This quarter I went with Gap Kids and posted coordinating outfits in gray and rose for a toddler boy, kid boy, and two kid girls sizes.

And for those with a more traditional “holiday” bent, head on over to lilswanky.com for this combo of red, black, and gray with options for two boys and two girls. As always, we love layering! Adding leg warmers in funky patterns for the girls might be a nice addition!

Albums: all albums expected for holiday delivery must have final approval by November 1. No exceptions.
Holiday cards: all sessions with holiday cards as an expected product must be completed by November 1.
Prints: all fine art prints expected for holiday delivery must be ordered by December 1.

Please note! For the last two weeks of November and first two weeks of December we will be in the office for very limited amounts of time, primarily only for image premieres and fulfilling current orders.

The very next day, Style Me Pretty published a feature on Francine and Jon’s Jersey Shore wedding.

Joe and I both know that these were great weddings, but it’s nice to see others agree that both couples put together fabulous celebrations!

We’ve long had leather flush mount albums in our offerings and also had a fine art album on the pricelist, and now we have a combination of both. The fine art flush mount album is printed on fine art paper but still mounted in a sturdy leather or premium binding just like the flush mount albums we’ve always offered. It’s truly the best of both worlds!

This first album showcases the new fine art paper option, as well as a new flipbook size that opens up to a 16″ square.

One more to show off the cover since it’s a pretty, fall-inspired combo:

The next album shows the largest size we currently offer (18×12) and also shows one of our cover upgrades, an acrylic cover that shows through to the first page of the album. The fireworks image from Punit and Nishma’s wedding looks perfect under the mystery glass!

Next, we’ll move on and show you Alex and Darren’s beautiful album showing one of our newer leathers, a deep black with a tooled texture. You can also see the gorgeous texture of the fine art paper here!

Another cover upgrade offering, this acrylic cover has a metallic photograph mounted behind the acrylic for a unique multi-dimensional appearance.

Kathleen and Chris’s wedding has been on the blog a lot lately! Here, another cover upgrade in the form of a wraparound canvas cover for the large album and the duplicate press-printed album is the smaller option. The duplicate press books make great gifts or parent albums. The larger album is our normal flush mount style with medium-thickness pages.

Last but not least, a small portrait album choice now available with our premium leathers!

The first is from my favorite browsing source, J Crew – or CrewCuts, rather. It’s all taken from their current spring lineup and all currently available. It’s a perfect mix for boys and girls!

The second option is from Naartje Kids and is a bright mix of aqua and a deep red. There’s outfits for both boys and girls of all ages newborn – 10 on their website, and it’s really easy to mix and match similar colors even at different sizes.

I wanted to include a full family look so I went over to the Gap website for this final group of clothing ideas, all in a soft butter, gray and khaki.

That’s it! We still have a couple spots open for portraits in Southern California and plenty in New York when we return!

Photography by Turn Loose The Art
Hair and Makeup by Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon

There are three basic stages of a digital file. The first is straight out of the camera, or SOTC as I’ll refer to it. This is the RAW file exactly as shot and downloaded to our computers. No work has been done to this file. Some photographers will deliver files or even printed products at this stage.

The second stage is what I would call color-corrected. For me, this level is defined by what a photographer can do to this file in any raw conversion program and is usually limited to color temperature (how warm or cool the photograph is), exposure (how bright or dark), and contrast (the difference between lights and darks). Most photographers finish at this stage unless it’s a favorite image, and this is also that level we used to deliver for the hi-res disc.

The final stage is a fully retouched image. This may or may not include more density correction, retouching of skin imperfections, brightening eyes, vignetting, and other artistic enhancements. While far more time consuming, this is what I hope all photographers are doing to any printed work. We are also delivering all products at this stage now, including the final hi-res files if our clients decide to purchase them. As far as I’ve seen, most photographers in the LA and NYC markets do not sell files with this level of finishing.

A few more examples of the three levels of finishing are below. I’ve included a different type of photograph to see the different amounts of work involved. As you can see with baby images, particularly if we didn’t photograph them at the newborn stage before baby acne comes in, retouching can be important.

First up is Nick and Christina’s show-stopping album from their September New Jersey wedding at The Manor. They chose a metal cover with a silvery croc leather pattern for the back and binding. This is one hot album!

Next are Nishma and Punit’s albums from their June wedding at the Jersey City Hyatt. They ordered two duplicate small copies of their albums for each of their parents (one shown). They did a small photo cover on gold fabric.

Since I never photographed the two new sample albums I’ve made in the last few months, I made sure to do it while photographing these albums the other day. The first is a sample album from Dan and Jordyn’s April wedding at the Inn at the Garrison, and the second is from Chris and Kathleen’s September wedding Hamlet Willow Creek in Mount Sinai. The albums are 14×11 and 12×9 in size. The 14×11 features some of the beautiful new leathers we have available (can you tell we’re in love with them!). The 12×9 features a neutral fabric and two photo cutouts. The first image is the album box that comes with all of our albums.

