I like doing these because it gets people to loosen up a bit. Some people are more crazy than others, but sometimes you can just get lost in formality and these are a great way to break into being more relaxed and fun. There’s NO chance anyone is going to look amazing in them so there isn’t anything to worry about which adds a nice “free” quality to them I think. :) It’s a staple of GAUPERphoto that will be around for as long as I’m around.

When I was looking through the images to find the best ones, I noticed how funny they all looked together so I thought it would be fun to put together a little video of them all. Please don’t judge me on the editing, I just batched these real quick just for the video since there are so many. :)

There are SO many great images from this wedding, I can’t wait to get caught up with my other weddings and get to editing. I’ll hopefully have a blog post up soon about it to hold everyone over. :)

We trekked it up to Charlevoix Michigan for Audrey & Nick’s wedding. They were married at Castle Farms which I guess is the like THE place to get hitched around there since there were like 6 other weddings going on at the same time. That place is one well oiled machine that’s for sure. While we were there, I saw 3 other weddings happen in the same ceremony site as theirs. There are also a few other places on the property as well so I can just assume it was at least 6 or so happening. Thumbs up to them for making everything run so smoothly!

We had never met Audrey or Nick prior which has been happening more often lately since we do a lot of out of town weddings. Lucky for us, they were super laid back and fun. Audrey was completely at ease about her dress and her bridesmaids were willing to do pretty much anything. From the photos, I assume the guys were cool too. I don’t spend a lot of time with the mens and Ryan doesn’t write a lot of blog posts so I guess thats all I have to say about that.

Her Maggie Sottero dress was STUNNING. I just adore the shape of it, the little flowers, the tulle, it was just magical.

Typically the first time I see the groomsmen’s photos is when I am editing so it’s always fun for me to see what shenanigans happened with Ryan. I thought this BOOM was super cute.
FAVORITE groomsmen photo! I love that the little boy is laying down, hahaa I think it’s hilarious when a group of white girls act ghetto. This never gets old for me. Of course, you can to commit to this for it to be funny, which they did. :) Oh my word, the little blonde one on the left was HILARIOUS. When she had the idea to leap I was all for it. Someone did catch her even though it really doesn’t look like anyone is planning on it in this photo. :) Speaking of the little blonde as I like to call her…. I’m not sure how these things happened, they just sort of…happened.  We take formal “pretty” pictures, but one of my staple shots is always crazy faces. I like to show a broad range of emotions, you know. :)
Before the rest of the girls were ready, since bridesmaids always take a long time if there are a lot of them, I took Audrey outside for some bride only shots and I’m so glad I did. These turned out beautiful!
These little girls were so adorable. I just love the bows in the back of their dresses. Flower girl dresses are just crazy cute to me for some reason. I would wear things like this just to go grocery shopping. Simple and whimsical, enough said. We found this cool outside theatre thing in downtown Charlevoix. I felt really awkward talking and working on posing this because I kept standing in the perfect spot for my voice to amplify and echo from it. I tend to say weird things so thank goodness there wasn’t a lot of people around. :)I’m doing this shot for everyone now. It’s my new favorite. Gosh I’d kill to have a shot like this with ryan! They had this huge chess set at castle farms which I’m sure everyone must get their photo taken with so I was trying to do something different and I’m really quite pleased with it. It could be one of my favorites. It looks to me like they all joined up as one army and are plotting something…

One of my favorite bride and groom shots of the day. It’s moments like this where Ryan and I just become one brain and make magical things. I had the idea that I wanted them to have a spotlight and for it to be moody and mystical. Ryan has the technical skill to make this happen. Gah! I love it! I would kill for some of those pretzels right now. SUGAR! Scratch that, I’d rather have the cake right now. Mmmm

We had such a great day with you guys! I hope you love the photos :)

If you’d like to see more from their wedding, check out their album design: http://www.gauperphoto.com/JacqmainAlbum/
VENDORS:
DJ- Sound Productions – Jim Paetschow
Caterer- Grey Gables

Event Coordinator- Sarah Hagen
Photography: GAUPERphoto

Hair Stylist- Emily Hilgendorf
Florist- Marvin’s Gardens
Pastor- Jim Nihiser
Wedding Dress Designer- Maggie Sottero
Shoe Designer- Vera Wang

Before and After Editing Images

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Editing Examples

The Save the Dates finally got sent out to everyone so I’m able to post it on the blog finally! I got my copy in the mail today and they look so good! We had them printed on matte paper which I think turned out great.

I am IN LOVE with their wedding logo I designed. I just love all the colors.

They also have an engagement book and guest book that match as well but I had them shipping straight to them so they would be there in time for Christmas so I won’t have able to have photos of those items until after the wedding in July unfortunately.

Sam’s wedding is going to be really awesome and I’m just so excited about her theme! I am also designing the invitations for her wedding which have to be done by the end of march so I’ll be posting them as well as they get sent out. I LOVE doing wedding brands for our brides, it really makes me feel more connected to the wedding and it’s fun to see my work loved in so many ways beyond the photos. :)

…and it just wouldn’t be right to do a post without a photo of them. SO excited to get to photograph them again in July! Their wedding is actually the day after my birthday and it’s in Iowa so we have to travel but since I have to work on my birthday I guess its not so bad when it’s for them!

If your interested in working with me for your wedding brand just email me and we can talk over the details, Holly@GAUPERphoto.com. I’m working on getting a price list and more information together to put up but for now I’m just dealing with everyone on a case by case basis.

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!!

I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do!

Directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp
Marcel is voiced (untreated & unenhanced) by a genius named Jenny Slate
Written by Jenny Slate + Dean Fleischer-Camp
deanfleischercamp.com

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!