Jake Holt Photography - Austin, Texas Photographer » Portraits

Julie & David’s after-session @ Design Within Reach | Austin, Texas

Jake H — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:22:12 +0000

Dear Design Within Reach – I want to own all of your stuff. How can we make this happen? I have a $2 bill and a Michael Jordan rookie card, can we work something out?

p.s. – The photos with the doggies and kitty were taken at Julie and David’s place, not DWR, although it would be easy to mistake the two. I just want to save you the trip down to the 2nd Street District if your only goal is to pet the animals. I mean, just look at them! Of course you want to pet them.

3 months of stuff and things…

Jake H — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:57:28 +0000

Finally! A very belated post featuring a few of my favorite non-wedding day shoots from the last 3 months – portrait sessions of every shape and size. I’m incredibly excited to get some of this stuff up for public viewing at last – since I’ve been spending the last 6 months or so working on developing some new looks and techniques and using a number of new locations, well, I guess you could say that this marks the official unveiling of a season’s worth of experimentation…

Heather and Taylor | Austin, Texas | March 10th, 2010

Jake H — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:26:47 +0000

Heather chose Roadhouse Relics for her and Taylor’s engagement session – I didn’t quite know what to expect as I’d never actually shot inside of the place before, but I now have a new addition to my small and exclusive list of “utterly fantastic” places to shoot. This place is just amazing. It’s relatively small, but what’s crammed into that space is just overflowing with goodness…

February and March miscellany…

Jake H — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:06:18 +0000

No posts for 6 weeks? Well, while it’s technically been the “off season” for weddings and portraits, that doesn’t mean that my cameras and I have just been sitting around and gathering dust while watching endless episodes of Life After People. In the last 6 weeks I’ve had a couple of fun shoots for Tribeza, headed off on a 2 week, 3800 mile road trip to San Francisco by way of Roswell, Flagstaff and Los Angeles, and had a few friends over to my new studio (now officially unveiled and open for business, BTW) to serve as lighting guinea pigs and to help me get my bearings in the new space. With new posts coming your way faster than a runaway Prius, here’s a incredibly quick rundown of what I’ve done with my down time:

These first three photos were shot for the February issue of Tribeza magazine – the piece featured local musicians who have residencies at restaurants around town. First off are Ethan and Doug, 2 members of “The Moonhangers,” a band that pays regularly at Lamberts on 2nd street. Next is Kris Kimura, a regular at Eddie V’s. Check out the article online on pages 84-87!

This photo tells you pretty much everything you need to know about Roswell.

On a creepily vacant and very, very long stretch of road between Roswell and Albuquerque I spied these two fabulous signs…fabulous for entirely different reasons. A word of warning to any future road-trippers that may take this same route – do not even think about leaving Roswell for Albuquerque without a full tank of gas! That’s what I did, tisk tisk, and I finally came across a gas station with my on-board trip computer giving me a total remaining range of 12 miles…with about 40 more to go to the I-40 junction and the next station. Lesson learned.

I finally made it to L.A….and this happened. I’ll try to explain these 3 photos, and I will fail miserably. In short, my friend Lydia (below) wanted to make a video for her friend Crystal’s rehearsal dinner…when they were in high school they apparently both loved “Money Ain’t A Thang” by Jermaine Dupri and Jay-Z, so of course the only choice was to remake that video, with Jay-Z and crew replaced by Lydia and her friends. I shot the video (my first and most likely last video gig) and stills, and below is just a tiny sample of what we created. It was incredibly fun, and very, very, very ridiculous. If you’re curious enough and enter the right search terms our masterwork can be found on YouTube, but I won’t post it here lest I be held directly responsible for amazing you to death.

This may look like a rather pedestrian photo of a nice house, but oh my, this is not just a house…this is THE house that was used as Fisher and Sons funeral home in what I call “the greatest thing ever put on film,” a.k.a. the amazing t.v. series Six Feet Under. This was pretty much the highlight of my entire trip.

The composition here leaves a bit to be desired, but what more can you expect of a photo taken with an iPhone at 2 a.m.? I just had to share, as I was really impressed with this healthy cake that we found at a Ralphs grocery just east of 101 on Hollywood Boulevard…it said that it was healthy so I ate like 11 of them over the course of a week.

This truly awful thing actually exists…somewhere in Arizona at a ridiculous roadside attraction called “The Thing.” I’m not sure if they left it in the bag because they were scared of it or if the person responsible for stocking that section was just incredibly apathetic.

Back to Austin, and back to photos that weren’t taken on cellphone cameras…this is my friend Amber, one of the aforementioned people that donated their time to help me test countless lighting setups in my new studio space and scout out some cool new locations in the surrounding area. I think we were quite successful…and with that, I now plunge headfirst into the heart of wedding and portrait season, stay tuned!

