ALERT to all brides!  You come first on the wedding day, so don’t think I put football first, but I do check my cellphone every now and then for score updates that are mailed to me during the games! 

Anyway, we play Tulane, which should be an easy game, but I’m really focused on Florida in two weeks. 

According to The Knot, a recent nation-wide survey suggests that couples spend about $30,000 on average on a wedding.  Now, this is "over the median annual income ins U.S. Households" according to a recent WSJ report (listed below).  This figure isn’t really a good indicator, because only 2% of the brides asked answered the questionnaire.  I always wonder – ‘does this include the ring and honeymoon – something that the guys usually pays for and is outside of the wedding day?’.  I know that for our wedding, I spent quite a bit on the ring and honeymoon (we went to Maui – enough said).

Many magazines also suggest that couples should only budget for 10% of the total cost for photography, which I think is ridiculous.  My theory is this (of course I am biased) – what do you have left over from the wedding 30, 60, 90 years from now?  The empty wine bottle?  The uneaten cake?  The huge tent with the cool chinese circular balloons?  No.  Photographs.  Don’t get me wrong, these things are important to some people, and I say go for it if it is what the bride has always dreamed of her wedding to be.  I know for our couples, photography is usually over the 10% that many books and planning guides suggest.  I always encourage brides (whether they choose us or someone else) to NOT skimp on photography.  I have heard too many horror stories about brides who hired friends, or hired someone from Craig’s list for a really cheap price, and they regret it forever.   

Here’s a link to the recent WSJ article that got me thinking about this. 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118790518546107112.html

Enjoy! 

This year was VERY challenging for me because we had 24 5th graders, and the boys REALLY tested my patience.  Thanks goodness it was only 3 hours a day.  Also, it’s ironic in that some of the kids in my class are sons/daughters of people that I grew up with (I’m not that old, am I?).  I still don’t have my first kid yet!  I guess I am running behind on that.

Anyway, it was fun to catch up with the relatives and eating some some great Cajun food.  I can’t wait for football season because I hope it’s the year where LSU gets to go back to the National Championship.  I graduated from LSU back in 1998, and my heart bleeds purple’n'gold.  GEAUX TIGERS!

Here’s a couple of images and a waterfight that the kids had.

Well, we took a much deserved vacation last weekend for Easter and went back home to Louisiana. We’re pretty fortunate in that we get to go back every Easter and my extended family throws a crawfish boil for us.

It’s usually pretty warm, too, EXCEPT for this time! It was miserable! It was in the upper 40′s the entire time and we saw off-and-on sleet! The worst thing is that the crawfish got cold within 5 minutes of them hitting the newspaper (that what we use for tablecloths in Louisiana)!

So, I didn’t eat as much, so I’ll have to try again next year. Fortunately for us, there’s an awesome Cajun restaurant that’s right down the road called Cypress Grill, and their food makes me feel somewhat closer to my ‘home’.

Lastly, I always take a cool crawfish shot every year, and I’m really happy with this one.

I was asked to go and photograph a new and upcoming venue in Dripping Springs called Vista West Ranch. It’s a gorgeous venue that portrays an elegant and rustic hill-country experience. Brian and Cindy Pearson are the owners, and I definitely believe that they will be great to work along with for any bride.

I wanted to do a day-time portrait, but some of the construction isn’t completed, and it would have been a lot of work to get it looking right. Their advertisement images are due ASAP to the Austin Wedding Guide, so we had to get something done fast. So, instead I took a risk and created a night-time portrait of the venue instead. It definitely paid off.

They are having their first wedding in May.

All of our clients receive images from us that are very colorful, sharp and color-corrected. We also do some toning of images, and some skin-softening as well. We do skin-softening because we want images that are sharp, while I don’t want to see every pore in someone’s skin. While it may be ok for your HDTV show, it’s not ok for the prints that I want to place into an album OR prints that are purchased through us. We call this process ‘applying some tender love and care’, and it’s one of the things that sets us apart from other photographers in Austin in order to give a desireable, unique and higher quality print.

