We have run out of cards again so I thought it was time to design something new. It took me a whole day of thinking and bad ideas to come up with this. I have been wanting to bring in the stripes more since it’s such a huge part of who I am so I am pretty happy with it. I’m really excited to see how the back of the card prints since it’s such a teeny tiny mosaic. :)

I love how our brand grows. It is nice to have a vision for it unlike a couple years ago. Having a clear vision of what I want our business to look like really helps to keep me motivated and on track with how we grow our style with our photos as well. Having a strong brand that I’m confident in really does change the way I shoot/edit and feel about myself. It’s weird, maybe I’m the only one who thinks like that, but whatever works!

I also designed some sweet thank you cards to send out to our clients as well. I am really happy with the design but the printer messed up the paper so I have to get it fixed before I can thank our clients for being so mindbogglingly awesome. :) I have a lot of pieces to the brand, the stripes, stitches, dots, green, curly flower graphic, logo, ect. So I’m trying to make it all work together so it all feels complete and makes sense. I don’t want to really limit it so much that everything is identical since thats just not our style but I know there are some things that are not exactly cohesive but i’m working on it. :)

I am just now finishing up my last two weddings in our summer season. I then have about 2 weeks before fall wedding season starts. We have had a pretty slow summer compared to most probably but are booked solid this fall! So I hope to finish everything up next week so I have a few days to just not work and relax before all the madness begins!

I put myself on a pretty intense editing schedule so I can keep up with things and not get behind and it’s fairly stressful. However, I believe when its november and I’m done with everything, it will be worth it. It also makes our brides really happy to get their photos back insanely fast! So if you all want to just pray for me this fall that would greatly appreciated. Just that I can stay motivated, stay on schedule and keep my sanity..and possibly find some time to spend with Ryan too. :)

So, thats all for now. Back to editing the best wedding EVER! I cannot wait to blog about Hope and Evan!

Have a great week everyone!!

]]> http://www.mudeyes.com/new-cards-and-keeping-my-sanity/feed/ 0 http://www.mudeyes.com/nateleah-7-10-10-adventures-with-nature-and-mountain-dew/ http://www.mudeyes.com/nateleah-7-10-10-adventures-with-nature-and-mountain-dew/#comments Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:29:20 +0000 Holly http://www.mudeyes.com/?p=1935 post by: holly

So let’s just start this out by saying I’m human and I don’t assume everything will always be the most awesome ever. I sure do try my hardest to make things as good as possible, but sometimes you just can’t rise above situations. That totally makes this sound like a bad wedding, doesn’t it? hahha

I love a good misleading introduction! :) Now, to be serious, I adore these people. They totally have the love and are super easy going so I really couldn’t ask  for better people to work with. They also really trusted us to just do our thing which I very much need so I was pretty happy about that. People will cool personalities are always our favorite. Having a good, fun personality in front of a camera changes everything. However, I was not so much excited about the nature and did not assume it would be the most awesome. Thus, I was preparing myself to work really hard for it…and I did. I don’t remember too many specifics about the afternoon anymore as I am fairly certain I was a maniac for half the day after leah’s mom gave me mountain dew when I had not had any pop for about a month. Soooo yeah I was pretty high for the rest of the afternoon until I crashed and got all weird feeling.

Anyways, back to the nature… You see, they love nature and live on a farm out in amish country. We don’t really do a lot with nature because it’s hard to get variety and it just hasn’t been much “our style”  especially when its not “magic hour” but I knew that was what they wanted so I was certainly going to kill myself to do a good job for them and still be proud of my work.

So, we arrived a day early and spent about 3 hours driving around New Phileldelphia, Dover and out to the reception site and Leah’s house to make our plan for the wedding day. Making a plan, marking all the spots in the gps and knowing exactly what you are doing the next day is so important. I want the schedule of the day to be a smart use of time. Having a good schedule can make or break the day and photography in my opinion. Luckily, they understood this and gave us enough time to get some pretty cool shots. Since we drove around the night before, we found some spots that were still us to provide more variety than just nature for everything. I feel it’s very important not to lose yourself and style in anything you do.

In the end, our plan worked out really well. We ran about 30 minutes behind schedule but had planned a nearly 2 hour buffer time so running late wasn’t stressful and everything worked out beautifully. PLEASE take that tip if your a photographer, wedding planner, or bride. Buffer time is your key to not being stressed on your wedding day and still getting photos if your running late.

Everything was great, well, except experiencing the hottest weather of my life! ….and did I mention we always seem to wear black to weddings? …and that I decided to wear leggings and boots as well? Yeah. I about died. We shot in direct sunlight for most of the sessions too. Thank goodness we had our flash.