The autumnal equinox is tomorrow, and that means the days are getting shorter. That also means the holidays are right around the corner! NOW is a great time to order pictures in time for the holidays.

The next few months are very busy for both of us, since we are finishing our wedding season, wrapping up fall portraits and working on product orders all at the same time. We want everyone to get their stuff on time, so we need everyone’s cooperation with the deadlines.

Below are the deadlines. Please plan accordingly. Rush fees will apply if you order past the deadline.

-

2010 Holiday Deadline Schedule:

ALL PRINT ORDERS:

Due December 1st. All online galleries will be deactivated at this time, with exceptions for recent weddings.

-

HOLIDAY CARDS:

Order AND approval due December 1st; if you want them delivered to you by December 1st so you can mail them on a timely basis, then the order AND approval due by November 15th.
Please note, we are only offering tent-style cards for holiday cards this year. Postcard designs are unavailable. Cards are available for $3/ea in sets of 25.

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RUSH FEE:

50% of the total order if placed after any of the stated deadlines.

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ALBUM DEADLINES:

• FINE ART ALBUM: FINAL APPROVAL – October 10^th
• FLUSH ALBUMS: Album Revisions are due October 15^th -  FINAL APPROVAL due November 1st

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PORTRAIT CLIENTS:

• If you have already been photographed, your deadline is Wednesday, December 1st. (50% RUSH FEE for orders placed after December 1st. No exceptions.)

• NEW PORTRAIT SESSIONS: If you want to schedule a new portrait session in time for the holidays, you must have an appointment scheduled on or before Monday, November 15th. We will need you to order by December 1st in order to be ready in time. If you don’t order by December 1^st,  you will be subject to a 50% rush charge. No exceptions.
• California portrait offerings will be after November 15th this year, but all orders will also need to placed by December 1st.

MINI SESSIONS:

If you’re in NY and interested in a quick portrait for holiday cards and maybe just a few prints, this is an economical offer of $75 for the 30 minute session. This year’s Mini Session day is Sunday, October 17^th (rain date is the following Sunday, October 24^th). This year’s location will be a local park in Nassau County.

For all other dates, our regular session fees of $175 for weekday and $275 for weekends will apply.

And since everyone knows I hate posting without a photo, here’s a recent scenic from Montauk:

I’ve put together a couple of very cute kids clothing suggestions for fall photo shoots. As always, we love layers and textures and we like the kids to be coordinated rather than matching. Here’s a great basic look for a couple of kids, all clothing from Naartjie. By adding a few more accessories, it could look great!

J Crew Kids has a really great collection this year, and you really can’t ever go wrong with them. I went with a very monochrome look for the grid, but any color combination is great.

In the next couple weeks, we’ll start posting holiday deadlines for albums, prints, holiday cards, and wall art. We’ll also be announcing the one day we’re doing mini sessions, and we’re going to have a huge November print sale again!

As with all our suggestions, in larger groups we do suggest coordinating colors, lots of layers to add some individuality, and accessories to bring it all together. The first board contains items from J Crew in colors of yellow, brown, orange and blue. For the boy looks I thought the pirate theme was adorable without being so in-your-face about it, and girls looks simple. That little brown jacket I have on the girl look is for either boys or girls and would look great on little boys as well. The key with all these items, even if they have a pattern or graphic, is subtly including it. Notice the little girls’ shoes don’t flash lights or have Dora’s smiling face glaring out at you, and notice the plaid band on the boys’ hat blends in with the rest of the coloring in his shirt.

For the next board, I went to the Old Navy website and found an airy mix of clothing for the whole family for those hot days. Bonus, this could easily double for Memorial Day wear!

I think it’s pretty cool the whole environmental movement is called being green. And even if I didn’t care about the planet, just calling it Green would make me more interested. Luckily we do care about the planet! And so, this post is all about how we do our best to keep our business low impact, especially in the office. Besides keeping the majority of our office paperless, we’re moving towards more environmentally friendly products as well.

Packaging:
All of our packaging is either recycled or dual purpose. Seriously, that pile of boxes we keep in the workroom isn’t staying there for aesthetics! We keep the boxes our lab, album suppliers, and even the boxes my tea supplier sends so we aren’t wasting cardboard every week. We also keep all those little packing peanuts, an always messy task that we may one day win. When we wrap our prints in tissue paper it is recycled paper and when we wrap our albums in pretty papers, they’re also recycled.