Color-correction is a method of where you take an image that was taken in a lighting condition that the camera could not properly compensate for. This is why people some times look somewhat either more red, green or blue in images than what they actually are. This is a problem for both film and digital cameras. In film, you could usually buy a filter of some type to help you out. In digital, you can do a number of things to color-correct an image before you take the image or after.
We usually use whi-bal white balance cards because they are small and can fit in our pockets. Another example of this is sometimes people look ‘orange’ in a church because of the strong tungsten lighting over-powering the flash on your camera. Ok – enough boring technical camera talk.

We as photographers almost never have the perfect scenario – maybe the lighting is bad and flat, maybe the background has something that is distracting, maybe the subject is uncooperative, or maybe I’m not in my groove!

In this scenario (as in every scenario), I had to be concerned about the following things and make split-second decisions. Concentrating for 3 hours straight can be hard, but I am learning to do it well.

1. I wanted to use natural light to capture the bridal portrait, but the lighting had to be timed just right because the sun was peeking in and out of the clouds. I was also concerned about the bride possibly wanting to squint because the sun was coming in and out the clouds and it was pretty bright.

2. I wanted to capture a ‘whiff’ of air to make her veil fly. Now, of course, we could have thrown her veil up in the air and moved out the picture super-fast, but I wanted to avoid that.

3. Since we were at the Quad at the University of Texas on a Saturday, we also had to deal with people walking in and out of the background. I wanted to avoid people being in the background as to isolate the bride.

4. I also wanted to capture some greenery in the background, which is somewhat hard at UT. So, all of these variables play into just 1 image!

So, the moment came (we did not have to wait too long), but I had to risk 1 of the 4 above elements. There was a tree and a pole in the background that some ‘could’ say would be distracting. Needless to say, it was a moment and I had to capture it because I finally found an opportunity where no one was in the background. the sun came out of the clouds, and the wind blew her veil up.

Now, I will be honest with you in that I didn’t know that the bride was going to pick this particular image for her bridal portrait because we take quite a few in a 3-hour session. However, I treat many of them as if they are going to be the one that she selects.

So, let me take you through my process.

We first look at the image that is straight out the camera. The image looks a little flat, and I think you agree that the pole and the tree are distracting. Also, since this a regular image, the crop ratio is going to be a 2:3 ratio (i.e. a 4×6 print). However, our bridal portraits are a 16×20 print, or 8:10 ratio, and I know that the pole on the left will be cropped out when we go to the large print. I also took this print in landscape because I wanted a cinematic effect. Of course, I could have taken this portrait in ‘portrait’ orientation, but the white wall behind her was getting a bit of sun and the wall would have distracted from the bride because it was brighter than the bride. We also had taken many portrait-orientation images that day, and I was just trying something different with the landscape-orientation.

So, the first thing I did was color-correct the image because the image was a bit ‘cool’ or had a bluish-tone to it. This is because the camera thought that it was a bit more daylight and over-compensated for it. Also, I added some contrast and color to bring out the bride and the shrubs. I wanted to take the ‘flatness’ out of the image and make it look a bit more 3-dimensional and add some depth. I even added a bit more ‘warmthness’ to the image or made her skin-tones a little red to indicate that this was taken in the late afternoon. Also, I had to deal with the fact that the sun was coming through the trees at certain points, so her dress was fully illuminated. I wanted to make her appear slimmer than what she already is, so I added some shadowing to her dress while preserving the pretty details in it.

I then went ahead and cropped the image to a 8:10 ratio for the final print. You can see how the pole that was bothering me before is now gone.

Now comes the hard part – what to do with this tree! I wanted to remove it, but yet I didn’t want the appearance of the image being edited. So, I spent some time and removed the tree by cloning some of the bushes. I also darkened the bushes a bit to hide some of the cloning, as well as blurring the entire background to hide some of the cloning. Also, by blurring the background, I was able to bring more focus on the bride.

Now, we’re almost there. You can not tell from this small image, but when it’s a 16×20, you do see A LOT. Fortunately, this bride had some really smooth skin, so very little skin smoothing was applied. She did have some freckles on her arms, and I never got around to asking her if she is sensitive about those or not. So, I took the liberty of assuming she was ‘slightly’ sensitive to them and I cloned some of them out, but there weren’t too many. I added some shadow to the bushes because I wanted the bride to stand out even more. I put a few highlights in her hair to bring out the brown, along with putting a little bit of light on her ring. Lastly, I thought this bride would appreciate a little glow effect to make the image look a bit dreamy since she was isolated. Now we have a finished product! We delivered the print to her reception on the wedding day, and everyone was truly amazed by it.

This amount of work goes into everyone of our prints in our albums and prints that are purchased from us. This is my art.

We’ll be at the Tribeza Bridal Show today. This is the first time that we have exhibited at this show and I am really excited about it. My booth is a bit smaller than what I am accustomed to, so I will have to make do. This will be held at the Stephen F. Austin Intercontinental Hotel.

Well, our entire town (and Central Texas for that matter) has been frozen-in for about 3 days now. Here’s a quick slideshow that I built to show what’s going on.

I couldn’t believe how much ice accumulated on our home and vehicles! It was over a half-inch thick on the Highlander.

I got to go back home and enjoy some fine cajun cooking and hospitality! I also got to spend some time and visit with my 5-year old nephew. The older he gets, the less time he wants to spend with me – so sad…

I also picked up my 5 lb. bucket of ‘gourmet Reeses cup cookie dough’ from my sister’s son. It was one of those ‘support my kid by buying expensive cookie dough’ school promotions. When we were kids, my sister and I would always get into trouble because we would always eat these items that we sold through school instead of delivering them. My favorite was always World’s Finest Chocolate – yum!

She also does the best job of dressing up her ‘Taco Bell dog’, too. As usual, I bought yet another LSU cap, shirt and sweater. Baton Rouge has changed so much since Katrina, and the traffic is stupid crazy.

I also helped a good friend of mine photograph a wedding (Jason Cohen of Jason Cohen Photography). The bride was very pretty and it was a simple country-style wedding in Opelousas, Louisiana. Images to follow.

We just wrapped up another wedding, quite a few portrait sessions, created Christmas cards, performed MANY print orders and even a few albums. WHEW!

One lesson that I did learn this year – set a ‘cut-off’ date! I didn’t do this and I learned my lesson. Also, I’m going to encourage customers to have their photography session in October for their Christmas cards to be done on time.

Anyway, we just finished up Ellen and Paul’s wedding and I’ll post some highlight images shortly. It was a beautiful and quaint wedding at Mercury Hall. I finally got a chance to work with one of my favorite wedding consultants, Mrs. Gina Starr-Hill or Starr-Catcher. She is a machine! She’s awesome and was on top of everything, and still had room for a smile! Anyway, I forgot to mention that she’s one of my favorites because she uses our images for her advertisements.

We’ve also been requested to submit some images for the website of Enchanted Antique Limousine. They have some beautiful cars and Warren pays very attention to detail on the look of the cars AND he’s dependable and a great guy. I really love the red Bentley, too.

We were also asked to visit Vintage Villas for their Vendor day. I had 15 minutes to give a complete description of our business and products. It was pretty tough, because we offer so much. It was great to visit with Marilyn, Becky and Lauren and we look forward to working with them again throughout the year with a few of the weddings we have already signed.

The next thing coming up – the Austin Wedding Guide Bridal Show and another wedding. Our next wedding will be with our ‘cover girl’ – the young lady that graces our splash page for our website. We hope to see many brides at the event and you can purchase discount tickets here.

Now, I’m off to Louisiana for Christmas and I can’t wait to see the LSU Tigers blow away Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl! GEAUX TIGERS!

We’ve added a new link to our website, called Storyshows. This is where we take the image highlights of a wedding day and play it to music. It’s something fun, and hopefully it will catch on. Here’s the first one.

