Backlit Creative has just launched a new site! My wife, Erin, is a photographer in the Twin Cities. She shoots wedding, family, engagement and child photography. Check out her brand new site on your computer, smart phone or devices like the iPad.

http://erinbellphoto.com

Tell us what you think with a comment below.

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Here are a few random photos from over the years:

Taken early in the morning outside Caribou Coffee.

Langton Lake Park in Roseville, MN

Nazareth Chapel at Northwestern College, St. Paul, MN

Somewhere in Chicago

Off the porch at LEVEL Brand, Warehouse District, Minneapolis

Vulture Mine, somewhere deep in the heart of the Arizona desert

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I had the privileged of photographing a long-time friend and her fiancé, Johnathon, this past week. My wife and I will also be shooting their wedding this October, and we can’t wait! I must say again to Lisa and Johnathon, thank you for picking such a beautiful spot for pictures. I can see how it made for the perfect spot for your first date and engagement. Congratulations! You guys are beautiful.

This is the bench where Johnathon asked Lisa to marry him—SO pretty!

You can see more pictures from this shoot on Erin’s blog.

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Dan and Karolyn have been friends of mine for a long time. It is such an honor to be shooting their wedding this summer and I’m glad they were able to take a weekend to come up to the cities from the Chicago area for this engagement shoot. It ended up being the perfect day for a shoot.

Erin and I shot this one together and had a great time hanging out with the two love birds down at the Stone Arch Bridge. There are so many great textures all in one place. Congratulations Dan and Karolyn, we can’t wait for the wedding!

By the way, Karolyn is a fabulous videographer if anyone is in need :)

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Erin and I did a shoot a while ago, and I’m just getting around to posting some pics. We traveled to AZ for Christmas and spent a day at Vulture Mine out in the middle of the desert taking Chris’ senior pictures. It was a really cool place and provided some interesting back drops. Chris has become quite the amazing musician, playing the guitar, bass, trombone, french horn, piano and the occasional sousaphone. Did I miss anything Chris? :) Congrats man, you’re almost done! Love you buddy.

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LevelBrand.com is a brand new redesigned website I just finished for my current employer, LEVEL. This site has been a while in the making and has kept me very busy, which is the main reason my blog has been a little bare recently. LEVEL is a brand and reputation agency in Minneapolis, and I have been there for almost a year working as Interactive Designer.

This new site was a very big undertaking, but I enjoyed every minute of it. And I am excited to share a couple techniques that add to it’s clean design and universally accessibility. The first is sIFR (scalable Inman flash replacement). This technique allows for headlines to be replaced with more interesting fonts that everyone with flash player installed can see. If you do not have flash or javascript enabled, you still see standard web fonts for headlines, so no information is lost. This technique helps to enhance the design of the site, while still allowing those headlines to be coded in HTML to be crawled by search engines for SEO purposes.

The second technique is called Faust (flash augmenting standards). The basic principle of this technique is to create your website using building blocks. First, you start as basic as possible using standards based HTML so all your content is out there for SEO. Second and third, add CSS for styling and javascript to enhance user interaction. And finally, display rich interactive flash content over top of your static HTML for those users who can see it. This technique can be seen in the work section of the site. If you have flash player installed you will see a fade between images as you click through the thumbnails. If you do not have flash, but you do have javascript enabled, you will get the same flip between images only without the fade. This is javascript controlling the transition instead of flash. If you have neither of these, you will be redirected to a new page which will display the larger image. Anyway you look at it, the viewer is seeing content. This is good news for anyone concerned with having a website that is universally accessible. And, all the image and alt tag code is written out in the HTML so search engines can read it as well.

My role in this project included everything besides writing copy. I designed, art directed, and programmed the site. I also took my first hack at developing the site specifically for SEO. The website also features some of my photography from a previous post, and some from around LEVEL’s office space.

Check out the site! www.levelbrand.com

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Back in September, I had the privilege of assisting my wife in photographing Adam and Aubrey’s wedding out in Cottage Grove. The day couldn’t have been more perfect, and neither could the love that these two share. It was such an honor to photograph their wedding. We love you guys. Here are a few of our favorite shots from the day. Congratulations Adam and Aubrey!

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Here are a few ads that are up around Minneapolis right now. The ads were done by LEVEL, my employer, for Medica. The ads play off of juxtapositions between picture and headline. I did some of the photo editing and retouching for the ads including some intense paper shred retouching.

I had the chance to get out of the office for a few minutes this afternoon to shoot these pictures to put up around our office. It’s kind of hard to catch buses on the move; luckily the one here was parked :)

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http://www.thebschool.com/

I haven’t been this excited in a long time! I always talk about how I’m passionate about web design and photography and building digital relationships. Well, Becker, a renowned wedding photographer from California, just launched the [b] school, taking digital relationships to a whole new level for photographers with an exclusive social network just for professional and aspiring photographers. This guy is paving the way for a whole new way for photographer to connect with each other across the world and build their business. The site is beautiful with a wonderful design. Way to go Becker and team, this is a very exciting day for photographer everywhere.

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