That being said, even though I don’t get it, I do get the fact that she goes crazy for them :)

She has been pulling on my sleeve to get me to “flank” her existing wedding band since, well, she got it. I have always told her no or maybe in a few years for a big anniversary. I have been reenforcing this decision for a while now so it really worked for the surprise factor this Christmas!

I really was planning on sticking to it too… This year has been tough to say the least. This gift isn’t to say that we have money spilling out of our pockets, it’s my way of saying yes we could use this money in a lot of different ways right now but… Holly has worked harder and sacrificed more for people then I thought was humanly possible. Even if she has been treated like crap or been taken advantage of she still puts the effort forth because she knows it’s the right thing to do.

What I am getting at is if anyone deserves something like this it is Holly. It’s more then I feel like I should have spent but I would rather work harder to give make her happy then to make her wait another few years until we could really “afford” it.

I am not very good at sharing my feelings, and even this explanation I feel like is not telling the whole story of my love and admiration for her integrity and dedication.

Holly is the most loyal friend anyone could have and I feel sorry for the people that write her off without giving her a chance. She is the reason this business is great, she is the reason I am what I am.

After all since we are together all the time if you think about how much time a normal couple spends together in a year this would be the same as someone with ten years under their belt!

I love her. All of her. I hope the flank makes up for my expression inadequacies. Merry Christmas :)

(images by Holly)

We are busier then you could probably imagine, and we have weddings every weekend for a little while. These weddings deserve our full attention so if you email me on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday please bare with me as I can’t respond while trying to focus on the wedding during the weekend, not to mention sometimes we just need to relax!

So I just wanted to let everyone know, that YES we are super dooper busy. No we aren’t avoiding you and we don’t hate you! We are just really trying our best to keep everything going and take care of about 50 people at one time in a timely manner as well.

We love our clients so please know that everything will be worth the wait. We are great at what we do, the magic just takes a while to warm up! ;)

Good news is that all our weddings are freaking awesome no matter WHAT nature or people throw at us, we are still awesome! ;) This is why we should be your photographers.

Plus we bought a really expensive lens that does this! That means it’s super mega ultra wide.

We have a wedding coming up this weekend in Lodi, Ca… aka wine country! First one there it should be amazing. Next we are coming home for a couple days and heading right back out for a long weekend wedding on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. This also will be EPIC. Then one more in detroit, which I am super pumped about because of their awesome engagement session which I have yet to post.

Ok I will try and blog much better then last season, since we have about 4 spectacular weddings coming down the pipe!!

There was $9,238 of lenses, $11,000 in Cameras, $2,000 in lighting and a whole lot more contributed by the couple and their families. It had pillars, beauty, more good light, tilt-shifting, blue skys, happy people, an amazing and kind couple, good food, and goooooood  good photos! I don’t say that lightly either! ;) It even had a point where the whole bridal party jumped in the dang ol’ pool! So we had fun until the security guy from the hotel got teste … get it?

Never thought I would say, “This is going so well” as I did for this wedding. That means a LOT. thegaupers… that’s us! We tend to have some bad luck which means as hard as we try I am nominating us for the hardest working wedding photographers! Whether it takes 1 hour or 4 hours to scout the area pre shoot, we are GOING to find some good spots in good light. Do we get paid for it? Technically no… Although it does make the clients very happy when we take them to a pallet yard and pull magic out of our… pockets.

Anyway my main point is, we needed this one man…This could fight Hope and Even. Our reigning favorite couple for this year. And dont go being so vein and thinking this song is about you. You do don’t you! Just kidding, we realllllly love this year’s clients. I don’t like to dirty my nose, but seriously, we really lucked out with the clients we got and this year has been crazy awesome – mostly in part to you.

Thank you to everyone that has worked with us this year. We are so grateful for the referrals and fans that tell everyone about us. You really don’t realize how much we appreciate that. This is our only source of income for Holly and I people spreading the word helps us to do what we do for the people who really want what we do.

Keep up the comments on the blog! Ya know, google likes when you link sites to your site or even when you leave a website in your comment. Google knows and it likes when we do that! ;)

Ok I kind of got on a tangent so here is a sweet sweet slow mo for your eyes to feast upon.

Anyway, I was gathering some images for a wedding party member that had uploaded a image from the proofing site (separate blog issue!) So as I was going  through a few more I thought people might like; I came across one that I just had to try and see what could come out of it.

Soon enough I had spent an hour plus on a black and white photo haha! How does that happen?? All I know is I was trying new things in LR and ways to make it sweet…

So just sayin… I did ALL this in Abobe Lightroom 2 not even 3 and it looks awesome… in my opinion anyway.  :)

BTW I added, count em, 13 brush layers!  …Holly laughed for a long time when she saw it. Cluster F. Take a look at what I saw in the end: All the little white spots are hand painted areas. look closely!

The history list was a mile long… literally. Alas I like to think if not just for the learing that was involved, it was worth it. Though I do have LOTS of things to do and I kicked myself for not just doing the stupid thing in PS. It probably would have looked 10x better! Oh well, like I said I am learning. Here’s the image BIG this time so you can see all the detail.

If that’s not enough I posted a special full res image that you can view on Flickr. ←« Click here to see it HUUUUGE! The 14mm isn’t very sharp that big but until I can flip the $2,400 bill for the (CRAZY awesome) 17mm TS-E or a Canon 14mmL II, it will have to do with less then perfect on 5′x10′ prints  :§ (21 megapixels for those that don’t know!) That means it is “physically” 23.4″x15.6″ … and you can go bigger then that probably without seeing much quality degrading. That’s what viewing at 100% means.

This is also great… Just a simple but gorgeous image shown at 100% on a 24″ iMac. (screen shot) See the big version on Flickr. ←« [Click HERE] of what I was actually seeing here. It’s even more impressive how flawless the 135mm f/2L is! Such a bargain for the price.

I also got a Canon 1D mk IV to play with courtesy of CPS, accompanied by a 50mm f/1.2L and 24mm f/3.5 TS-E L II. Yes I like it better when the Ls are red.

I really liked the 50mm… here’s a good sample:

More soon!

seriously borrowlenses.com is the only place i rent equitment and has been great from prices to customer service. Please give them a try and you won’t regret it!

Mary is a long time employee for a high-end florist dealing with, well weddings of course!  They do some pretty cool stuff that you can check out HERE.

Annnyway let’s look at some images! OK normally I wouldn’t go backwards but WOW. Makes me wanna swear this is so cool!

You know what? NO! I do want I want! Favorite images FIRST.

I mean come ON!

This sure took a few tries and some MEGA flash power. It sure is hard to slow down a train in direct sunlight.

I think we had the best tag.

you know it’s a good session when this is the last image. :)

Good stuff Peter, good stuff.

seriously borrowlenses.com is the only place i rent equitment and has been great from prices to customer service. Please give them a try and you won’t regret it!

Actually now that I think about it, Alex’s mom helped get us Angela & Brandon‘s wedding which is in a couple weeks! Sweet thanks!

Since I didn’t do a post for her last year, check out a few good ones from the session.

Who can forget this one? AWEsome.

The timing was perfect for good leaves (since the next week the wall was bare) So we had to have some more fun in them… right before we get a chance the steeple bell rings LOUD, freaking Alex out as you can see! It didn’t take her long to continue having fun. =)

One of our favorite images EVER. Had to go to a school bus graveyard to get it!

Since she’s a dancer naturally we had to end with a “dancer” jump.

Ashley had a lot to live up to but proved to be just as photogenic as Alex! That matched with our ever good…ening skills, it was a good one!

That being said we started in this little nook to get warmed up. We wanted to go down by this bridge but as I went to get out of the car, Holly said “Don’t go down there, there’s a NAKED guy down there! We avoided him and whatdayaknow? There he is… invading our lives again!

Luckily we found some new top-secret spots ;)

Ashley was VERRy serious ….. until she wasn’t.

Yeah yeah… I know we are doing a lot of “nature” which CAN be sweet… but it’s gotta be the right nature and the right light. I actually tested out an on the spot theory about backlighting the dark leaves and using natural light for her face. I think it looks AWEsome.

