By Jill Kitchener

If a guy wanted to take me to a gun club for a date, I don’t know how I’d react. Growing up near Toronto, Canada, guns have never played a role in my life – most certainly not my dating life. Shooting guns as a recreational activity has never caught on in my social circle.

Yet I found myself at the Los Angeles Gun Club with photographer Lucy Nicholson while on vacation.

After a nice lunch at a neighborhood cafe we thought we’d try our luck in getting permission to shoot at the gun club – with our cameras. To my surprise, the manager was more than happy to have us document the action. She kindly provided us with headphones to save our eardrums.

We met a family with a young girl learning to shoot (the minimum age to shoot at a gun range is 10, as long as they have parental supervision). We met couples on dates, and groups of male and female friends out for some fun. Some were there to shoot the guns they owned, and some were there to try new guns before buying their own. There were tourists looking to shoot, and a swell of frat boys from a local university. Whether young or old, male or female, it seemed everyone was eager to have their shot on the range.

Photographs by Lucy Nicholson

I wasn’t expecting the level of excitement to be at such a high.

Before entering the range, customers picked their guns. I had to laugh at the cartoons of seemingly angry men drawn on some of the targets up for grabs. But before taking aim at the paper perpetrators, everyone had to learn the safety procedures. “Never point a gun at another person.” It made no difference if it was loaded or unloaded – this rule was a non-negotiable. And I was glad to hear it.

The Gun Club staff were knowledgeable and thorough with each and every person. They would go over and over the proper way to handle a gun, load a gun, point a gun, shoot a gun… and if the person they were teaching looked at all confused, they would go over it again. And again.

“Are you going to try shooting?” I was asked more than once. “No way,” I laughed. I had no desire to handle a loaded gun, let alone point it at one of those creepy looking cartoons.

Yet I became more at ease as the time passed. The atmosphere wasn’t at all threatening. In fact, I got the sense that this was a somewhat normal and innocent hobby for most. The pops of the guns became less piercing as time went on.

After Lucy and I interviewed some customers (funnily enough, many couples were on dates) and staff, and got enough photos and videos to put together a multimedia piece, it was time to leave. We loaded our gear into the car, and at that point I turned to Lucy and said, “I think I should give this a try. When am I ever going to have this opportunity again?”

I admit I was really nervous, and was paying utmost attention to the safety precautions and the proper shooting technique. I didn’t want to have any slipups at all.

After loading eight bullets in my designated booth and carefully picking up the handgun, my heart was pounding. I pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. I will never forget the feeling of that first shot; the recoil knocked me back a bit and my mouth opened wide. I had shot a gun… and it was easy! A little too easy. My adrenaline had kicked in immediately and I became focused on hitting my target (a man in a suit who had a gun drawn).

Lucy and I took turns loading 8 bullets and shooting 8 bullets until they were all gone. I had my fix and enough was enough.

It was a fun experience and a great story to tell my Canadian friends, but I don’t have the urge to go back any time soon.

Click here for a look at photographers covering all angles of the red carpet.

In this multimedia piece, Lucas turns the camera toward the photographers themselves.

Oscar photographers:

Mario Anzuoni – Arrivals 2

Mike Blake – Photo Room

Gary Hershorn – Awards Show

Lucas Jackson – Orchid Court

Lucy Nicholson – Arrivals 1

NEW YORK (Reuters.com) – Following his 200-guest wedding in Tuscany and two-week honeymoon to Egypt, Tejpaul Bhatia’s inbox was bombarded with photo attachments and links to pictures from his special day. Frustration mounted as he faced the onerous task of organizing all of these images.

Bhatia, who was working on a video search engine at the time, approached his engineering team with the idea of being able to get every picture into one place within 30 seconds or less. “The CTO and I knew right then we had something extremely powerful,” says Bhatia.

Inspired by his own wedding, Bhatia launched Kaptur.com, a website that provides users with a powerful search engine for finding photos from a personal event. “Kaptur is a website that brings together photos, videos, and status updates from any event, from across the web. It seamlessly pulls everything together and puts it into one place so you can view it as a single, collective memory,” says Bhatia, who currently serves as the company’s president.

Kaptur.com allows the user to create an album to add photos or videos from social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo. Users log in through their Facebook account to choose friends who were at a particular event on a specific day, and the technology pulls in all related media. Kaptur downloads the highest possible resolution of each picture and when exported to iPhoto, the pictures can be synced with the iPhone and iPad.

“Within Kaptur, you can see everyone’s pictures in one place; organized, time synchronized and you have the ability to move them all as if they were one album,” says Bhatia, who has thousands of his wedding photos downloaded onto his iPhone.

The New York-based startup launched on New Year’s Eve 2011, while working with Getmarried.com to capture and recreate “the largest wedding ever” in Times Square. The company’s focus on weddings was established from that day forward.

“There are roughly 2.3 million weddings in the U.S. each year. Our goal is to get a piece of that market,” he says.

Kaptur’s target demographic is newly-wed couples with an emphasis on brides. Says Bhatia: “Women tend to spend more time customizing the capture of their wedding and sharing it with more people — and ultimately put out the best face for our product to their friends. “Through Facebook alone we see brides, within 30 seconds or so, finding 2000-3000 pictures of their wedding on average,” he says. Kaptur.com recently partnered with pop star Beyonce’s record label, inviting people to use Kaptur to create a slideshow of their wedding photos while using her music as the soundtrack.

“Within the first couple minutes (of Beyonce posting an invitation to fans) there were 35,000-40,000 people on our site,” says Bhatia. He admits this brand alliance is likely a contributing factor of Kaptur signing up 600-1000 new users each day. In its first year, Kaptur has seen 85,000 people register with their site through Facebook.

THE PITCH

Kaptur has raised $1.3 million so far, with a significant investment of $550,000 from Archie Cox, former chairman of Barclays Americas. Cox now sits on the board and advises Kaptur, keeping them focused on the wedding vertical.

According to WeddingBusinessMarketing.com, the wedding industry is an $86-billion-a-year business. In a 2011 study, Brides Magazine reported the average wedding costs $26,501 and the average number of guests is 152. Besides the reception, one of the highest costs is photography/videography at an average of $3,367.

“We find we have a clear opportunity to provide a very valuable product to our target market, and create a brand in a leadership position in the wedding vertical,” says Bhatia, who has built a team of 11 employees.

“Our investors are really happy. We’re on track to hit our numbers. We’re signing up so many people every day, it’s a given that usage will get up there. We just have to figure out how to grow it, sustain it and monetize it,” says Bhatia, adding they’ve done work with select brands to focus targeted, location-based ads toward users.

Kaptur has also generated money from customized thank-you cards, printed pictures and photo albums and is expected to launch a “single click” functionality, where the technology suggests Facebook friends who may have been at the wedding. “It’s ridiculously accurate,” says Bhatia.

“The vision for Kaptur is to capture every memory. We believe that memories are being captured every day, every moment, from multiple angles. If we can capture weddings, it’s the perfect place to start the life cycle.”