Albums:
Some of clients still love the traditional feel of a leather-bound album, so we aren’t getting rid of them by any means. But this year we’re adding silk and brocade-covered albums to our lineup. In addition, two of our album options are printed on fine art papers and not adding to the pile of chemicals from photographic prints.

Prints:
Starting soon, we’ll be offering only prints smaller than 8×10 as traditional luster prints. 8x10s and larger will only be available as fine art prints on environmentally friendly paper. We’re currently testing papers with our lab made from sugar cane and bamboo, and will soon be offering our favorites. In addition to this, we have a few framing options made from 80% recycled materials.

In the office:
In December we changed energy companies! We’re now using Energy Plus, which generates electricity solely from wind power domestically produced.

We’re getting better at the whole paperless office thing. We’ve been using on online client management system for two years, do all contracts electronically, and email for about 98% of our business communication. All of our credit card statements, bank statements and utility bills are electronic statements. I still think a hand-written note is warranted for some things and won’t be giving that up anytime soon, though.

We keep our heat to a minimum in the winter, and use fans rather than A/C in the summer as much as possible. We use compact fluorescent light bulbs. We sleep our computers when not in use and turn the displays off if we’re running batches but not otherwise using the computers. Also, Joe yells at me all the time about leaving lights on and I promise, I’m getting better about it.

Details:

-albums must be ordered and 50% deposit paid by January 31. To order, let us know the size album you prefer and we’ll send you an invoice.

-within a week, we will send you a link to view your album draft. We include one round of revisions and will have your revision back to you in one week.

-you must give your final approval by February 15th and pay your balance to qualify for the 25% discount

-mini albums, portrait albums, matted albums, press books, and main wedding albums all qualify!

We are planning an album offer that you won’t want to refuse! For all albums ordered, designed, and approved in January, we are offering a 25% discount. This will apply to any size album, with any number of images. Offer not valid for pre-packaged or albums already purchased, or albums for events that have not yet occurred. The albums above are 12×9 and 10×8 in size, but you’re not limited to those sizes! If you haven’t purchased your own album yet, or want an album for parents, this is the time to do it.

The first looks is taken entirely from jcrew’s current collection. It includes lots of color, a little texture, and easy mix and match pieces.

This next look has option for 2 boys and a girl, and I found all the items on The Children’s Place’s website. Icy wintery colors anyone?

code: birthday33
view public products
33% off any canvas product!

ALL ALBUMS:
REVISION requests due October 15
FINAL APPROVAL due November 1

ALL PRINT ORDERS: due December 1
all online galleries will be deactivated at this time, with exceptions for recent weddings

HOLIDAY CARDS:
order AND approval due December 1; if you want them delivered to you by Dec. 1 so you can mail them on a timely basis, order AND approval due by November 15
please note, we are only offering tent-style cards for holiday cards this year. postcard designs are unavailable. Cards are available for $3/ea in sets of 25. designs available for this year are below!

RUSH FEE: 50% of the total order if placed after any of the stated deadlines

MINI SESSIONS: if you’re interested in a quick portrait for holiday cards and maybe just a few prints, this is an economical offer of $75 for the 30 minute session
CA dates: Oct 12, Nov 16 – Seal Beach
NY dates: Oct 16, Nov 28 – Central Park

For all other dates, our regular session fees of $175 for weekday and $275 for weekends will apply.

We also just received a couple of albums in recently and are so happy to be delivering them shortly!

For example, I’ve always laughed at the suggestion that if you’re on a budget for photography, going to a photography program at a community college will be a good solution. While I took several community college photography classes, I know most of the students around me would never have survived a wedding. A wedding photographer needs to be good at so many things: a commercial photographer (details, food), a photojournalist (candid moments throughout the day), a portrait artist (bride and groom portraits), a drill sergeant (family + group photos)! In my experience, a semester class can’t even properly teach ONE of those things, let alone all of them. A similar piece of advice, ask the photographer for a more affordable associate or assistant with a similar style… well, I don’t have permanent assistants and the ones I’ve had regularly don’t have a business or backup equipment.

With all that said: Joe found an article that provides mostly great advice on how to hire a photographer. The Knot did good this time!

Tips to Getting the Wedding Photos You Want

And since all posts are better with photographs…

So, that said, I’m pointing you to another article that delves further into this idea better than I can express with my own words:
Lessons Learned From the (in)Famous Chicken Suit Pics
With that, we’re off to California. We’ll be photographing a couple weddings, and I’ll be in a wedding! I can’t wait to see Andrew and Sara get married!

Andrew and Sara arranged to have a Vespa at their engagement shoot!