So I really love a lot of these and since I have slacked on doing wedding blogs for so long, this one is gonna be beeeefy!

Also, make sure you check out their album design since I spent forever on it. :)
www.theGAUPERS.com/bebout

No flashing please. :)

The big reveal!

I found this spot under the deck of leah’s house where they were getting ready. I was so excited about it! I love tiny

We found these AWESOME big round things but they were fenced in and there was no way to get to them. Inside the fence there were oh so many magical things, I could have done the whole session there… but alas, we could at least shoot on the outside and do the best we can with what we have. Leah is a graphic designer and had the cutest theme! I love when people have a personality and are able to show it in their weddings. Too many weddings are identical. If you want people to remember your wedding, do things differently!
I am not really a huge fan of trains on dresses, but my gosh her’s was so different and beautiful! Just in general, her dress was amazing. One of the best.

We stopped on the side of the road on the way to the reception to get a few shots in the good light since most everything else was earlier in the day with the bright sun. This was well worth the stop but I soooo wish we would have had more time in that light with the awesome sky!

The second one in, the ones that look like truffles…ok so those are cake bites and possibly the MOST DELICIOUS thing I have ever eaten. At the end of the night there were some left over so I put a handful of them in a napkin and brought them back with me. Then…I forgot them at the hotel! ARG!

This past Monday was our two year anniversary. It’s so hard to believe it’s already been two years, but at the same time its hard to believe it’s ONLY been two years! I finally do feel more comfortable saying my name is holly GAUPER instead of holly JOHNSON. So that is good.

Our first date was July 13th of 2007 and we got married June 7th 2008. Since the wedding our business has grown a ton and we have both gone full time. We have lived in 3 places so far and are moving again at the end of October. We have traveled a ridiculous amount all over the US and China. We have worked an insane amount and spend every single day together. We are still getting to know each other and have both changed a lot in the past couple years. It all feels like such a blur until I think about specific events and sometimes I can’t believe the things we have accomplished and worked through. Sometimes I can’t believe Ryan loves me for who I am and who I will be. At the end of the day, we go to bed and rest up for all kinds of new adventures that we are going to have.

Our life probably pretty unbalanced. We work hard and then we play hard. I like it that way. :) If this is what only 2 years together is like, gosh, I cannot imagine what the rest of our lives together will be like. Honestly, I really can’t. We are so random sometimes but I guess that is what makes life more interesting.

I can’t wait to see the rest of the world with you Ryan. I love you the most. :)

I also thought it would be fun to post a photo of my parents when they got married. Their wedding photographer was drunk and basically did the worst job ever, haha. This is probably the best image from the day. Look at my dads face! Ahahha I love it.

He was just the most kind and honest teacher who had really high standards…and well, I love a good challenge. This was a semester long project and the goal was to do 50 designs of one thing to get you thinking more creatively. We were also to have one final piece that was far more finished than the rest as well. I have a photo album on facebook of all my pages here: skull book

Granted, they are not earth shatteringly inspired but the project really helped me grow and think differently about things. My final piece for the book was my skull painting. This piece was done on acrylic paper with acrylic paints watered down, dry and thick. I also used pens, ink, sharpies and colored pencils. This is probably my favorite painting I’ve ever done.

After a while I decided to illustrate it which is what was entered into the artsprojekt competition. Last year I found out it made it into the top 10 which means they would produce the shirt. It has taken forever for it to get printed but alas it is finally for sale!

…and….they printed the teeth with metallic gold ink so now he’s a pimp.

These photos are taken from their website. I take no credit for how that model is posing, hahha.

My name is in it!

Sooo it’s pretty cool it is finally here. You should all go get one. :)
www.zazzle.com/hollyjlynn

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….hahah yeah… Just Kidding. :) It seems thats the only “really big news” people ever have these days. hahaha

Anyways…back to the real news. :)

Since before Ryan and I were even engaged we have been looking to get out of Michigan and it seems like we have looked everywhere.

We have went and look at…
Nashville Tennessee
Charlotte North Carolina
Denver Colorado
Dallas Texas
Austin Texas
Los Angeles California
San Francisco California
Boston Massachusets

At first, we thought Denver would be the place… but it just didn’t feel right for me so we nixed that idea. It seemed like we would never find a place that just screamed HOME to us. There were a lot of things in play because this is a big decision to make.

Since we are moving a business to a place where nobody knows us, well, that has it’s own set of challenges so this place had to be worth it and had to be right so we don’t have to move again for a very very long time.

