About

Welcome to CMC Photography!

I started CMC Photography in 2005 after noticing a lack of good, affordable, yet professional wedding photographers. Everyone knows the adage; “You get what you pay for”, well I wanted to create photography that made you feel ” You get more than what you paid for”!

I started doing photography after watching my Dad take photos for years. In 7th grade he bought me a Agfa, manual point and shoot camera. It gave me the ease of a point and shoot but with everything being manual it made me learn about the settings and how they effected the final image. In 8th grade I was given an assignment that was based on photojournalism, no words but a title, the rest images. I did a study of Barrett Ave. in Richmond and the complete opposite economic conditions from one end to the other. It started in the old part of Richmond next to the BNSF train yards, filled with run down houses, lots of crime and abandoned cars. It ends with the lush East Bay hills on the one of the fairways of the Mira Vista country club. Large houses with White columns and new cars in the drive way. That project not only got me an “A+”, but was the kindling that started the photography fire in me.

All through High School I was the one with the camera, taking pictures of everything from the halls at school to swim meets and water polo games, to bands at the ill fated Berkeley Square. College brought more of the same and taking more photography classes. It is there I fell in love with the darkroom and processing black and white film. I loved the complex simplicity of B&W and the gorgeous images it made. During this time I started being asked by friends and friends of friends to do wedding work. Mostly doing a lot of candid photography and taking over when the professional was done. (Back then wedding photography was very limited and quite expensive due to processing of medium format film). I did a few weddings and was hired to be the man photographer serveral times before I quit doing them because of the lack of creativity to it.

When I got married in 2004 the digital SLR was being pushed into its current form and eminent take over of the professional photography world. It was then I decided that is what I wanted to do as a career. Digital let me be more creative, take more risks, and be a better photographer. Everything I had learned from my little Agfa camera and in the Darkroom I was able to apply to digital photography and that fueled the fire even more.

Now as I am into my 6th wedding season, I have refined a style based on bright clean images with lots of emotion, and making sure my clients are having fun and are comfortable in front of my lens. Every wedding is different, no matter how similar it is to the wedding before there is always a new element that makes my creative fire continue to roar.

Since my first “professional” wedding April 15, 2005 I have branched out and taken on different avenues of photography like all aspects of portraiture. I wanted my relationship with my clients to be long lasting, not ending with the delivery of their wedding albums. I wanted to be a part of the birth of their children, watching their families grow, and maybe down the road photographing their child’s weddings!

Thank you to everyone for being a part of my photographic journey.

Christopher M Cooke