DEADLINES for the 2009 HOLIDAY SEASON:

All Albums:
REVISION requests due October 15
FINAL APPROVAL due November 1

ALL PRINT ORDERS: due December 1
all online galleries will be deactivated at this time, with exceptions for recent weddings

HOLIDAY CARDS:
order AND approval due December 1; if you want them delivered to you by Dec. 1 so you can mail them on a timely basis, order AND approval due by November 2o
please note, we are only offering tent-style cards for holiday cards this year. postcard designs are unavailable. Cards are available for $3/ea in sets of 25. designs available for this year are below!

RUSH FEE: 50% of the total order if placed after any of the stated deadlines

MINI SESSIONS: if you’re interested in a quick portrait for holiday cards and maybe just a few prints, this is an economical offer of $75 for the 30 minute session
CA dates: Oct 12, Nov 12
NY dates: Oct 16, Nov 28
locations TBD

For all other dates, our regular session fees of $175 for weekday and $275 for weekends will apply.

Joe took this image of the Save-the-Date magnet he made for Phyllis and Michael:

We can print save-the-dates on magnets or we can print them on our favorite linen cardstock for you. We also can design thank you cards for after the wedding!

What about that bridesmaid or groomsman gift? I know everyone struggles with that. We have beautiful silk-covered folios that make lovely gifts and can be customized in your wedding colors. You can order them in time for the rehearsal dinner and add a few photos into them after the wedding.

Many clients have seen our guestbook, a great way to share your engagement photos with your guests:

Another way to share engagement photos would a portfolio box with your favorite engagement images matted inside, or we can mat your favorite wedding images and you can set out the box in your home:

We’re all about the art here, of course! Commission a painting inspired by your wedding photos:

And of course, there are always gift certificates, when in doubt.

1. We are unique.

2. You are unique.

You can roll your eyes at me, go for it! But that’s really what it’s all about when it comes to photography and to your wedding.

We believe we offer a unique service and a unique product. In fact, we offer a lot of different products to showcase the photos we take of you. (More on that next week.)

We joke a bit that Joe is “east coast traditional” and I, Britney, am “relaxed west coast” but it’s really quite true in a lot of our photographs. We believe we offer the best of both styles, and we’re coming to find that coupling consistency and creativity offers our clients a complete service. I tend to follow the light into drama, and Joe tends to catch it on the soft and even side. Our clients end up with both even, flattering portraits and dramatic portraits with flare. And that’s just us.

Moving on, let’s talk about the most popular wedding product: the album. Between Joe and I, we’ve used eight different album companies over the years. Now, each of those companies have several options. In fact, our current album binding company has over 20 options!  We offer so many different ways to customize your wedding album. Pricing our “offerings” in a package would limit what we could offer clients. Pricing everything separately gives us the freedom to show you anything!

Or, as a florist says here, “there are so many wonderful flowers out there that just wouldn’t get used if I based everything on packages. I would being doing my clients, and myself, a disservice to offer packages.”

We don’t feel limiting our clients to packages lends to the creative and custom experience we want to offer.

Why should we limit your wedding photography experience? Why would we want to do so? And that brings us to you; you are unique. Odds are, if you’re reading this… you aren’t looking for the cookie-cutter photographer and you aren’t planning a cookie-cutter wedding. You want to personalize your wedding. You want people to remember it! And if that’s the case, why would you want to “order” from us as if you were in front of a menu at McDonald’s?

We used to have packages. We used to then spend a lot of time customizing those for clients during meetings, since they wanted 3 parent albums instead of 2, or they did want save the date cards but not thank you cards, or they needed 9 hours instead of 8. And since it was in a package, it was difficult for our clients to figure out the monetary associations with all these swaps. We decided to do away with packages completely, and now the power to build your wedding photography experience lies with you. You can enhance it with extra products, or leave it at as a base wedding coverage.

Wouldn’t the world be such a boring place if you could only choose from three options?

This is why we do not charge any travel fees for the NYC metro area or the LA/OC metro areas. For weddings outside these areas, we’ll continue charging travel fees, though if you want to take us to an awesome location like Costa Rica we’ll make it worth your while!

We have developed a pretty good online system to help clients on the opposite coasts, of course. Over the last couple years we’ve noticed many clients book us online regardless of where they are currently living, so we do our best to make that easy for our wedding clients. For our portrait clients, we do make a habit of sending newsletters with upcoming travel dates to book sessions.

Joe comes with a more traditional, East coast style and I have a more relaxed West coast manner, and we truly think this gives the best of both worlds for our clients.

So, you’ll keep seeing photos like this for a long time to come:

Plus, we think it’s pretty great that we’ve been serving so many clients that also have a bi-coastal thing going on. This fall, we’ll photograph clients that were originally from SoCal and Canada, met and fell in love in NYC, and just moved to California again. We’ll also photograph clients that were originally from SoCal and NYC, met and fell in love in NYC and will marry in SoCal and continue living in NYC, and it looks like we’ve got more coming up next year!