We are ready to settle…a little. We want to buy an actual house within the next few years. We plan on living in an apartment, perhaps a live/work space downtown for a couple years just to have that experience and have the time to get to know more about the area after living in it. The last thing I ever want to do is jump into buying a home. I’m ready to settle a little right now, but not the let’s buy a house and have babies kind of settle.

Last year we went to Dallas Texas to check it out and we liked it a lot but just didn’t feel like it was exactly right for us but I had this warm fuzzy feeling about Texas in general. Everyone on facebook kept yacking about Austin to us so we figured it was worth checking out since everyone kept making a big deal of it.

We only spent a few days there but…ummm…I fell in love. When we first went to dallas I just felt like I was meant to live in Texas but just not Dallas and Austin just presented itself as just right to me. THUS….

It is a locked down for sure thing…We are moving to Austin this October!

Yes, the summers are blazing hot and people keep warning me about fire ants, but thats ok nowhere is going to be perfect. I’ll just walk around with a little blow torch and kill the little suckers. :)

The beauty of this plan is that I have heard July and August are the realllly hot months and July and August just so happen to be beautiful up here in Michigan and those are also really big wedding months here. So…bam! We visit family, enjoy the nice weather, shoot some sweet weddings and then head back home. It is kind of a reversed winter I figure. If its too hot to go outside there, well, it’s too cold to go outside here. So it’s a trade off and I’ll take heat over cold any day.

We are both SOO excited about moving and it feels great to finally feel at peace with where we have chosen.

Everything in our life seems to happen rather fast, or at least it feels that way. We will be driving down there June 26th to start looking a place to live and work since that is our only break in weddings. We have about 2-3 weeks to spend there and search the whole place for an awesome space. I think with enough effort, we can find a cool loft or something for a decent price… hopefully. :) I have good vibes about it at least, haha.

Soooo that is our big news. :)  The End. :)

I was so overwhelmed last year with editing and weddings every weekend so I never had a chance to post their engagement photos. I figured now would be a good time to get excited for their wedding. Soooo here is justin and beth pre-wedding. :)

Oh… and all the photos with the yellow in them…we were at some empty fish market or something. It smelled soooo bad…but was sooo cool. :)

Remember the hupfers? We shot their wedding last August and it was one of the craziest things I have ever experienced. When we planned out this big 3 month trip we knew we wanted to see san francisco and to visit with the hupfers so we planned to stay a few days there and trash her dress.

The shoot I had in mind did not exactly work out. Since we were in China and Hawaii for so long it was kind of hard to find a hair stylist and makeup artist since there was always so much going on. So when we got back I desperately tried to find one but nobody was available. So, I did it myself and since I know nothing about such things really…I think I did a pretty decent job! It was also helpful that I brought along my wig as well. :)

So, we set out to trash the dress and that didn’t happen. Why… You must be thinking.

At their wedding we had at most 10 minutes to do their bride and groom photos. It was frantic and for what we usually deliver, there just wasn’t as many as we would have liked. This is why we really try and keep on schedule for weddings because its so sad when we can’t do all the cool things we like to do. So I figured since we are trashing the dress, we should do some not-so-trash the dress stuff first to make up for what we didn’t get at the wedding.

The not-so-trash part just kept being awesome and we ran out of time. I wanted to do like a 10 hour shoot to get it all done but we were all exhausted and overslept which pushed us back a bit. At the end of the day I didn’t want to do the ideas we had to trash it and not do them right because lack of light and time. I want to do this dress justice so we decided to call it a day. However, WE WILL trash that dress! It’s just going to be on our next visit. By then, we will be able to plan more ahead of time and really do some awesome things. She is willing to just 100% destroy this thing and to be honest, I feel honored that she is letting us be the ones to do it. :) It’s going to be epic and I can’t wait to get back to San Francisco to make it all happen!

From this, I learned some things. Many brides don’t get a ton of photos on their wedding. We sure try and deliver as many and as much variety as we possibly can, but at the same time, your being so careful with the dress and its such a busy day that it’s just a different kind of day. Then, after the wedding, a lot of brides would freak out at the idea of “trashing” their wedding dress. To be honest, steph’s dress really should have been trashed. We dragged it around all day, sat in things, stepped all over it, ect. and got some awesome pictures…without trashing it and without being nervous about destroying it. This is when we came up with the idea of a “Dirt Dont’ Hurt” shoot. All the things done to steph’s dress can be cleaned, and that includes all the mess that was on it from her reception.

