Hey everyone! We hope you had a great Thanksgiving and didn’t forget to start the countdown for Christmas. As I mentioned in a previous post, tonight we are blogging the last wedding of the 2011 season. Often times, it is so easy for us humans to get caught up with the routine of life, to-do lists, and thinking ahead mentality. And, to be honest with you, we are pretty bad at that ourselves. However, right after this wonderful wedding of Matt and Mayra, when Yana and I sat in the car, breathed out and said “well done! That was the last wedding of the year…”, we couldn’t help but be overwhelmed with this awesome feeling of being thankful and grateful to God for blessing us with such a great privilege in life to, first, be able to discover who you are, and, second, be able to do what you love. Its been a great year for our business and Matt and Mayra’s wedding was an awesome way to capitalize it.  Besides having such privilege to photograph at one of the coolest venues, the Smog Shoppe, both, Matt and Mayra, and the whole wedding overall, were so much fun and enjoyment. We truly loved it and couldn’t think of a better way to finish up the year. So, congrats again to Matt and Mayra, and now scroll down to view some photos…

Josh and Damara are some of the sweetest people we know. They have beautiful characters and rich, warming souls. It was our great pleasure to witness and a be a part of their wonderful wedding day. Feel free to scroll down and enjoy a few of selected photos from the day:

Hello everyone! This time I promise not to talk about deep philosophical questions. It’ll be a simple update on our lives.

As we entered October, we picked up pace with a lot of shoots. We’ll try to post things quickly, but can’t promise anything:) Now, overall we’re doing good. Nathan has been going to kindergarten for already a few weeks, and is enjoying it and learning things quick. He also, just lost his first tooth. Unfortunately we couldn’t find it, and we have some thoughts that he might even swallow it while eating pretzels:) Personally, I started to have this awesome mood of anticipating the holidays. As many of you do, we absolutely love that time of the year and can’t wait to finally slow down and enjoy time with family and friends.

Below are some of our favorite snaps from an awesome wedding of Luke and Crystal. Its hard to describe that day in just a few photos – all that we can say is that it was a gorgeous, detail oriented wedding day. Just for the reference, the ceremony was held at the Warner Theater and the reception took place at the Grand 1401. And also, we wanted to highlight the great work of Inglenook girls, who handcrafted most of the wonderful details of this wedding (Check out their page and leave some love – they deserve it!), Preserve Vintage by Misty Deflitch (if you’re looking to rent vintage furniture and other “old things”, Misty is the person to talk to), and of course Le Petite Sweet cupcakes with their amazing cupcakes :)

A few years back, when we just began exploring a DSLR, we only took photos in the one of the provided auto modes. Not the “auto” auto mode, but somewhat  semi-auto. All we had to care about was the depth of field, and the rest our camera would figure out on its own. It was very convenient, yet, as we discovered later, it was very binding creativity wise. Once we switched all the way to manual settings, we began to feel more control over what we want to do. It sort of liberated us to dictate what we want to do with a given lighting scenario.

Thinking about that recently, I ended up meditating about life, our mistakes and patterns of our behaviors. It seems to me that if we live our life using the “auto” mode, we tend to makes same mistakes over and over again. I noticed, when I pay attention to what I say, do and how I act, and direct it in the way that I would like, things start to change in a positive way. Its as if you switch to the “manual” mode, gain control of the situation and don’t let yourself react to it with the first burst of emotions…. Food for thought :)

Now back to photography.

Melody and Kelly are fantastic! Seriously, everything about them and their wedding day was so awesome. It was one of the best of our experiences. Since one of their great passions in life to to be missionaries in the middle east, they had a middle-eastern theme to their wedding. We were absolutely honored to be a part of this day!

Congrats you guys! you rock!

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Washing each others feet

Hey! I feel like it’s been a while since the last time I shared with you some tips and tricks of how we do things based on our experience. Today I wanted to talk about lenses. Honestly, after a few years into shooting, it feels to me that we started liking or disliking lenses, as well as strategically picking which ones to use, much, much later down the road. Its funny, but in the beginning I remember picking a lens based of the focal length. There was a choice of two kit lenses with the 30D that we were purchasing at the time. The first one was the “infamous” EF 18-55mm F3.5-5.6, and the other one was the EF  28-135mm F3.5-5.6 USM lens. And I’ll be completely honest with you – I did not know a single thing of what it all meant! All that I knew was the “mm”, and that was only because I grew up in Russia using metric system:) So, using a very simply logical concept “the bigger – the better” I went with buying the 28-135 one. It funny how it is, but today I think that neither of those two would give any great results in terms of quality of an image. It took time and practice to realize whatever we try, we can’t get a sharp enough image out of our camera. It all came to a pretty challenging conclusion. We either have to get an expensive “L” series lens, or we won’t get anywhere. EF 24-70 F2.8 was a pure joy to work with. It was much faster at F2.8, it was much sharper, and the colors seemed to be way more accurate. We loved that thing with all our hearts until we’ve discovered the prime lenses. At first, I didn’t really like the idea of not having the comfort of a zoom lens. It felt weird. However, after comparing the results from the 24-70 with primes, over and over again we could see the difference in the overall performance of them. Besides, all great primes were significantly faster. I must admit, the switch to prime lenses was probably one of the most significant changes we’ve done in our business. Today in our arsenal we have EF 35mm F1.4L, EF 50mm F1.4, EF 85mm F1.8, EF 70-200mm F2.8L IS USM. This set is definitely not a complete list and we’ll be adding lenses as we go, but these getthe job done and we’re able to produce great results with them.

We hope this is somehow helpful to you. If any of you have any questions in regards to lens selection or performance, feel absolutely free to drop us a note. We would love to answer any Qs.

Obviously, all this information is more familiar to people who know photographer’s world and terminology, so we apologize if this bored you to death:) Just keep scrolling down and enjoy some of our favorites from Alex and Liz’s wedding: