Amy trying to contain her excitement.

The Hoffer Photography Welcome Packet

Today is without a doubt one of the most exciting days of my life. You see, today is actually the exact anniversary of when I shot my first wedding. But that's not the exciting part...

HOW IT STARTED
It was three years ago today that I shot that wedding. Now, only a short time later, we're gearing up for our 4th wedding season with a packed schedule and a packed 2011 next year. But today is making me think more about that very first wedding for our friends Jon and Jocelyn. When I shot it, Amy and I were not yet married. I asked her to come along for both moral support and to help me with a few things. It's pretty funny when you look back on it. I had no backup equipment, no flash and only a few small memory cards. Halfway through the wedding I handed a memory card to Amy so she could load them on the computer she was carrying and hand it back to me to use again. That may not seem strange to some of you, but deleting photos that aren't backed up is a giant no-no...

Anyway, luckily all went well and we grew. Within that year I shot 7 weddings. By the 2nd one I had backup equipment and by the 3rd I gave it to Amy and just said "I'm not using this camera anyway. See what happens." Since then, our business has grown beyond what I could have imagined. Only a year later, I left my job because the workload was too heavy to maintain two jobs. In the meantime, Amy started coming to most weddings with me and was learning at an incredible rate. After a while, she was better than most of the second shooters I worked with anyway.

WHAT IS HAPPENING
But all this came at a price (Ok, I'm just being dramatic to have an E! True Hollywood story moment). With Amy's job and my workload, we've basically spent the last 2 years without much free time and with little time together in the summers. Meanwhile, as you all know, Amy's become quite the accomplished photographer herself. Her work is in almost every gallery you see on here, was featured in Rangefinder and some other publications we've been in and has really blown me away every time I look at it and realize that she created it.

So that brings us to today when I hire my first official employee!!! Ladies and gentlemen, my favorite person alive, Amy Hoffer :)

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
Starting today, Amy and I are a package deal. We'll be working together with all our clients, on every shoot and getting to spend some much-missed free time with each other. We're so excited! Amy has sacrificed a lot of time and energy for the sake of my business and I'm so glad that it's now officially OUR business!

It means a new About page. It means that we'll no longer be differentiating who took what shot on the blog. It means that you (clients) may be getting emails from both of us. And it means that you ladies out there can now have a female authority for all girl-related questions.

We're so excited about this. As always, we both just want to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts to all of you who read this blog and share our work with others. Since we're based completely on referrals, trust us when we say that it means SO much to us. Here's to a great 2010 wedding season!