So…all other brides past, present and future… If your terrified of the trash the dress idea but want more awesome photos, perhaps you should consider a dirt don’t hurt shoot with us. :) It’s a fun way to get some more use out of your dress, accessorize crazier than you would at your wedding and get your hair and makeup done.

AND… a big thanks to Nic for helping us out with our lights and helping out all day and Soma Sofa for letting us shoot in their AMAZING furniture store!

We were lucky enough to find Kristina and Kevin through Jessica and Melanie since we didn’t have anyone to shoot for our LA workshop yet. We were staying in a rediculous town with nowhere to shoot so we drove up to venice and found some pretty cool things. There are some interesting people there… hahah

It was supposed to rain A LOT right during the time we had planned to shoot so we were really bummed. However, miracles happen to us a lot with the weather and the rain pushed back and started POURING right after we finished. We were prepared with cute umbrellas and hello kitty rain boots if we needed  them. We could have done some fun things in the rain, but I am happy it was nice out just because it makes things so much easier.

There are two images in this post that are “beach” photos. They are probably the only beach photos you’ll ever see posted from us. Beach photos just always tend to look a bit cliche but I am really happy with how these couple turned out. This first one I actually love a ton, who would have thought?
Kristina is 5 feet tall and completely adorable!
Some of our workshop attendees being awesome! hahah

I still have a couple more posts to go before leaving for china so keep checking back!

We first arrived in Vegas last wednesday, the 3rd of march. We didn’t really have any plans for our stay, vegas was just kinda on our way to LA to it was a good place to stop.

In the beginning of our trip we stopped in Austin Texas and did a family shoot for Jessica and Nick. Well, since then Jessica had talked to her friend Melanie who lives in Vegas so she booked a family session with us. After this, we were looking for models for our LA workshop and melanie hooked us up with Kristina and Kevin. Thats quite the chain of people for such a short time. We just happen to be going through all the states where these people have friends so thats cool, haha.

Anyways, back to vegas. We did this shoot on day 23 of our trip. We got up early to go scouting for places to shoot because we didn’t want to do cheesy things at the busy parts of the strip. We looked in all the wrong places. We wanted to find a ghost town but got half way there only to realize it was MUCH further than google told me it was. So we turned back around looking for any kind of “downtown”. We finally ended up in the real downtown las vegas which I assume is the old strip. It was much less busy and had cooler things so I was really happy at the end of it all. This was originally going to be a “sisters” shoot but Melanie’s husband just happened to have the day off of work so he came along and we worked in some couples stuff as well.

We left the next day for our LA workshop but decided to come back to Vegas for 3 more days after the workshop. The hotel here is SO nice and so cheap, WPPI is happening right now and we were only a few hours away. I figured staying a nice quiet place would be good to catch up on all our work before leaving for China on Friday and we would be able to at least go to the trade show as well.

Anyways, enough of my jabbering. Look at all these pretty pictures!

This first one is possibly my favorite of the set. I just love how those stairs look with the fisheye!

This was shot with the 135 from across the street. If only you knew how awkward this was…haha…this was on the side of las vegas blvd I think and it was a stop light so we kept having to wait for traffic to clear and were getting a lot of people looking. I think it turned out cool, but I can’t say I would have enjoyed sitting there like that so I’m glad they were good sports about it. :)
Could this be one of my favorite “up shots” ever?! I think it might be. Everything just looks so cool about it.
Since we decided to stop trespassing so much, our style has changed a bit. However, we keep getting yelled at by security guards and things! UGh! Luckily, in this case, we got our shot before he yelled at us to get off the garbage can… and really…what’s the big deal about sitting on a garbage can? It’s a GARBAGE CAN! hah
I LOVE the ninja jump from Robyn on the left. I suggested it but didn’t think she would execute it SO perfectly. I am impressed.
We have been mostly natural light shooters but have been getting a lot better and more efficient with flash lately so when it gets dark, I mildly freak out but Ryan always brings me back to reality and does some really awesome stuff with flash. A lot of this shoot was done with flash actually. I am glad he is so awesome, it really calms me down a lot, haha.  This building was so cool, it changed colors like every 5 seconds.
We went back to this spot because we liked the ceiling but while we were setting up our flash some random guy asked us when the show started and I had no idea what he was talking about and then all the sudden the whole ceiling went all trippy with these lights. So…good timing I guess, haha.
There were a few funny out-takes from this shoot but I decided this was my favorite. That guy on the left both cracks me up and completely creeps me out!
We had a lot of fun and hope you all like the images!  So…. thats the end of that, more stuff to come! I’ve got till wednesday to get all my editing and blogging caught up so I don’t get behind once we are in china. I can’t even believe we fly out on Friday! AHHHHH!

