This past weekend Bill and Chris were married. It was a great day, and they were a lot of fun! The wedding and reception were perfect! The ceremony was at Hillside Community Church, and the reception was at the beautiful Frederik Meijer Gardens. To see more of their big day, watch their slide show here!Bill and Chris gave each other gifts on the wedding day. Chris gave this pocket watch to Bill, with a picture of his late father in the watch. Beautiful! Bill gave Chris these gorgeous diamond earrings!
There was a really nice lounge in the church that I loved! I did a few pictures in the lounge.

Chris getting ready for the big day!
This was in the lounge too!

And the ceremony…

Happily married!

And of course a little fish eye with the guys…
I know.. I have done this before, but i love it!

Bill and Chris worked hard on their first dance, and it was perfect! I could tell they had a lot of fun working on it!

Their cake was absolutely stunning!
Kids always steal the show at the weddings, and this kid was no exception!
Everyone had a great time dancing! The dance floor was busy all night long!

Congratulations Bill and Chris!

This week we had a wedding print competition at PPWM. The unusual part of the competition was that it was judged by everyday people, not photography judges. We asked people who were recent brides or that age group, and mothers of brides or grooms to come and judge for us. We wanted to hear what our customers like! They judged each print, and one person would comment on the print. They would tell what they liked or didn’t like about it. What was funny was that they look at totally different things than we do as photographers. We are looking at art, and they are looking at the people in the image. One thing that was said quite often is that they wanted to see the images cropped closer. They didn’t like the backgrounds showing much. This goes totally against what photography judges are looking for! In a photography competition they are always telling us to leave more room outside of the image. Give the person in the image more room to breathe. But, in the end it is the customers who make us a business, that is why it is good to see what they want!

I did well in the competition. I entered 4 prints, and 3 of the 4 scored blue ribbons. Here are the three that scored blue ribbons….

OK, this is going to be a long one… kind of like my day on Wednesday! I went to the OneLight workshop with Zack Arias. It was GREAT! We started the morning with some classroom time! (This is Zack!)

We learned things like the inverse square law…
Then we went out and put our class time into action. We basically used “One Light” on everything! We started out in a parking lot of an old area in Ypsilanti. Here is a picture of the set up….Here is the picture after….

Here is the next set up….
Here are a few afters….


Then we went to a very cool toppled down barn. Here is Zack giving us more instruction…

This is a “Before” the extra light picture. This picture is natural light…. This is exactly in the same spot, with the ambient light killed…
Here is one in the middle… the background goes a little darker, but not black.
Here is the next example. This is the image with the ambient light….

This is the picture with the background “darkened” with camera settings, and the model lit with “One Light”.
Here are a few more…

I love this, because it shows our set up in the sun set!

Here is the set up again….
And here is what we got. Then we headed down to the downtown area again, and took some night shots…. Here is an example of what we were doing, showing some background light….
Then getting rid of the background light for a more dramatic look. It was all about options…

Another one….
Ok, it was getting late, and Betty was getting tired of us taking thousands of pictures of her! So, we were trying to be creative! This was one of the coolest tricks! Zack used a bare bulb flash to create a high key effect on a old white brick wall!

I tried to get a cool hair flying shot like Zack did… but I couldn’t get it quite right….
It was a GREAT time! Zack put an AWESOME picture of us on his blog, so check it out HERE! I am the second from the back!

Brady came over earlier this week. I was able to squeak him in before I left for my workshop on Tuesday. He was such a good baby! It was fun to have a baby that was a little older than my normal newborns. Brady’s mom was almost done with her maternity leave, so she wanted to get this done this week before she went back to work. I love any type of expressions in my customers. Brady gave me a few cute expressions! I love this one!



Thanks for bringing Brady over this week!

I just got back from an AMAZING seminar, called the OneLight Workshop. I was in Ypsilanti Tuesday afternoon through this morning. It was incredible. I can’t wait to show you the images of the things I learned. But, for now I have a ton of stuff to do to get right back at my daily routine! I also have a session to edit that I did right before I left. So, for now you will have to wait, and hopefully after I get my “real work” done, I’ll have time to look at and play with my OneLight Images! You won’t believe how AMAZING they are, so check back!

My husband is so wonderful… I got an early mother’s day present tonight. Let me go backward a little bit before I tell you what I got. I am signed up for a photography class this week, Tomorrow night and Wednesday called the “Onelight Workshop”. I have been looking forward to this for 6 or 7 months! It is an intense all day seminar on using an external flash on a stand off your camera. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this workshop.

So, back to my husband…. He had a sweatshirt made with my new logo on it. He decided to give it to me early so that I can take it and wear it to the one light seminar this week! Isn’t he sweet?

My good friend, Shelley had her baby and we did his newborn session this past week! Collin was such a good baby… he hardly fussed at all. Babies grow so fast, he will already be changing and older when they get their final prints from this session! That is why I love to do the newborn session when they are so little!

Shelley has already seen her slide show from the session, and she loved it! She said it made her and her husband cry! That is why I love this job… I love to give people a cherished gift, a memory of this time in their life. Images are so powerful! Here are a couple of my favorite…

Congratulations Shelley! Thanks for trusting this special time to me!

We made a little mini vacation to Chicago for Spring Break. My girls had a Tumbling and Trampoline meet there, so we decided to make it a little vacation. Here are some pictures from the competition!

Angela on Trampoline…
Alex on Trampoline… Alex on the Double Mini Trampoline… (I love this one because I love to see the judge watching her!)
Angela on the Double Mini Trampoline…

A high on our trip was to go to Ed Debevic’s! It is a fun and crazy place if you have never been there. Here was one of the waitresses! Then we went to the Shedd’s Aquarium

These were outside the aquarium…
We also went to the John Hancock Observatory. I got a couple shots before the employee there told me I couldn’t use my tripod! (I was bummed!)
And finally, the skyline of Chicago at night. I made my husband drive back past the aquarium at night to get this shot. (He was not very happy fighting Chicago traffic for this, but he put up with me! This was actually 4 different images that I pasted together.
And one more… again this was 3 images pieced together to make one.

I went to another seminar this week. It was called “Captivated by the light” by Ed Pierce. It was PACKED! It was fun to see all my friend photographers there! It is always fun to go to seminars to get inspired and get some new ideas. I am glad I had a good seat, because there were 400 people there, and the room was really long and skinny. I felt bad for the people in the back!
My friend Lisa Lenderink took this picture of me and Ed during the break!