think it’s sunk in half as much as it will when I’m holding that little guy on Sunday. I keep trying to imagine the meaning of it all in the “big picture” kind of way, but I just can’t seem to wrap my head around everything.

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I hope my fellow Orange County peeps out there weren’t affected by those crazy fires we had this past weekend. We know a lot of people in the Yorba Linda / Anaheim Hills area, but thankfully everyone as far as I know was fine. For us though, we’re far enough south in Orange County that our air quality didn’t suffer, since the winds were pushing everything west and north. Sucked to be in LA that weekend though!

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I still have a wedding to blog, but as you can imagine we’ve been very busy around here with last minute preparations. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it up soon! :)

Have a great weekend!

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P.S. I forgot that I need to change the bio pic on the blog and write a little something about myself. Anyone wanna take a stab at the writing part? Or should I be afraid to see what you all think of me? :)

Best. Grandma. Ever.

Except that I didn’t call her “Grandma”. To me, she was affectionately known as “Ba-Ban”, a shorter version of the Japanese word for “grandmother”. Usually only children call their grandparents “Ba-Ban” and “Ji-Ji”, but it seems that I just never grew out of the only names by which I knew them.

To the heartbreak of many, we lost my grandmother on June 2, 2007. She was literally fine one week, in the hospital the next, and then one week after that we were attending her funeral. Crazy, isn’t it? If you think there’s always time later to do the things you need to do now, I challenge you to change that belief because sometimes tomorrow just never comes. And the one time it doesn’t, you’ll regret it.

I took this picture of my grandmother on Thanksgiving ‘06. I had just purchased my first DSLR and was only barely beginning to explore my photographic love more deeply. This would turn out to be the last picture that I would take of her. Beautiful, isn’t she?

This week I’ve been cleaning out the garage, organizing and moving boxes in as we get ready for the birth of our first son, Jonas. Part of that process entailed going through boxes that haven’t been opened since I came back from Texas after grad school in 2004. And can you believe what I found in one of those boxes? A handwritten letter from my grandmother, written to me almost 7 1/2 years ago. This letter was written about 3 months before I began my first semester at UC Irvine, where I transferred to finish out my junior and senior years of college. I’m not one to save many things, so I don’t have a whole lot of sentimental items around, but man would I be lying if I told you that this letter didn’t bring a tear to my eye when I read it. This is now one of the most cherished items in our home.

I thought about writing the letter out so that it’s easier to read. But if you try even just a little bit you can make out her writing pretty well. The words are so much more meaningful as written by her own hand, aren’t they? Those first few words are really the ones that hit me the most. If you can’t read it and would like to, just shoot me an email and I’ll write it out for you.

To the best “Ba-Ban” ever, we miss you and love you and wish you were here, even though we know you’re in a better and more joyful place than we could possibly imagine. Even now, almost a year and a half later, not a week goes by where I haven’t thought about you and the times we had together.

Thanks for reading…

Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one.

Before I say anything else, let me first thank everyone for the many, many kind words given in response to the launch of my first website. It means so much to me and everything that I am trying to achieve that so many people had so many good things to say about it, whether here in the comments, via email or elsewhere. Honestly, this photographic venture has been more of a leap of faith than anything, but each successive and positive step in the right direction closes that long and tortuous gap between dream and reality just a little bit more. So, thank you! The confidence your positive energy breeds is one of the many, many elements that keeps me going in this.

And speaking of my new website, yesterday I discovered that my site was featured in David Jay’s most recent newsletter, in addition to being plugged on his blog last week! Very cool, exciting, humbling, and mind-boggling all at the same time. :) Seriously, I really feel that my website is an extension of myself and my personality, and I’m pretty sure that I could not have experienced that same feeling had my only option been to purchase a template website. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it just didn’t seem right for what I wanted to achieve with the online presence I was determined to create.

Now with that said, here are some updates!

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Two words for you: Diaper. Duty.

Notwithstanding any early surprises, diaper duty officially begins at Casa de Toshikazu next Thursday, 11/20 - just a mere 10 days away!  It’s unbelievable, really.  The reality of fatherhood is both exciting and humbling, with a dash of trepidation thrown in for good measure, and it’s amazing how quickly we’ve come to this point. Forgive the cliché, but it really does seem like yesterday when we first found out that we were going to be parents.

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Yesterday Mary and I cruised down to the local Japanese Garden up in Fresno to walk around a bit and snap some pics before running some errands. Check out this pic of Mary at nearly 37 weeks pregnant. She’s so tiny for being that far along, and if I showed you a side profile pic of her you still wouldn’t see her belly stick out very far (sorry - not a prego-photogo here). She’s just as beautiful pregnant as she was the first day I saw her. That was almost seven years ago and I still remember it very vividly. I can even tell you what she was wearing and what her hair looked like. :)

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Mary’s last day of work is officialy this Friday and her maternity leave begins! So exciting. It will be so nice to spend the next two months with her and Jonas and to bring back some normalcy to our lives, even if only for a short time. And this will be the FIRST time since we married in 2006 that we’ll be together for Christmas. Can you say best Christmas ever?

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I got an iPhone. I got addicted to an iPhone. As a result of getting addicted to an iPhone I got addicted to Twitter and Facebook. Feel free to follow me and add me as a friend.

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Finally, I’ve got some wedding pics to put up from an awesome wedding I shot with the oh so tiny but way cool Kim Le, as well as some engagement pics from a session I’ll be doing this weekend in old town Orange, so stay tuned! I should also be back to regular blogging, and with the baby coming next week I’m sure that he’s going to hijack this blog anyway with loads and loads of pics of himself.

Thanks again for reading, and see you soon!

Aaaaaaannnnd I’m back! With more than an hour to spare. :)

Almost exactly 10 months ago I decided that my life needed a new direction. I needed to pull myself out of the comfort of my safety net, where I was very much prone to hiding, and push myself towards really living my life the way I was beginning to envision it, and to pursue the idea that it really was possible for one to live his dreams and do something he loved to do. For me, that was a big, big change.

Two years of marriage and life in the “real” world proved to be a great teacher, so much so that I probably learned more about myself in those two years than the last 10 put together. Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20, and that coupled with the wisdom that comes with age gave me a very clear idea of where my values were and how I wanted to achieve them.

So here I am, 10 months later, really chasing after something I honestly love to do, and looking back at those 10 months in awe of all that I’ve been able to experience. And now, to top it all off, I finallly have a website. :)

Please check it out! http://waynetoshikazu.com. (and don’t forget to turn up the volume)

I’ve mentioned this wonderful software before, but just to say it again my new site has been built from the ground up, from scratch, using Showit Sites. It’s an amazing piece of software, and way ahead of its time for a V. 1.0 release, and sure to only keep improving over time. It essentially allows you to build a flash based website without actually knowing how to code flash.

Lastly, a big thanks needs to go out to Brian Khang for taking some headshots of me, which I’ve used in the blog header and on the new site. Thanks also to my friend Araxi for putting up with what must have been 67 designs or versions of the same design that I had before what you see here. This process has very much been a very intense labor of love, and I can’t say enough how glad I am that I finally reached the end. I’ll still be touching it up over the next few days, which is the beauty of Showit Sites, and I still need to update some stuff on the blog too.

Comments welcome and appreciated!