Ok. The End. :)

I wanted to blog every day of this trip but my goodness that just has not worked out for me. So I am gonna go back a few days.

After we left Austin we went up to dallas for 6 days and stayed with our friends Don and Karen Hunt. They didn’t have internet at their house so we had to go other places to find some which just made keeping up with the blog really hard. They live out in Cleburne which is just a small town but it is full of such awesome people. I have been there twice now and every time I just enjoy the people there so much. Texas is just the best. We did a short family session for them to thank them for letting us stay there and I’ll be posting about that next but here is a little preview. :)

Friday Morning: 9am – 11am was a couple of the best hours of my life. It is awesome to know people who are connected to such awesome people as Shannon. She is the queen of the theatre in Cleburne. She let us look through this big warehouse of all their clothes for the theater. We got to pick out the most awesome vintage dresses and accessories. My heart just nearly exploded with joy looking at all the amazing stuff. I didn’t think it would be as awesome as it was so I didn’t take my camera but luckily while I was nearly fainting from all the options Ryan got a picture of just a small part of one of the sections with his iphone. We spent two hours going through stuff and walked away with some great dresses.

SAD side note: We didn’t have enough time shooting in the workshop to use a few of the outfits we had with us… boo. Hopefully the next time we are in Cleburne we can do another shoot with Kamille (our model) and use up some of the other glorious things in there.

As we were getting ready to leave Shannon found a box someone had just donated of vintage glasses and it was amazing. There were so many cool frames in there that were in nearly perfect condition! We found these coke bottle glasses and I think they look great on us. Thank goodness we always have our phones on us when we forget our regular cameras!

So, thank you so much to Shannon for letting us use the awesome awesome clothes! They made the shoot so much fun!

Saturday:
The workshop. Whew! It was a long day! We started at 10am and went until about 9pm. To start the day off right, let me tell you about our friend Cheryl. She is one of my most favorite people…ever. I swear, I just met her the last time we were in Cleburne last year and I just instantly wished I lived closer just to hear some of her stories on a regular basis. The craziest things happen to her. She is hilarious and just an overall awesome woman. I knew having her in the workshop would prove to be funny at some point in the day.

Well, that point in the day was the very beginning. She walks quietly into the room and sits down on the edge of a chair and starts to introduce herself only to have that chair slip out from beneath her, flip over her head, knock the end table next to it and toss the lamp in the air breaking it. All this came crashing down in a matter of seconds. We all just stared in silence and then busted out laughing at the same time. Cheryl just sat there on the floor, confused. It was such a great moment and a very funny start to the day. These are the moments I so wish I had my camera ready. I will regret not getting a photo of that for sure. Just sitting here thinking about this story still makes me laugh.

After a bunch of jibber jabbering from me and ryan and some lunch it was time for shooting!

Our first model we had lined up fell through at the last minute so we were kind of scrambling to fix this problem and I am actually really happy that it happened because Kamille and Bradley just got engaged and were great models. Not to mention…she (and Cheryl) connected us to Shannon and her amazing vintage heaven!

The shoot wasn’t really a normal engagement session because we only had so much time and explaining things and giving everyone a chance to shoot takes 10 times longer than things usually do so there isn’t our usual variety in this shoot. The best stuff was in the middle of it with the Red jacket, black and white striped shirt and that awesome coral dress we had her in. It just seems very Alice in Wonderland to me which got me all excited. Even though it isn’t our usually variety, I still am really happy with the shots that we got. It was so much fun!

Kamille is a dancer so it was only appropriate to do a little spinning in such a spectacular dress….with red tulle underneath!!

Is the 14mm growing on me? Why yes it is. I love this shot!
I just am madly in love with these yellow gloves. If anyone knows where I could buy some like this..please email me, I just must have some!
This was the first dress. I kinda wish it was a brighter color, but at the same time love how it kinda blends in with her skin tone. The front and back were made of different types of fabric which was just fabulous. I wish I had a better photo of it.
He was pretty quiet most of the time. Kamille is certainly the loud one of the two. It kind of reminds me of me and Ryan, haha. When I took this I was a bit freaked out because of its creepy vibe but then I looked at it on my computer and I was like whoa! This is creepyily awesome. :)
This last dress was made for her. I was so disappointed we ran out of time and had to quit shooting before we could do some really great stuff with it.

We had a great time at the workshop and are really happy how everything worked out. Big thanks to Kamille and Bradley for being so great in front of 8 people.

The next few blogs will be about…
The Hunt Family
Oklahoma Workshop!
First day on Route 66
….so keep checking back!