Carefully captured.

We ask ourselves as visual storytellers, ‘what is the story’?  here it is, in a single moment – captured perfectly as Mindy walks down the isle and John sticks out his  tongue  at her.

I revel in the moment, and capturing this gives me great pleasure – both to work for clients who understand individual expression, and to work so hard to really capture it for them.

There’s a lot of competition in the ‘wedding photography’ market these days, but as I’ve been observing weddings since 2003 – these nuances are easily noticed to my experienced eye.  The WPJA gave me a top 5 in the nation ranking in 2004, and aging has only made me more sensitive to these moments – aware and able to capture them.

If you’re wondering why I’m not answering e-mail, slow on voicemails read on – if you’re not ok with my sillyness – don’t read on!!

This is my photographic family – from these minds my career has been molded – and to whom I give my highest gratitude:

FW7 from Vladimir Chaloupka on Vimeo.

Did you catch my multiple cameos?

Each year in North Dallas TX we gather for the most intense, most personal, and most life changing photography workshop on the planet – Foundation Workshop. It was out of this workshop that my wedding photography career was born – and I have been returning for the last three years as a Mentor to the students of the workshop.  The team leaders are Huy Nguyen, Brooks Whittington, Amy Deputy, Greg Gibson (my team leader in 08) and Tyler Wirken (my team leader this year – blonde  spiky  hair in the hotel room edit scenes).  

Recognize that shadow? my opening presentation

There are two unique things about the Foundation Workshop – first, the students shoot assignments like newspaper photographers.  Second, the student to staff ratio is 1:1 to ensure a crazy, intense, and personal level of instruction and connection.  I was  privileged  to lead off the workshop with a talk on creativity kicking off day one’s four lectures and team building  exercises.  Day’s two and three are full shooting days for the participants to shoot assignments.  While day 4 had a dinner deadline to edit all the photos into a short slideshow for a presentation after a  celebratory  dinner.

This year Team Wirken started the week off with a very silly hotel room bonding experience.  After which our team member’s took on assignments like the South Fork Ranch – where Dallas the TV show was fashioned shot by Stacy Doyle.  A chocolatier who just opened shop – shot by Duncan Kerridge.  A local  Veterinary  hospital in Plano shot by Dan Shuman.  An organic tree farm shot by Jerry Yoon. Finally a family caring for their father stricken by Lou Gherig’s disease shot by Joseph Allen.  It was a real  privilege  to be able to speak into these people’s lives and I hope I’ve made a positive impact on their shooting, thinking and feeling pictures.  My role as a mentor is to visit the team members in the field and help them gain new perspectives, think new approaches and generally push them out of their comfortable ways of shooting and thinking.  Then we take it back to the editing suite…..and talk about all their mistakes all night!

Stacy Doyle shooting at the Dallas TV show museum

Duncan at the Chocolate shop above and Dan at the Vet below

Really – it’s just plain brutal honesty about almost every picture.  Tyler Wirken our team leader has a graphically driven taste for images and he can see every compositional flaw within seconds.  He also has the mental energy to talk about it for 6 hours straight!!  A totally revealing experience for the participants and the staff alike as we warm up our creative brains by realizing all the things we should do better!  So as you see in the video a lot of sitting around and talking – that’s us critiquing our work.

If you’d like to see a still image slideshow by  David Pullum and Anna Kuperberg our official staff photographers there’s the link!

Thank you cards illustrated watch in High Definition Video on Vimeo.

Thank-you cards are a fun way to show everyone your wedding style with a lovely photo card.  You can purchase your card set from one of the many types we have in our shopping cart:

8.5 x 5.5 Color Postcards – 250

4×5.5 Folded Delux Greeting Cards

4×6 Color Postcards – 250

5×7 Folded Delux Greeting Cards

So which one of these two hotties, I mean comedians, is getting married?

And well by now you know who’s shooting their wedding right?

Go see them in New York City!

