Not too long ago I have posted on the fan page (facebook) a sentence saying that we absolutely love our clients. It truly is a blessing to do work for people who are so cool and fun. And last Monday was yet another proof for that. Daniel and Catherina are simply fantastic. Besides being a great looking couple, they came to our shoot well prepared with multiple outfits and a whole bunch of props. At some point it felt like they brought their living room set out in the open field. We were thrilled to photograph all that and spend a lot of time enjoying both the setting and shooting!  We ended up have tons of great images and decided to break them apart in two posts. So stay tuned for D and C engagements session part II that is coming up next…

and for now check these out….

I’ve said many times before that we’ve been blessed with great clients! To this day we haven’t had a single person that would be difficult to work with. It definitely set positive feelings to it and every time sessions are  coming up we’re eagerly anticipating them. In case with Nick and Theresa we were more than just excited for several reasons. One of them is that the wedding ceremony and reception were held at one of the nicest venues in town -  the Grand . This place was recently fixed and restored to its 1920′s look and has this elegant,vintage feel to it. Another reason for our excitement was that we knew ahead of time Nick and Theresa put in a lot of attention into details and decorations. It was really cool to see all the effort and creativity in all little things. In overall, the whole day felt like it was well prepared and thought through and we definitely enjoyed being part of it. And probably the most important reasons of all was having this wonderful connection with bride and groom. Despite the fact that we knew them only for a couple of months we had a great level of understanding and felt like we were a part of their group of family and friends! Congratulations to you guys! You totally rock!!!!

Venue: the Grand 1401

Catering: Grand Occasions

Introducing to you – Salon Innovations. Really cool place. Very professional, clean, stylish and vintage looking place. I was impressed!

As I said in the previous post, I had a great opportunity to be at WPPI convention this year. For those who don’t know what it is: WPPI is wedding and portrait photographers international. And it’s held annually at Las Vegas. This year there were 15000 photographers from around U.S. and probably the world.  There is two parts to the convention. One is the trade show. There were two huge rooms full of everything and anything that is anyhow connected to the trade. It took us two days to see everything! I was mainly focused on finding more info on different wedding album makers. I was really impressed with a couple of them and will be doing a separate post on that.  The second part of the convention was the Classes. I had a pleasure to visit Jesh De Rox, Jim Garner, Jasmine Star, Justin and Mary Marantz, Marcus Bell, Roberto Valenzuela,  and Matt Mendelsohn and Greg Gibson’s platform classes. The whole thing totally rocked my world and got me very inspired for the year ahead of us. There is uncountable amount of things and practices that we want to change and add to our business. So, we hope by the end of this year we’ll become a better studio to serve our clients as much as we can. For any photographer who wondered about WPPI – you shouldn’t. Its worth the time and money.

These are some photos of the convention and a few abstract expressions in the infamous town of L. Vegas:

With John Mireles

For most part of my life I’ve been very lazy to pick up on reading. Even though I enjoy a fun written book, most of them are not aimed at being fun, and a big part of them is like torture. Sometimes I wonder if the smart guys that write them put in those long and complicated words just to prove how smart they are. I would argue that, even though there is about 160 000 new titles of books published every year!!!!, there aren’t very many talented writers. Some of the books are so dry and complicated, often times I can’t even finish one chapter. I think that books are exactly like photographs!!! Believe it or not, it is. Besides all the sugar coating and examples to flavor up your work, there is a subject and a certain “framework” of the book within every book – you can’t just write about anything and everything, right? and the simpler it is the more attention there is to the subject. Bingo! Same principles work, for the most part, with a great photograph. You need  to have a captivating subject, or a story, some sugar coating to make it pretty – and all of that you have to fit in a frame of a DSLR.

So, currently I’m reading a book by Mark Hughes “Buzzmarketing”. I think  he’s an interesting writer with a good sense  of humor. Not the funnest subject, but a fun read! One of the fascinating things that I learned so far from it is that in today’s world we, as consumers, are absolutely bombarded with more that 1000 advertisement messages per day. That makes most traditional and accepted tools of marketing less effective and a lot of money wasted!

Nevertheless, below are photos from a very fun engagement session of Nata and Paul that we had last weekend. It was almost spoiled by the bad weather, but in the last minute everything turned out to be great: the day, the couple and the shoot…

Sorry for a late post again. Its kind of hard to run a family and a business at the same time. So here is another late post. Zhenya and Lilya engagements session. Don’t you love the spring time?