1. When do I schedule my maternity session?

Well, this one is going to be an ambiguous answer, unfortunately. For a lot of first time mothers, they aren’t sure when they feel best, and aren’t sure when they will all of the sudden just feel big. For the average woman, 7.5 to 8 months is a great time for a maternity or “bump” session. Your belly has great shape and you aren’t feeling “blah” yet. However, if you feel you’re getting very round at 6 months, feel free to schedule it for the 6.5 to 7 time period. If you don’t feel you’re that big at all yet, feel free to wait. Just don’t wait too long, or it may turn into an unexpected birth session!

I believe Kaylene had less than 4 weeks to go here:

2. When do I schedule my newborn session?

This is not an ambiguous answer at all. In fact, we will ONLY schedule a newborn session during the first week! While we don’t have children, we do know what we’re talking about, I promise. Having photographed well over 30 newborns in the last couple years, we’ve seen a lot and experienced a lot! Newborns in the first week are different, and they change so quickly. We can bundle them up and snuggle them into the most adorable positions for photos in that first week, things they just won’t tolerate in the second week. We hear a lot of mothers tell us, “Trust me, they won’t change next week.” While your new baby may not appear to change, in hindsight you’ll see they have changed; at the very least, their sleep habits change. The cuddly newborn photos you see on our website and blog really only occur in the first week, and weeks 2-5 make for difficult sessions with fewer great images.

This is a recent favorite from a session in the first week, something that we just wouldn’t be able to do any later

And another from last year. Again this would be very difficult once the baby is more aware of what is going on around him.

3. When do I schedule my baby session?

After the newborn session, there are some great landmarks. 6 weeks is the next really great time to photograph babies, as they start to interact more. Other great times are when your baby begins to sit up on their own, when they’re just starting to crawl, just starting to stand, and of course the 1 year mark. The next two photos are at 6 weeks and 1 year:

4. What about later? How often should I plan for photography sessions?

That’s a personal answer, and again, it depends. Any landmarks like a child entering school, important birthdays, graduating from school, going away for the first time, these are all great times to schedule sessions. When I was in middle school, I went to Europe for almost a month and just before I left, my mother scheduled a portrait session for my sisters and I. I love looking back at those photos even if I look like a total dork in them, because that was a turning point in my life. (And yes, Joe agrees I look like a total dork in those photos.)

As for groups, a lot of our clients schedule annual sessions in the fall for holiday photos of their kids, while some schedule an annual beach session in the summer. We recommend a full family session with mom and dad at least every three years when your children are school-aged so you have a progression of family images. I know, I know… you just want photos of your kids. Please trust me when I say that one day your kids will want to know what you looked like when they were 5!

Ryan and Marlene incorporated Jake’s first professional photos in with their annual fall session last year, and we already have their November session scheduled this year!Graduating from high school? We can take a much nicer and more creative senior portrait than the contracted yearbook photographer for your school!

Or maybe you’ve got several children nearing or in high school and want to take a nice family photo before your family starts changing!

Or… maybe you’re moving. While we’re sad to see you leaving the Turn Loose the Art family, it’s nice to document your last portrait session at your home for historical purposes. We’d even be happy to recommend a colleague in your new area to continue taking photos of your family as you settle and grow there. This image was taken the day before the moving truck arrived to pack up the house and move it from Redondo Beach, CA to Bend, OR.

1. Texture

We love texture! Sweaters with cable and other textures add a richness that you’ll never get with a plain cotton tee. Look at Ava’s sweater dress, the different rolling textures at the hem, and also her headband even has texture. We do mostly prefer the textures to be solid in color as that’s not distracting, but any texture is great. (Also, you’ll note that the kids take center stage here and the parents are in supporting colors– this is great.)

While the Splendorio kids do match perfectly, they added visual interest by all wearing textured knits. In addition, they really dressed considering the surroundings.

Below, Evie and Jeff are dressed quite simply for their beach engagement session. But her sweater adds some dimension in an otherwise simple image.

2. Layers

Layers also add interest without adding distraction. The orange shirt Mandell is wearing beneath his Mom shirt adds a pop of color in an otherwise dark outfit. Layering denim jackets over dresses, layering sweaters with corduroy pants, ruffled dresses — these are all easy ways to add layers into your clothing choices.

3. Accessories

Technically, white tank tops are pretty boring, right? But with the accessories we added here with the cowboy hat and ruffled skit, it’s a great portrait! Sometimes letting the girls take center stage works pretty well. After all, most women know that adding the right necklace or hat can completely transform an outfit. Below, the Presser girls look adorable in their gold leggings and Converse. The right accessories really dress up a portrait.

4. Complementing Colors

Years later, I still use this great portrait of the Ver Steegs as an example of awesome attire. They’re all dressed in complementing colors, but no one matches exactly. Jeans, black pants, black lace shirts (texture), sweaters… they all meld wonderfully. For a full family, you don’t get any better than this.

