About 6 months ago I (Tony) posted a photo of Amy on Facebook that I took while we were working. Someone mentioned that we should post more of those. Then I had a brilliant idea to wait until the end of the year and post a bunch of them. Clearly I didn’t realize a few things:

1. We have way too many photos of ourselves making ridiculous faces.
2. There’s no chance that anyone will actually be entertained by all of these.
3. Amy’s hair color changed about 5 times throughout the year.

So, without further ado, here’s a bunch of photos we took of ourselves (and interns and assistants) during 2011. Don’t judge us for it… It’s your decision to be here :)

I told you it was long.

Amy and I owe you guys a huge debt of gratitude and thanks. This year, we hit the 5-year mark with our business. Back when I started the business, my father-in-law shared a book with me that had two stats I’ve always remembered since: 80% of businesses fail within the first year. 80% of those that survive fail before the 5th year. For those scoring at home, that means that we’re officially part of the other 4% now… and it feels great. But it really has very little to do with us.

From the beginning of the business until now, there are a few things that have stayed the same. While we’ve grown, expanded and improved, we still have never had to pay a dime to advertise anywhere. And we owe all of that to YOU. If we’re being honest, we owe this whole business to YOU. From the get go, we learned just how amazing our clients are. The fact that you guys take your time to look at our work, share it with other people and recommend us to friends still blows our minds. We have some people (other than our parents) who have been looking at our blog for almost 5 years now… and that was an UGLY iWeb site back then. We honestly cannot thank you enough times for what you mean to our lives. YOU have given us a career that we love, and made us so happy to do it for you. From the bottom of our hearts, we say thank you.

2011 really was a remarkable year for us. We had 148 shoots (that’s one more than last year if you’re scoring at home), delivered around 50,000 finished images and met hundreds (maybe thousands?) of new people. We shot everywhere from our own living room to Munich, Germany, for newborns and in hospice facilities. made our way across the country a few times and even out of it… and next year promises to take us even further away!

So without further ado, here’s some of our favorite shots from the year. We’re sorry in advance if we didn’t include some people/favorites. We had to at least attempt to keep this to a reasonable length… I recommend you watch on full screen in HD mode :)

If you’re curious, the music was (in order): Mat Kearny, Count on Me • Breanne Duren, Gold Mine • Brooke Fraser, Something in the Water • Josh Garrels, A Far-Off Hope

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank each one of you for the very important role you play in our lives. God has blessed us tremendously by having you support our work and we can’t thank you enough for that. We hope everyone had a great 2011, and we can’t wait to see you all in 2012!

Well, I’m happy to announce that this year will raise the stakes in a HUGE way. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that this spring we’re holding The Genesis Workshop (our annual photography workshop) in Las Vegas. That’s where YOU and the Shoot Me for FREE contest come into play…

The winner of this year’s Shoot Me for FREE contest will win an absolutely free trip to Las Vegas. That’s right. We will be choosing one couple to come to Vegas during our workshop, all expenses paid! This includes flights for 2 to Las Vegas, 5 night’s stay in one of the workshop mansions, food with the workshop crew from our own private chef and a whole bunch of amenities (pool, pool tables, ect..).

Here’s your part: We need a couple that will model for us during some of our workshop sessions on March 20-22. We will fly you out at least a day early to do whatever you’d like with your spouse/significant other. Then you can model for us for certain sessions throughout the week. The rest of the time is yours! And of course you’ll be able to keep digital versions of any photos we take while we’re there. So in exchange for us using your pretty faces you get a 5-night all-expense paid trip to Vegas with someone you love as well as all the photos we shoot of you throughout the week… all for FREE!!!

To recap, here’s what you get:
2 round trip tickets to Vegas
5 nights stay in one of the workshop mansions
All meals
Photos from the shoots during the whole week

Here’s what we get:
2ish hours of your modeling talents for shooting in the morning and 2ish hours in the afternoon on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The rest of the time is yours!

Here’s the Rules:
- Contest entries start today (12/27) and end on Friday (12/30).
- You must be a couple to enter.
- You need to be available to travel 3/18-3/23
- You should be outgoing and very much in love.
- We’d love to choose a couple we’ve already shot for, but are absolutely open to anyone!
- No purchase necessary… duh.
- Bribes accepted

VOTING IS NOW CLOSED! THE WINNERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED SOON!

Facebook and Twitter

At the bottom of this page are links to our Facebook business page and Tony’s twitter. The Facebook business page is a great place to keep up on things that we don’t blog, such as when we need models or volunteers, when we have contests or when we ask for questions (like we did yesterday). The Twitter feed is mostly Tony talking about sports, music and photography and we (this is Tony talking) apologize in advance to anyone that follows it. :)

Booking Schedule

We get a lot of questions from soon-to-be brides asking about our booking schedule. For weddings, we typically fill up 12-18 months in advance. For the busiest months (May-June and Sept.-Oct.) its usually closer to the 18 month mark. For engagements, portraits and commercial work, we typically fill up at least 2-3 months ahead of time. For this reason, we do scale back our commercial and non-wedding-client work during the busy months. Fall is by far our busiest time for engagements and families, so if you want to shoot in the fall, it’s good to get in touch way ahead of time (like now).

Shooting Days

For engagements, families and commercial work we shoot exclusively during the week. The evenings are typically the best time and we try to shoot on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sundays are our day off.

Travel Policy

As we’ve been traveling a lot for weddings, many of our clients have asked about our travel policy. Our policy is basically that there is no policy! We’ll travel anywhere for anything (as evidenced by our recent engagement session in Germany). If you have an idea for us that involves travel, just let us know. We’ll work up an all-inclusive quote that includes all our costs and we’ll do all the planning. It’s super easy for you.

Comment

We just wanted to say thanks to all the people who check out our work and comment on it either on our blog or on Facebook. It means so much to us that our clients can see that other people like their photos. So, come out of stalker-ville and leave a comment!

Workshops

A few people a week ask us about workshops, so we’ve added a ‘Workshops’ link to our menu. Right now, our only planned workshop is the Genesis workshop (which has a few seats still available). If we ever do a 1-on-1, small workshop, business consultation or anything else, we’ll often post things to our Facebook page for help/models.

Reader Questions

Ok, so that’s mostly it for stuff from us. So here’s a few questions we got from people on our Facebook page. If you’re interested in having a question answered here sometime, keep an eye on that page (rather than emailing us) and if it works out, we’ll do it more often.

Quincy asks:

Do you plan on doing anything like Genesis closer to PHL?
The likelihood is extremely low. We only plan one workshop at a time. After it’s over, we reevaluate to see if we’d like to do another one. If we ever do a third, it will most likely be on the west coast.

Karlo asks:

Can you dunk? Forward? Reverse? 360?
You’re asking a very sensitive question Karlo. The answer is yes to all 3, but every year my hops are giving way more and more. Back in the day it was windmills and alley-oops. Now I’m lucky to do the things you mentioned above.

Heather asks:

Do you plan out your sessions (poses, locations, lighting tricks you want to use) in advance or do you do it on the fly…
The overwhelming answer is that we do everything on the fly. Every shoot is so different (weather, location, clients) that it’s hard to plan things in advance. Occasionally we’ll have ideas or thoughts, but we usually forget about them once we start. We always tell people that we want their sessions to be unique, so basing it on them is much easier than basing it on us.

Mike asks:

Without giving away any trade secrets… When using a flash/off camera lighting for outdoor shooting during the evening (before dark) do you have a go to lighting setup you use or change it up every time based on the conditions? i.e.- umbrellas or softboxes, typical number or lighting sources, etc. Your lighting just looks so much better than any others I’ve seen.
Well not really. For outdoor lighting, it mostly depends on how much time we have and how windy it is. We prefer softboxes whenever possible and are always looking for faster setup for softboxes. When it’s windy, we use a lot less modifiers because we’ve broken so many that way :).

Angie asks:

Any tips for those of us learning Lightroom and the processing end? I have trouble finding presets that aren’t too strong. I’m always longing for the perfect preset :)
Well you could always buy the Workflow DVD… :D. But the serious answer is that we don’t use any presets that we didn’t make ourselves. Since the processing sets our style in some ways, it’s important to me that it’s not available to everyone.

Megan asks:

If you had to shoot with 1 lens the rest of your career, what would it be?
Definitely a 35mm. I find it to be the most versatile and challenging focal length. I think it makes a person think about composition so much that I always feel challenged by it.

Adam asks:

I’ve seen some of your photos where your clients have been in the water or topless even, how do you talk your clients into doing some of those things?
Well we never talk anyone into anything really. We ask our clients to give us ideas and than run with it. Whether that’s in the water, climbing something tall or what they do/don’t wear, it’s important that our clients tell us what they’d like. Then we just make suggestions and see what they want to do. If we start trying to convince people to do something, then we’ve gotten away from the main goal, which is to give them what they want.

Jonathan asks:

Your best advice on getting resistant participants (guys) to spend the time needed for a great engagement shoot?
This is one huge advantage of shooting with your wife. I (Tony) am not really a stereotypical “wedding” person, but Amy totally is. Like many of our clients, that’s totally my wife’s department. It works great because we can just be ourselves. I think it’s easier to identify with men this way. I’m into sports, movies and other things that guys usually want to talk about. I find that working with both sexes is much easier when we can just be ourselves and connect on different things. After all, people have fun when they don’t feel forced into something.

Anyway, we did take our camera, but hardly took any photos. All but 2 of these are from our phones, but here’s a quick glimpse at our vacation last week. See if you can guess which weren’t from a phone… Back to regular programming this week :)

We didn’t shoot much on Thanksgiving, but snapped a few off here and there. More blogging coming this week as we pick it back up!

Amy doesn’t know I posted this so flood her inbox!!

EVERYONE CLICK HERE TO SEND AMY A HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMAIL!!