Thursdays @ 8pm in September

The PIT
The Peoples Improv Theater
154 West 29th Street btwn 6-7

And well we might just be able to hook you up with a free ticket for your date! Buy your first ticket online with this link and contact us through the comments and we can hook you up with a free ticket for your date to their comedy show, seriously – free stuff here at Make Love Real!  Read more to see other ‘trailers’ for this comedy show, and to find out which one is a Make Love Real bride.

OK – thanks for making the jump – Alicia the non-blonde of the pair is our client and she’s actually marrying another comedian….we’ll have to tell that story later.

Well, I haven’t heard any news about a breakup, so David must have survived the filming and used his massive comic wit to charm Alicia out of dumping him for the show.  Enjoy and say hi to Alicia after the show!  Or you can add the thursday Sept 11th event to your facebook calendar.

But, while that may partially be true – really I’m just lucky that I wrote Erik…

…and Danielle was smart to encourage him to call me back…

…and I was lucky enough to get the voicemail as I hiked to the top of Pilsbury mountain with Eben…

Some know that there is more than luck.

Thanks for letting me join in the, well, more than formal – fun!

Oh wait, just when you think there couldn’t possibly be more – well thanks to Erik there is!

Wedding Splashers from Neil Cowley on Vimeo.

Planning and patience, wow – that was an amazing project!

Plan some time for pictures into your wedding schedule – and we’ll be able to be creative and allow you and your husband to have time to relate.   If we’re all feeling rushed, it doesn’t allow for the creativity to bloom the same way!

I guess I titled the post to reflect the intent we started with, to make William the sex object and give me a photo assistant on the shoot. He was distracted by the hotness – of the sun – but I still managed to pull off a few decent pictures.

But looking at them now I think he got overshadowed even though he’s holding the light.

I’m pretty sure that’s Deanna’s “I’m enjoying this way too much face” as the red wine has convinced her she’s channeling Cindy Crawford at this point . Well William, you should realize marrying a Barbie doll – they like to steal the spotlight.

read on to see a few pics from the birthday partyHere are a few snaps of Eben at his family party:

My wife got him a set of straws that you can construct to drink from 5-6 cups at a time, it was her favorite gift.

[flashvideo filename=wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ebens-riddles1.flv /]

Tomorrow is Eben’s 9th birthday! Happy birthday my wonderful son!!

So I wasn’t too surprised when my wedding nightmares started last year. Most are the typical worries: getting married on the wrong day, forgetting to invite anyone, the church shrinks while we’re in it…real common stuff. Well I finally experienced a “mind movie” that I wouldn’t mind watching again and I thought I would share it with you.

It was my wedding day and I think because of lousy weather, I got mad and called the whole thing off. Well Neil had already set up all his equipment, so he was annoyed and decided to smoke a joint in the parking lot. I thought this was an interesting concept so I sat next to him and started talking. He offered me a puff when a cop showed up to ask what we were doing. At that point Neil was so high, he offered the cop his own joint, which he gladly accepted!

Unfortunately, Neil didn’t continue in the sharing mood and another officer was mad he didn’t get offered a joint so he arrested Neil. Like a crazy man, Neil jumped in his 80′s Ford pickup truck and started doing donuts in the grass at my reception site. Dug the whole thing up like a mess then left, with the cops chasing after him.

As he drove off, we called My wife to come bail him out of jail, but instead she decided to talk to me on a balcony somewhere and discuss life. And of course as we were chatting, the whole thing fell down and we ended up joining the New York City marathon in progress below.

Can’t say I remember who won! But I woke up totally confused wondering if I was married or needed to find a different photographer. Should I be concerned?

Now normally I don’t obsess about filling out my shirts, but I’m an only child marrying a man with two beautiful sisters and a mother all blessed with big brains and gigantic…well you get the picture. It’s not uncommon for them to team up on me and joke about what they call “my peanuts”.

So you can understand that this shirt had to fit perfect. This was decided at 10pm the night before my photo session. No problem, I’ll just grab my bra made of pillows.

