Beautiful Erin and Jared sharing the love. Words don’t do these two justice.

Posted in destination, engagements 3 Comments »

I met up with E + J in a cool part of Chicago to talk about their wedding plans and do a session. I just spent the last couple of hours proofing our photos, and I can’t get over just how DIFFERENT every couple is from one another. I love it! I love that we can bring your personality and tastes and integrate them into the photos so you have this portfolio that is… you.

[ view more images here ]

Posted in clients, destination, engagements 2 Comments »

I have re-built my wedding photography business around the fact that I absolutely LOVE photographing weddings where the couple comes from two different cultures.

I just came across a post on one of my favorite wedding sites, weddingbee, where the author brings up her own situation with multiple cultural, religious, and socioeconomic differences between their families.

[ read the post here ]

Posted in inspiration, wedding No Comments »

I was just playing around with a photo I took awhile ago. I think it’s cool that you can find three completely different images depending on the crop. I also think it’s pretty wonderful that Job can make Kate (who is normally pretty serious career woman) giggle like that. Love has power!

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I can tell you the day. It was December 10, 2005.
I was hired to come take photographs at a noble NYC patron saint’s 90th birthday. At the time I was living with his granddaughter and had just moved to Boston. I was totally in awe of her cosmopolitan family and their fancy NYC lives. Her grandfather Thomas Keehn is amazing and I loved being around him, even though he never remembered my name. (I don’t blame him, he’s too popular and important.) Gloria Steinem was rumored to make an appearance at that particular party.

But time moves forward and a guest at the party, Perry (the man in the photo above) recently passed away. I received a message asking for the photo to be used in the funeral, and was floored by the response:

Thank you so much. When Leatrice (my mother-in-law) saw your photograph of Perry, she broke into that cathartic weeping that a mourner needs to give into in order to come to terms with what has happened. The photo grabs and brings back the “awesomeness” (as one of your bloggers put it) of the Perry we want so much to keep and remember — before illness robbed those blue eyes of their spark. I have framed a copy for Lea and she keeps it near her all the time.

I really can’t thank you adequately. Life falls apart. Art stitches it back together. You are a very special seamstress.

BHK

Wow. I am experiencing a bittersweet joy. I have been reminded in this experience how special the older people in our lives are, and how we need to cherish the opportunities we have to be with them. I am going to make a more concentrated effort to do portraits with the grandparents at the weddings this year, to remember to do things like a generational portrait with the bride and her mother and her grandmother. Sometimes at a wedding or bat mitzvah you have all these people running around, and about five minutes to get the family photos done, and want to slam through the required motions. But we as wedding photographers need to remember to ensure that families have photos of the special people in their lives.

As Benny so eloquently states, “Life falls apart. Art stitches it back together.”

Posted in portraits, wisdom 3 Comments »

Yesterday I spent the entire day in an UNinspiring seminar with a photographer who basically cursed the entire time and told us how we can extort the most money out of our clients by offering odd print sizes and custom framing… and only taking the same 30 poses over and over because those are the ones that “sell.”

Is it just me, or is your wedding worth a little bit more effort than a generic set of posing?

Today I met with a NESOP photography student who totally inspired me. Marissa said she wasn’t really interested in weddings until she saw my website, and that wedding photography could be artful. That made me realize I need to keep doing what I’m doing, despite the advice from some well-established photographers such as the one I did not name above.

And then this afternoon… let me tell you I have been sitting here working on my computer for more than FIVE hours preparing a couple of albums to be printed. They look totally hot, but I need to learn how to streamline this album design work because it is out of control time consuming! That’s what I get for being an inefficient perfectionist.

Also, I was totally and completely thrilled at what came in today’s mail. I met Erin and Jared when I was in Chicago last week, and our session was near a chocolate factory. I could smell the chocolate the whole time, but the retail store wasn’t open for business on a Sunday so I joked about how frustrated I was to be able to smell but not taste that chocolate. So today I got a package with their hand-printed wedding save the date card (which I love), a handwritten note, and a couple of tasty bags of chocolate covered goodies. Thanks Erin and Jared!

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Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.

— George MacDonald

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This weekend was a rare opportunity for us to hang out with friends. We celebrated a birthday at the Providence Place Mall and I got to experience the magic that is Dave & Buster’s for the first time. Have you ever been there? It’s like Chuck-e-Cheese… for adults.

photography related commentary: It was interesting to shoot with my sweet f/1.4 lens on my Canon 5D. If you can believe it, all of the above images were taken in EXTREMELY dark conditions with no flash, using only available light. I’m excited to see what this lens-camera combination can do at a ridiculously dark reception venue. Whheeeee! /photography related commentary

I did have a lot of fun winning tickets and hanging out with friends. Sometimes I forget how good it is just to play… since my workweek easily takes over weekdays and weekends, I don’t always get a chance to be available when other people are hanging out.

And the prize Ali chose to buy with all of our ticket winnings is simultaneously disgusting and hilarious… a giant gummy bear! I can’t find the photo right now but I’ll post it later. Ewwwww!

Posted in personal 1 Comment »

Now that the 2007 tax deadline has officially arrived, I and many other wedding professionals can finally breathe a sign of relief. As a wedding photographer, I have to keep track of all of my expenses when I am on the job - meals and miles, equipment, postage, etc. This means that I end up with a lot of loose receipts in a drawer that need to be dealt with at some point before I can officially close the books on the previous year.

I knew better this year how to handle all of this from a business standpoint, but getting married in February and being away from Boston from November through mid-March meant that I did not have a lot of accessibility or extra time. So the past month has been, needless to say, a bit crazy. I did two things that helped me immensely: I hired an office manager to help me get the books ready, and I hired a tax prep representative to help me prepare the actual paperwork.

I decided to give H&R Block a try since they have an office down the street and had many appointments available. One thing I found strange was that they didn’t seem to give any prices anywhere. I wasn’t overly concerned about that, since they always have coupons going out I figured it couldn’t be that much for their services. Boy, was I wrong! When he finally rang up my total it turned out to be the same amount I spent with a private accountant in the previous year, and she had spent a lot of time answering my questions and helping me find information. I didn’t even have correct totals available when I walked in last year!

So anyway, H&R Block apparently charges you fees based on how many forms you use and how many times the rep clicks into them. So even though I had all my numbers ready, my H&R Block rep didn’t know where a certain number should go (car mileage, which is embedded within other questions in their program) so he ended up clicking around quite a bit. When he told me about the pay-per-click thing at the end I was really frustrated. He even forgot to go back and fix the mileage number before printing out my final paperwork, so he had to go back again and look around. The worst part is that he told me he could not adjust my final fee to bring it back down to the first quote I got before he went back to fix his own error.

So, even though on my part this experience using H&R Block was seemingly easy, it was costly and frustrating. From what I saw I would even venture into calling them shady.

Anyone know a good CPA?

(Whew! Now I should be able to catch up on those other projects.)

Posted in personal 1 Comment »

To our server at Bertucci’s last night… you gave us great service! Let me know if I can return the favor and provide amazing photos for you and your fiancée. I’ve never been to the state where your wedding will be held and would love a chance to get there.

[does this sound like an Improper Impersonal or what?]

Posted in clients, destination 1 Comment »