Below, the Weinstocks complemented each other very well, all dressing in greens, yellows, and pinks for their family lifestyle beach session. The kids suits all have subtle patterns and textures that blend nicely as well.

Below, Amber and Trevor complement each other so well! They are at the same level of formality and in similar tones.

5. Naked. But I guess that really only works for newborns!

There is a reason behind this post, and that this for us to say, if there is anything you feel would make your experience with Turn Loose the Art better, please let us know. If you feel we weren’t clear enough explaining something, say so! If you wished a policy was different, let us know your reasons! We promise to at least listen and take it under advisement. In fact, you may help many future clients by letting us know.

Beyond that, there are some specific areas where we try to talk with each and every client. Many portrait clients ask us what they should wear at a portrait session and we’ll have a whole post next devoted to that topic. Many wedding clients ask our opinion on their wedding day timeline in order to get the most out of the coverage, and we’ve blogged about that in the past. While our informative posts are helpful, they aren’t a one size fits all sticker, so we’re always happy to give personal advice.

The good news for portrait clients is that we have new guides coming soon! They’ll be either mailed or delivered by hand to all future clients, and past clients are welcome to request them at any time.

We struggled about adding an image here or not. We decided to just put up something pretty, courtesy of an iphone again.

We start coverage for most weddings around lunch time in the early afternoon. What does this mean? It means we were driving to you during lunchtime and probably did not have a great meal. Then, you’ll see, we’re running around and making incredible images of you. While driving in the car from one location to the next, we’ll probably scarf down a granola bar and a bottle of water, because that’s really the only downtime we have.

After the ceremony, which may or may not be in a warm place, we run after the family members that tend to wander off so we can move through the family formal photos. Then we walk around with you, moving low to the ground or climbing rocks to get the perfect angle for your bride and groom photos. Sometimes we’re traipsing into the snow or sand with you. Sometimes I get smacked in the back with a wave while on the beach (true story).

We’re likely still photographing you during cocktail hour, and then run into the reception to set up for the rest of the night. By the time your 8pm dinner service is starting, we’re naturally feeling pretty rundown.

At this point, more often than not, one of these situations is what happens:

• The venue lays out a platter of soggy sandwiches in the cocktail room and by the time we get there the band has already picked though it all (this is why we not so affectionatley call them “bandwiches”)
• We’re given a take out box with a slightly less soggy bandwich and a bag of potato chips, and end up eating in the hall outside the reception room
• If we are fed an actual warm meal, it’s usually at the end of the reception’s mealtime after the entire reception room was served. This means we get about two bites, and the reception starts up again and we need to take photographs. We come back to the food during a moment of downtime, only to find it’s been taken away.

So, what would our ideal situation be? Our ideal situation would be eating at a corner table in the reception room so we can see what is going on and jump up to take photographs if we need to. Our ideal situation includes eating the same food at the same time as the bride and groom, so we have plenty of energy for the rest of the evening and can be ready to take photographs when the bride and groom are finished eating.

In layman’s terms, our contract reminds you of this. We understand some venues prefer to give sandwiches or other meals that aren’t the same as the wedding guests. If that is the case with your venue, you need to let us know in writing two weeks before your wedding. This way we can arrange to quickly leave the venue and find a good meal ourselves. This is not ideal, because we would be unable to photograph if anything special is going on while we are away. If you’d prefer we not leave, please let your catering manager know how important your photos are to you, and that the best way to get great photos is for your photographer to eat well at the same time you’re eating.

When we’re well fed, these are the types of photos you’ll see from the rest of the reception:

Things happen, and sometimes we get elbowed in the face or stabbed by a high heel. It’s a lot easier to keep on shooting if it’s just your foot hurting from that high heel. We also think better and feel more creative if we’re not thinking about stopping for fast food on the way home!

The stats include a beautiful cover with ink laid over the brushed metal surface, allowing the metal to show through in the highlight areas. We’ll be designing this album with 90% full bleed images, allowing multiple images only for a few detail shots or story sequences.

We’ll have two pricing levels for this book, one at 20 images/spreads and one at 40 images/spreads. If you’re already a client and already have an album included in your coverage, ask about upgrading!

Weddings is a Facebook application that lets you share your wedding details with all your friends and  family, check out vendors, and discuss wedding planning and other wedding ideas. We think it’s a cool app to check out!

Oh, yeah…. we’re there too!   Become a fan of Turn Loose The Art on Weddings while you’re there!