Blithe & Scott | Round Rock, Texas | December 30th, 2009

Jake H — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:28:34 +0000

When Blithe and Scott brought up the idea of shooting their engagement session at Ikea, I was incredibly excited about the possibilities but not too hopeful that it would ever come to fruition – getting permission to shoot on private property is always a hit-or-miss affair, and when it comes to large retail chains, my hit rate so far has been 0%. Surprisingly, the folks at Ikea in Round Rock were incredibly inviting and allowed us to go throughout the store at our leisure, even though it was INSANELY busy that day. The funny thing was, all of the shoppers seemed to be so involved in searching for deals that not one single person even asked what we were doing or gave us strange looks, even when we had multiple lights going off – they just walked right past us to look at the merchandise! I guess when you’re in Ikea you’re on a mission…

Jess & Justin | Austin, Texas | January 3rd, 2010

Jake H — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:30:43 +0000

So, I went to a portrait session and a wedding broke out! Jess and Justin’s session was without a doubt one of the most unforgettable shoots of my life – not because of the awesome location, Austin’s own Hotel Saint Cecilia, one of my absolute favorite settings, but because of the unexpected way in which the day unfolded. This requires a bit of backstory – Jess and Justin are both in the military and were due to ship out in about 10 days, with plans to get married when they returned. They were originally going to two very different locations - Jess to Spain, and Justin to Alaska. However, they discovered that if they were married prior to shipping out that they could be assigned to the same place, so plans were made to have a small private ceremony at Mt. Bonnell, officiated by Justin’s best friend, with a full-sized wedding taking place when they return from their assignments. When someone is willing to give up living in Spain to come live with you in Alaska, you know you have something special! Anyway, our original plan was to spend a couple of hours shooting around the South Congress area, and then for Jess, Justin and friends to head to Mt. Bonnell for the ceremony. Well, mother nature didn’t like that plan, so we headed back to St. Cecilia for the shoot in order to avoid the rain. As the rain continued and plans for a Mt. Bonnell ceremony began to look bleak, the decision was made to have the ceremony on the patio of their room at St. Cecilia and, since I was there with my cameras and all, well, of course I photographed the ceremony as well! It was such a change of pace not having hundreds of guests watching, and I felt very lucky to be a part of something so unique and intimate. Congrats guys, I hope you enjoy Alaska…you can always go visit Spain on your honeymoon!

Annie Ray and her amazing kitties…

Jake H — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:50:07 +0000

Friend and fellow photographer Annie Ray was just selected by Rare magazine as a 2010 “Up and Comer,” and I was asked to do the photographing honors. What an awful gig, I thought – photographing a friend and her cats. And then I remembered that I like friends, and I like cats, so I graciously accepted. You can check out the January issue of Rare online (page 62!) or throughout our fair city in the time-tested and always classy printed format. BTW, the orange guy’s name is Cowboy, but I’m not sure about the other one…what can I say, I’m partial to the orange ones.

It’s been too long…

Jake H — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:28:25 +0000

I know, I know – I’ve been a bit remiss in my blogging lately. In my defense, I have a hard time justifying blogging when I’m trying my best to spend most of my waking hours editing the many, many thousands of images that can quickly pile up during a busy busy busy fall wedding season. However, as the last couple of weddings of the season approach completion, I thought I’d take a few minutes to share some of my favorite images from my November and December portrait sessions. Everyone, meet Trisha & Joe, Mairin & Chris, and Alison & Matt, and stay tuned…in the next few days I’ll be sharing two of the most unique portrait sessions that I’ve ever shot. Unique how, you say? Well, one takes place in the only furniture superstore that sells lingonberry juice, and the other started as an engagement session on South Congress and ended, two hours later, in an unexpected but 100% legit impromptu wedding ceremony at Hotel Saint Cecilia. It’s been a very interesting 2010 so far…

Courtney’s Bridals | Austin, Texas | September 2nd, 2009

Jake H — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:11:54 +0000

Courtney’s bridal session was a perfect example of making lemonade when life hands you apricots – when our original plans of shooting at the Capitol and The Driskill fell through in the preceding week, we came up with a plan B of Lustre Pearl and Hotel Saint Cecilia. And I can say, with one billion percent certainty, that things turned out better that way…

Jenny’s Portraits | August 13th, 2009

Jake H — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 08:37:36 +0000

My friend Jenny needed some new headshots, and I wanted to try out some fun new portrait ideas in a couple of new locations, so we headed out on a trek across south-central Austin. We started at Jo’s coffee and ended up at the awesome Lustre Pearl, where, somewhere between discussing the finer points of sidecar mixology and draining my laptop battery to 0%, we managed to somehow take a few photos. Sugared rim! Sugared rim!