That’s all folks! Check back soon for our next senior Peter. (He’s pretty great and his mom is cool too!)

The scene starts in Denver the day after rigerous scouting as always… We found a sweet Tim Burton wall to start with a great couple we found at the last minute. So things seemed to be going well…see? Pretty awesome.

So where does it go wrong you ask? Well I guess shooting in some of the places we do, we had it coming. That’s just the risk you take when you gotta get that shot you see in your head. Anyway, This lady comes up to me… Friendly at first and I though she was just passing through no biggie so I humored her as always. So then she starts actually talking to me and all the sudden talking about how her husband died and how much she misses him… It put me in an awkward spot because I really felt bad for her (even though she wreaked of booze and her crying was less and less genuine). So after a while I am just like I’m sorry I don’t know what to tell you! Then she started telling me her family was on extreme home makeover and how I should take a picture of her and her family because it would be good for me… Mind you this all happened very fast and I was getting very confused. Where was her family, how was I going to do that I have a workshop to focus on?

So I tell her just go get your family because I can’t leave (as she was tugging on me to come with her) So she said OK after a while and said she would be right back. Then Chris, one of our workshop attendees tells me he saw her and 3 big dudes across the street prior to her coming across the street. He said they were talking and looking over, and only she came up to me… Sounds very sketchy. So I was like “that’s it, lets take off”… forget about breaking down the flash let’s just leave and get the cars later. So we took off down the alley and about half way down we hear yelling and whistling from a block behind us. While I knew better then to look back I just kept speed walking as discretely as i could!!

We ducked into some hotel, and took a breath… It’s so messed up that they would try and play me like that… Play to my kindness, seeing it as a weakness. Makes me pretty upset to be honest. We have always given people the benefit of the doubt, but it gets harder every day unfortunately.

Annnnyway…heart-beating stuff… Once we got our nerves back we could finally get some mojo going! We got some great stuff playing with that Sigma 14mm!!

Andrea was down for it all… And she did goood.

Erika Jessop seemed to have more mojo in this location that I did… I will admit it! Still like it though! :)

We ended up selling the session to one of Lacey’s fellow teachers that has a two year old that she wanted to be photographized. His name is Owen. He likes to stand on his tippy-toes. p.s. check out Holly’s album design! It’s super cute!! http://www.thegaupers.com/owen/

Every kids session warrants a good stretch before we get started because this was going to be a very energetic shoot!

Good thing he knew were the good light was!

Owen was our kind of kid. He liked to have FUN.

The hat didn’t last for long though.

He even practiced his faces for us.

After we were satisfied with some urban stuff we found a cool field at magic hour. Owen wasn’t exactly sure what to do.

He got the hang of it when his wild nature instincts came to the surface. He was very sneaky =)

Sometimes his mom would have to keep him under control with bribes of M&Ms. Hey whatever works!

We loved Owen and would love to do more kids! If you would like some family/kids pictures shoot and email to ryan@gauperphoto.com and I can send you the goods!

P.S. a VERRY special thank you to Nicole (and Eli) who helped us out with holding stuff and keeping Owen happy! Couldn’t have done this well without you!

Our good friend Vince of McVay Vision Photography was kind enough to trade us this session for a family session (which we still need to do) And though we aren’t the easiest subjects… OK I am not the easiest, Holly is pretty great. I thought we got some reaaaally fun and cool shots. Have a look!

Starting with probably my favorite picture of us that we have!

This is what we call a happy-smirky … Holly pulls it off beautifully as you can see.

How smokin’ hot is Holly in this image?

After many attempts, I think I did ok =)

Vince said he had a sweet idea, and for some reason I doubted his “McVay Vision” p.s. sorry vince ;)

Alas I was wrong… and it was awesome!

Did I mention it was November when we were doing this thus it was feepin’ freezing! So we retreated to a garage that I happened to make a studio. =)

Vince was feeling left out of all the fun we were having so I give you Vince: The man, the legend, the crazy.

It was a ton of fun, and we think you all could have some fun with us doing the same thing! Thanks to Vince for the great shots, can’t wait to do some family time!!

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