Now that doesn't necessarily mean that our lovely Ohio winter will soon diminish, but calendar wise, the busy season is on our heels.
For the first few months of spring, I will be jet setting (i.e. travelling in coach on the cheapest flights I could find) to Vegas, NYC, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. for all things photography! Once weddings get under way, I'll be back and forth between Ann Arbor, Cleveland, Mackniac Island, good ole Toledo... rinse and repeat. So excited to tell the love stories of so many rad couples this year! 2010 is going to frickin' raawwwk!!!
What this means to MWP clients? If you haven't scheduled your engaged session or are interested in a portrait session, available dates are dwindling.
While the past few months have been slow regarding shoots, I will have some work to share soon enough. My handy hubby has been building me a darkroom for the past couple of months, and I should in there agitating silver with chemicals in the next couple of weeks.
And finally, I will be in Vegas for the huge WPPI tradeshow, classes, partay, and general good time photog love March 7th thru 11th. I am going to try my best to get back to emails and inquiries on my iPhone but I won't be as quick to respond as I usually am.
I'll leave you with a too cute photo of my pup Trixie in her favourite sweater.
I just finished up a new design that I had been working on since mid-summer for a new photo guest book sample. I used the amazing shoot I had in Seattle with Mary & Scott for the book, since it had more of a lifestyle session feel to it... props, action, playful. I encourage all couples who haven't done their engagement session yet to come up with unique ways to make the shoot more personal... props are an effective way to achieve that... sans balloons :)
One of the more popular add-ons couples choose to customize their wedding photography package with, is the photo guest book. I design the album with ample white space for guests to leave well-wishes and love for the newlyweds at the reception, and an ordinary coffee table book becomes a great memento of the time before the couple married. Oh and it's actually a guest book that you'll want to look at again!
Here is the design, feel free to look at it larger here.
Oh 2010.... you're oh so very... unpredictable. This has been one strange week.
I found myself watching hours of CNN, feeling helpless, crying until my face was red for the people in Haiti. Feeling incredibly guilty for spending $8 on lunch, for being able to fill my dogs water dishes up until they over flow. Watching CNN scroll the statistics on how incredibly impoverished that nation is... feeling like an idiot for spending money on silly things. If I had any sort of medical training I would be there in a heartbeat, but I don't, so I donated a bit of money to the Red Cross. It's what I could do at that moment.
Then there is the late night debacle to lighten the mood. For the record, I am Team Conan in the Leno/Conan battle. However, when it comes to late night programming in general, my heart belongs to Jimmy Kimmel... his response was pure genius.
Today I found myself needing to take my eyes away from CNN & the computer, so I took up a challenge that my photog friend Joshua White had posted on his blog "Take 50 photos in one day"... below are the results... some good, some great, some not so great, and some just to make you smile.
Hope everyone has a great weekend and is constantly thinking about how beyond lucky we all are to live in this country.
Click on the first thumbnail then use the arrows on your keyboard to scroll through the images... enjoy!
I love the couples I was able to photograph in 2009... thank YOU for allowing me to do what I love! Thank you for trusting me to capture the most intimate and special moments in your lives. All of you are the ones who make me want to challenge and push myself further out of my comfort zone with every shoot. It is truly impossible for me to express in words how lucky I feel to have the clients that I do, you're all amazing people.
Here's to 2010!!!
This year has been such a learning experience. Figuring out workflow, taxes (ugghh), dealing with equipment issues... I have a feeling that every year I will learn through trials and tribulations... I will never sit back and say, YES! I now have it all figured out. Won't ever happen... and I don't want it to.
One huge thing I learned this year was the importance of THE album. I have memories of looking at my parents wedding album, opening up the plastic covered white silk album, the corners adorned with metallic photo corners... one huge print per page. It's funny how certain things stick with you. That memory made me want to make sure everyone of my couples had a wedding album... and that's what happened... though they all may not have them yet, they will soon. :)
Midway through the season, I reworked my workflow. The first thing my couples saw after their wedding wasn't a blog post or their gallery full of thumbnails, it was their album design. I designed the biggest, baddest album without any limitations and presented their wedding to them in story form. They saw their wedding for the first time how I visualized it while shooting. This has been the biggest and most rewarding change to how I do my post work.
I design the album 100% in Adobe InDesign from scratch, no templates. InDesign makes it extremely easy for me to design a modern album in hours. I know the spacing is perfect and it works seamlessly with Photoshop & Bridge, so I can easily make sure the photos will look great in print. All the spreads have white backgrounds, are completely clean and modern. I don't want the album to look dated in 5 years, and by keeping it simple, about the photos and not the design, I know it will never look trendy. Pro DPI (an environmentally conscious pro lab) does the printing of my spreads, sends them to me to so I can approve the color and quality before I ship them off to Renaissance for the production of the album.
If you'd like to look through a couple completed albums, take a peek at the albums page here.
3 comments so far
joshua says:
is it weird if i call that thing sexy?
Mary says:
red silk?! it's hot!
Jenn Stark says:
Hi! I've only just started offering albums as an option in my packages and just wanted to thank you for sharing some insight on your album production workflow! They are beautiful!