Hmmm…that didn’t seem to fill it out. How about wearing an undershirt as well? No luck either. Ok, desperate times call for desperate measures. I’ll try bra on bra with undershirt…haha…I bet I won’t be able to get it over my head. WHAT!!! There’s still room to pack a lunch! This is ridiculous.

As I sat there looking at my deflated chest in the mirror, I wondered how I was going to pull this off. I had to wear this shirt, it was the one. After pinching the shirt from all angles, I realized I just needed to pin up the shoulders to lift up the neckline. Easy. Where’s some safety pins?

We moved into our first home just 2 months ago so be darn if I knew where any safety pins were. The only ones I could scrounge were some giants holding up our 70′s draperies in the living-room. That’ll do. So I pinned up the shirt and tried it on for the 40th time. Lovely! Well…except for the silver metal peeking through the fabric and the uneven gaps gathering atop my shoulders. After 30 minutes of trying to pin it just right, I realized this wasn’t going to work. Time to get serious.

The last time I sewed was in 6th grade. We made sweatshirts from sewing machines and my sleeves were different lengths. Oops. I wasn’t even going to attempt that. Too many buttons and threading, this job called for the hand stitch! Now where was some thread?

My only guess for the location of thread would be in our sewing machine. You would think this would be an easy item to spot, yet it took me over 30 minutes to hunt it down in the corner of our garage. (Just in case Billy gets in the mood to sew up some britches?) I open the top to find a single needle with less than 6 inches of white thread. Are you serious? Who doesn’t have a stock of white thread? Well I would have to make due.

For the next hour, I sewed my left shoulder. Martha Stewart, watch out. When I finished I had less than an inch of thread left. Well that isn’t enough to hold up my right peanut!

So I dived into my closest and choose an old white shirt as my victim. For the next 20 minutes I carefully pulled out a piece of thread just long enough to finish the job. I totally felt like MacGyver. Finishing the second shoulder in record time, I raced to the bathroom to view my tailor skills.

Perfect! And I think they might have grown to walnuts!

Happier than a clam, I headed to bed with only 6 hours left till photo time. Guess who was going to look good now?

The night before my engagement photo shoot I was a mess. It might have helped if I had started planning things before 9pm, considering we had to be up by 5 in the morning to catch the sunrise. But who has time to plan?

I start to throw this and that into bags. Five pairs of shoes? Check. All the makeup I’ve ever owned? Check. A bottle of wine? Well you never know…Check. And as I start to fill the bags, I start to get a little nervous.

What if the weather is lousy? What if we don’t pose well? What if we’re uninspiring to Neil? And after filling the fifth bag, it hits me. I’m a wreck! Is this what the wedding jitters is all about? I don’t think I can get married!

I go to bed at 1am, worrying about my hair and makeup, so I never really sleep. When did I turn into such a Barbie? (Without the DD cups, *sigh) We get up the next morning and head out the door at 7am. Late as usual.

When we get to Letchworth Park, it’s absolutely stunning. I’m not a morning person (morning being any time before 11am) so I was captivated. Neil was setting up with the most tranquil music playing from his car. What a wonderful way to start the shoot. Ok, take a breath.

We pose for some amazing shots and head to the next location. “Stop being so stiff,” Billy says to me in the car, “just relax.” Wow, was it that noticeable? I peek at the wine bottle in the back seat. Maybe just a sip.

A few swigs later and I’m feeling much more Cindy Crawford. I couldn’t stop smiling or talking to Neil’s dead cat. (Don’t ask, you’ll find out.) And I finally start to relax. The effects of the nasty drink didn’t last long, but it had served its purpose. To allow me to live in the moment.

I realized then that these photos weren’t relying on a flashy smile or the way I crossed my legs, but about how happy Billy and I were at that exact moment being with each other on such a gorgeous day. How could that photo not be beautiful? No wonder I love Neil & My wife’s images. They know how to capture that moment.

And I laughed. Weddings aren’t about schedules or fresh flowers. They’re for living in a moment of immense happiness for the whole day. I can’t imagine. I can’t believe I was so stressed over nothing! I can’t wait for my wedding.