On a separate note, we’ve finally created a category here on the blog called “Information Tuesdays.” Yes, today is Tuesday! While we don’t promise for a post every Tuesday, we’ll try to keep general information posts about policies and ideas to help your photography coverage on Tuesdays. The easiest way to see them all at once is to use the category drop-down menu above. We’ve gone back and re-categorized some past posts that fit in the Information Tuesdays category. If you have any questions you’d like to see answered, let us know!

1. Get married. Yep, kinda hard to make a wedding album without wedding photographs! We’ll be shooting all day with your album in mind.

2. Go on your honeymoon, and we’ll be hard at work editing your photos. About a week or so after your fulling set of wedding proofs are available online, I’ll send you a link to your password-protected online album viewing area.

3. You’ll see an album we’ve designed for you, custom to your style and preferences. We take the feel of your wedding day and lay it out for a flowing story as you turn each page. We incorporate some of those details you chose, but probably never had a chance to see on the wedding day. We include beautiful portraits mixed in with those touching moments.

4. As we tell everyone, we want you to LOVE your album. This is why we allow you to make any changes you want, so long as you make them all together. There are instructions on how to make changes to ensure a speedy revision time. While most of our clients just swap a few images out or approve it as is, you are welcome to make extensive changes if you wish; in this case we’ll ask to sit down for a design meeting with you or a phone conference if you’re out of town.

5. After we’ve made the changes and you approve the album design, you can usually expect your album back within 8 weeks. Around the holidays, this might be a little longer– all the more reason to work on the album just after your wedding!

Sounds easy, right? It is! The key is to approve your design early, and get your album back early while all your friends and family are still excited after the wedding.

We’ve seen several magazines suggest you give your photographer a list of pictures you’d like to have, and in theory it’s not a bad idea. However, the lists these magazines suggest are kind of ridiculous! Weddings are emotional times, but I can honestly tell you it’s at less than half the weddings were I see the mother of the bride wipe a tear from her eye as she helps her daughter into the wedding gown. Sometimes the mother isn’t present at the moment, or sometimes she’s more focused on helping her daughter lace up the corset. As for the commonly suggested shot of the bridesmaids doing the bride’s hair? If the bride hasn’t hired a professional to do her hair, it’s usually the bride doing it herself. Some moments just don’t happen at every wedding.

More importantly, do you want your photographer spending all day looking at a list? Or do you want your photographer spending the day scanning what’s happening in front of them, ready to capture every moment they do see!

We do, however, suggest clients give us a list of important family photos for historical purposes. We’ll always make a point to get the common photos, like the bride and groom with the wedding party, the bride and groom with each of their families, and so forth. But if you have specific requests, please let us know! Maybe your parents have close friends that were really more like second parents to you– that’s something we’re not going to know unless you tell us.

To illustrate these points, here are a few favorite moments that I would have laughed at, seeing on a list. We’ll start with “birds flying overhead just as the officiant instructs the groom to kiss his bride”

and then maybe “groomsmen “borrowing” resort bikes in between events”

and oh yeah, this happens all the time, right? “wedding guests mimicking aunt sally seeing a long lost nephew”

I loved this moment, and while it’s great when done well — I am sure the wedding guests prefer silence from the less talented soloists of the world. “groom serenading his new wife”On the other side of the coin, there are some group photos that we could miss if you don’t let us know they are important to you.

Whether you’re normally a punctual person or not, you’ll find a wedding day has all sorts of extra things that will distract you. A few examples, all from actual weddings I’ve photographed.

• The bride is dressed, walking out of the hotel lobby towards her venue down the road and realizes she left her wedding vows upstairs in the hotel. Normally, this would be a 5 minute delay. However, with her poofy wedding skirt, her maid of honor and another bridesmaid had to go back upstairs with her so her dress wouldn’t drag all over the hotel. Once she got to room, she remembered her brother had the key to the suite, so she called him to get the key. He then had to wait for the elevator to go to the top floor. 15 minutes later, she finally leaves the hotel.
• The bride and groom chose to see each other before the ceremony and wanted to meet at a local park for a special moment and then some couple portraits. After 20 minutes, the rest of the bridal party was to meet there, too, as well as both families. The bride and groom successfully arrive on time, but the bridal party doesn’t show up for quite some time. The families arrive, but we can’t take family photos yet since there are family members in the bridal party limo that has yet to arrive.
• The makeup artist arrives late, so all the girls are running behind. This happens often, of course, but this time it’s compounded by downtown traffic. The portraits we were supposed to photograph before the ceremony get pushed back to after the ceremony, and the bride and groom miss their cocktail hour.

All of these situations could have been easily fixed by making a timeline with lots of extra padding. 15 minutes here and there can add to a lot of delay, but if you have little pockets of 15 minute padding throughout the timeline and plan for the unexpected, you won’t lose portrait photo time later. If by some miracle, everything runs perfectly on time, you’ll end up with either extra portrait time or time to actually relax and enjoy your wedding day!

