• I’m shooting weddings often, so don’t be alarmed by the lack of recent posts. When I’m not shooting weddings for my couples, I’m assisting Judy. She has been full time for about a year now and I’ve been making sure that all of our clients are taken care of. We work as an awesome team and it’s been amazing watching her develop as a professional and more importantly as an artist.
• Judy and I are getting married in December!  We did a tasting of our food at S Fine Dining (we are foodies) and here are some pics I took.  We also had a wedding in Vietnam already. Holy moly we had 570 guests at that wedding. I has pretty plastered after going table to table 57 times…
• I’ve been working on my commercial photography portfolio. I think it’s been very important to my overall development as a photographer, since it helps separates one from being a wedding photography business to being an artist in wedding photography. I’m not saying that one has to do commercial work to be a good photographer, but I’m a firm believer in cross-training in any field to gain a better perspective of the task at hand.
• We just came back from a wedding in Milwaukee and shot down to Chicago afterwards.  It was my first time there and here is a little video I did of the Chicago River:

• Oh yeah, I’m starting up video again. So if you are interested in a short-form edit wedding video, let me know.

• I also started up a high school portrait photography company.  We are trying to change it up from the old, standard high school portrait photography to something new and different.  It’s been a busy year.

So thanks for putting up with my horrible blogging skills. Judy regularly updates her blog, so you can check her out for new stuff. I’ll try to get new stuff up as I change my website (I’m doing a small overhaul later this year).

Judy and I, after much conversation with previous and future couples, have decided to go with one price.  This is currently at $1500 for the first book and $1000 for each additional book.  By keeping it simple, everyone gets a great album that isn’t bound by page restrictions and what not.  This is the general spec:

• 100% Leather, Guaranteed by the album company for life from defects
• 12″ x 12″ – the larger size makes sure that the photos are seen the way they were meant to be.  8″ x 8″ is an option, but it makes the images “pop” less.
• Around 30 pages – when Judy and I make these albums, we can care more about telling the story and arranging composition.  It might be 27.  It might be 33.  But by putting it in our hands we make decisions that are best for the album (not for price limitations or cost efficiency).  For example, I won’t be afraid of using one image for a full spread (if I had to squeeze 50 images in 20 pages I’d be thinking more about real estate than art composition).
• We design initially (with any special requests in mind).  From there you guys can swap out up to three images before printing.  This ensures that we design the album and choose the images we think are artistically the best, while you get the final say (and you make sure no wedding crashers end up in the album).

Here are some images I took of our sample album made from Shara and Phillip’s wedding.  This is the outside and the black leather option.

Here is a full page spread of one of my favorite images from that day

I love the trio in the next image.  Not every album will have that exactly, but we layout each album based on it’s unique images.

Let me know what you think.