Wow!

We were completely blown away that we made the front cover of a magazine! We have won some contests here and there, but now we are published!

It will be out in January and it’s the Austin Wedding Guide. This magazine is distributed all throughout Austin and surrounding areas and can be picked up at various Bridal Salons (David’s Bridal, Belle Saison, etc.) and Venues (Kindred Oaks, Hamilton 12, Marriot in RR, Winfield Inn, Texas Old Town, etc.). The beautiful lady that is on the cover is Meredith Malcolm, daughter of Jerry and Penny Malcolm at 2nd Generations Video Productions at www.2vgp.com.

Well, I knew it had to happen sooner or later. This isn’t photography-related, but a good lesson.

The house is falling apart!

Our air conditioning went out and my office TV that I have had since college (10 years ago) went out – all in 1 weekend! Anyway, I didn’t know who to call about air conditioning, so I called Fox since I see their truck in our neighborhood often. They came out and told me that my unit was going out and it was inefficient. I thought he was full of it – the unit is only 6 years old!

So, I went and got a second opinion. So, I then went onto Lennox’s website (a Lennox air conditioning system came with the house) and they recommended Airco. I called the company up, and they came out, fixed some wires that got shorted out due to condensation build-up from unequal pressurization of the freon line, and he even explained everything he did to me. THIS SAVED ME A LOT OF MONEY, even though Airco cost a bit more to come out on Sundays.

So, the moral of the story – unexperienced people want to charge you for something you don’t need and charge too much for it and they don’t want to spend the time trying to fix something if it’s broken. Unfortunately, I have heard this same notion about other photographers in town – not doing a great job and wanting you to spend a lot of money. I hope I never get this reputation.

Oh, on the TV front, I resisted temptation and did not splurge on a new LCD or plasma – I instead purchased a tube TV that will probably be out-of-date in a couple of years due to HDTV.

Well, we have a couple of weddings coming up, and we are very excited about them – Snowden/Taylor and Williams/Kelly.

We’re just getting back from the Austin Wedding Guide Bridal Extravaganza Show. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun. We simplified our booth quite a bit, and it really paid off when assembling it. We talked for 6 hours with so many brides, and it was exciting to see some folks who had heard about us before the show. It was great that we also had some of our recent brides show off the album and bridal portraits, too (thanks to Christy, Byron and Ashley). Now, it’s off to meeting with some of those we talked too!

We offered a complimentary Fashion-Bridal session as a Grand-Prize at the show, and Amy Winkler of Austin, Texas won. Congratulations!

We also want to throw a BIG thanks to Kabloom for offering the beautiful flowers in our booth, too. They did an awesome job of matching the colors of our booth.If you need some floral work done, call Scott Yeager at Kabloom and he will definitely help you out. He also did the floral work for a couple of weddings this year that we performed, and the flowers were always colorful, fresh and big!

We rented our linens, table and chairs from George at Premier Rentals. They always do a great job for us and are always dependable.

I am so excited! On my very first try, I got accepted into WPJA (Wedding Photojournalist Association). It’s an awesome group of photographers who are some of the most elite wedding photojournalists in America. I want to thank all of my previous couples and models for making this happen! Check the website out because they have some awesome photography. They have many photography contests, too, so maybe this will allow me to enter some more contests. Check out the site at www.wpja.com.

I’ve also been tinkering around with joining WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photographers International) after receiving a special invitation to attend last year’s convention in Las Vegas thanks to Bambi Cantrell. I met her again at PPA’s Imaging USA last year in Austin, Texas, and I do owe a quite a bit of my style to her. I’m just not really good at selecting images for competition. We just changed our booth for our upcoming bridal show for austinweddings.com and it took me 3 months just for that! It’s not that I am not indecisive, but I just want the best work out there to show off my clients.

We recently went out with Alex and Oliver and did a quick engagement session (or e-session as we call them). They’ll be getting married pretty soon, with the ceremony at Grace Lutheran in Lockhart and the reception at Texas Old Town in Kyle.