Every wedding is different, so it’s best to talk to us and make the most out of the time you have. One of my favorite photos ever is below. It was taken at a wedding that had a successful timeline. We photographed the bride and groom seeing each other for the first time before the ceremony and then photographed the wedding party shots. After the ceremony, we photographed the formal family portraits, and then had a little extra pocket of time to take a golf car to the far side of the property and catch this moment:

Basically, in the United States, every time a photographer makes a photograph, it’s covered by copyright. Unless a photographer specifically signs something that says he doesn’t own the copyright, he does. We don’t even have to mention copyright in our contracts, and it’s still ours. We mention it in the contract as a reminder to our clients.

Turn Loose the Art is happy to grant our clients personal use rights. We’ve had a “Terms of Use” posted both on our proofing site and on the blog for a while, but I’ll also mention them here. The rights we grant our clients are to print images on their own for their own personal enjoyment. After you receive your disc of hi-res images, you are welcome to make copies of that disc for safekeeping, welcome to take it to Costco and make some prints for your scrapbook, and welcome to send a few prints to your grandma.

You aren’t allowed to sell or publish the images. This means, you can’t upload the images to snapfish, for example. You also are not allowed to upload the images to sites such as facebook or myspace — this is a form of publishing. We have probably already uploaded a few of our favorite images to facebook for you, likely the same images as on the blog. If you’d like to share more images with your friends and family, you have two options:

1. You can wait until your album is finished and you receive your disc, make a few prints, and share them that way.

2. You can direct them to our client viewing and ordering site where they can log in and see ALL your images. They can even make collections of their friends.

While we’re quite laidback about a lot of things, copyright is not one of them. It’s our livelihood as well as our passion!

The most important reason to us as photographers is to get to know you better. Sitting in a meeting with you helps us start that process, but sometimes talking about all the details of your wedding can distract us from that. We like to start an engagement shoot with a chat over cocktails or coffee and have a little time to just talk about life, and then move on to the engagement shoot. We may be in a business relationship, but really like being friends with our clients, and the engagement shoot is the first step towards that. This is why we include an engagement shoot in our basic coverage; it’s important to us!

Another reason for an engagement shoot is to incorporate meaningful places. Often the tight schedule on a wedding day means you can’t choose just any location for your wedding portraits. Maybe, as in Sadiaka and Yusha’s case, you’re getting married in Westchester and you’d really like your portraits in Central Park. It’s just not a realistic opportunity on the wedding day, but we’d be happy to photograph wherever you like for your engagement shoot. We love places that matter to you! Maybe where you met? Had a first date? Where he proposed?

In Heather and Scott’s case, it was very important to Heather to include another love of her life, her longtime pony.

Of course, as we get to know each other, we hope that we’re starting the first step of photographing all the important steps of your life. Just a few posts down, you’ll notice Steve and Carole’s family shoot with their beautiful daughters. Here’s one of my favorites from their engagement shoot several years ago:

Another reason for an engagement shoot? It’s nice to have something to hold on to while you’re engaged. It’s a busy time, sometimes stressful, and we think it’s nice to be able to turn to a photo, a portfolio box, a framed portrait. The sooner you schedule the shoot, the sooner you can enjoy beautiful products, of course. It’s nice seeing gorgeous images on our website, but even nicer seeing them on your wall.

This is the image Joel and Karley chose to frame, and they also displayed it near the escort cards at their Guasti Villa wedding.

This, of course, brings us to the next question. What can you do to share these images with your guests, your friends and family? The easiest option is to share your online gallery with them. But we’ve got some pretty impressive products that also make great ways to share your photographs.

The portfolio box is a great way to share images in your home. It’s a lovely designed box that can sit out in your living room, dining room. We mat your favorite images to fit within the box. With a small easel, you can rotate images out of the box for a more creative display, too.

If you’re looking for a way to share more than one image at your wedding, a guestbook is another great option. We design the guestbook with a lot of blank space for your friends to write in their good wishes and sign their names. It gives you a great reason not to put away the guestbook after the wedding, never to be seen again.

There is art in your life. We mean that when we say it, and that’s the last reason to have an engagement shoot. Let it loose!

The number one mistake to avoid when hiring a wedding photographer is to listen to everyone else. Your best friend might have loved her photographer, and your cousin probably swears by hers. So you meet with both of them and their pictures seem good enough. But did you like them? Your photographer will be with you all day, so it’s important you get along with them and enjoy their company. Your instincts will tell you a whole lot!
~ Britney Gardner, Turn Loose the Art

We will be populating this new blog with a bit of recent work, but for the most part we will not incorporate older posts from either of our old blogs. You can see older work at the following links: Joe’s old blog | Britney’s old blog

Any questions? Please contact us on the Contact page.