We have apparently been unknowingly inspired by space the last couple weddings with our bride in the space ship (view it here!) and now the rings on the moon!

I so wish I would have taken a shot of what the scene was like for this. You would never believe what it was really like by looking at this shot. It was this big boulder and we had a 580 flat against the back of the rock shooting up.

and as a completely unrelated bonus because it’s hilarious and Ryan loves kitties…I give you mean kitty!

http://vimeo.com/smpfilms

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

Remember Brandon & Angela’s Engagement Session? Remember that epic tree shot?!  Ahhh we love these people!

So many people get lost in the wedding jungle of traditions and what you “should do”. Should you jump in the pool with your wedding dress on? Lots of people would say No, put it in a giant tupperware to preserve it’s freshness! It will inevitably get pushed to the dark and mystical place in the back of the refrigerator and never seen again. Why not actually get some use out of the dress, have some fun and do it in front of our cameras. :)

I do understand that not everyone would do this at the end of their actual wedding. However, you can always do a DIRT DON’T HURT shoot with us! Just click on that link for more info about that. If you want to totally trash your dress, well we sure would love to do that! However, we do know that not everyone is so gutsy to completely ruin it but still would love for some more creatively free photos in their dress. It is the best of both worlds really. :)

Anyways, back to the wedding… We were working till 10:30pm that night but decided to stay around a little longer. Then, they come up to us and tell us that the whole wedding party wants to jump in the pool at midnight and wondered if we would stay. I didn’t believe them at first but…ummm…yes, yes we will. It was a loonnng day, but it’s good to go the extra mile sometimes.

There were 19 people in their wedding party. I was prepared for a splash, but didn’t really think about the flooding of the whole floor when all those people jumped it. It was awesome.

I wanted to take some slow motion video of it, but it all happened so fast and I didn’t have time. However, one of the guests got it on video which shows what it was really like in that area…which is dark, haha. Thank goodness Ryan’s a total nerd when it comes to lighting. :) The video is at the very bottom.

Ok everyone listen! It’s on Ryan’s count. 1, standing. 2, bend at the knees. 3, lift off and jump!

Ok look at the guy who is the second person to the right of the bride. His hands are up and he is vertical as he takes off in the left photo. Then, in the right his legs are up and forward. Now, I wonder… how is this guy not dead? If you look at where the edge of the pool is and how his legs are facing forward in the air, how did he not bash his brains in on the side is beyond me! I’m glad nobody got hurt…because that takes the fun out of everything.

I so wish we could have done more with just Brandon and Angela in the pool but the manager was getting really ticked since midnight was closing time for the pool I guess. Either way, I’m really happy with what we got, it was a lot of fun!

I am really excited to get started on their wedding so you should see another post about the more dry part of their wedding day coming soon!

I was going to save this for their full wedding post but decided it needed to be shown all on it’s own and right now!

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!)

Both Ryan and I have facebook the little facebook app that counts down to your wedding day and then after it tells you how many days you have been married. I noticed yesterday that it was 800 days.

The photo above is the very first picture of us together. Lucky us it just happened to not be taken on a point and shoot but was shot at a wedding by amy malone who also did our engagement pictures. The 800 days started to make me think about us in the past few years and I remembered this picture happening but we never got a copy. So I contacted her yesterday and asked on the off chance she still had it three years later. Well my goodness, what an organized woman because here it is!

Then I got to thinking and we didn’t really know each other that long before getting married so I thought I would look some dates up and relive the story of how the gaupers came to be. :)

Our first date was july 13th 2007 which is 1,131  Days (161  Weeks and  4  Days)

I can’t remember the exact date we met. I felt like it was the week before our first date, I think it might have been july 6th since I know it was a weekday. Ryan had invited me along to a redsox game in detroit. Granted, if you look from the outside in it probably wasn’t the most wise idea for me to drive from muskegon to kalamazoo to meet up with 3 guys I didn’t know, get in their car and go to detroit and not return until really late that night. Yes, my parents were probably a little more than worried. However, I just had a feeling about Ryan and look how all that turned out! I never dated much and honestly, didn’t really interact with guys much at all. I saw all the nonsense everyone else went through dating around and just wanted none of it. Ryan always felt different though. The day of the game I had my kayaking class and of course, I had to step into it wrong and fall in the water. I was the only one to do that all summer. I am obviously a very graceful woman. So I had to rush back home and change and still try to make it to kalamazoo in time to meet them. I swear I must have been driving 95 mph the whole way there.

When I got there my keys wouldn’t come out of my ignition (which happened all the time) so I was in my car violently shaking the wheel trying to get them out. From their view, I’m sure they all thought I was crazy. I’m pretty awesome at first impressions. Ryan was pretty quiet on the way to detroit. I didn’t realize at the time that he is always quiet and forever will be quiet, haha. His friend Steve and his dad were also there and they are both very chatty people so I talked to them more than Ryan during the 2 hour ride there.

At the baseball game (which was the first one of my life) I knew nothing. Well, to be honest, I still know nothing even though I’ve been to many at this point. :) But it was a fun day either way. Ryan talked to me a lot more on the drive back, I assume because steve was sleeping. Although he will probably never believe me, I left my sunglasses in the van by accident so a few days later, Ryan made the trip up to muskegon to return them to me. That night he met my parents, had dinner with us and stayed until 2am (which was real weird in my world then…people just don’t do that) By now, he was much more chatty…but still did more listening than talking. Our life is no different now. He says I don’t have enough filters and I say he has too many. Stalemate.

After all that, we talked on the phone for a couple hours and then I realized I had to go and was ending the conversation. He had apparently planned on ending it by asking me out on a legit date and I ruined that. So he frantically tried to still do that and it was very very awkward. I think we both left that conversation wondering what had actually just happened. He later clarified via aim. :)

…and that brings us to July 13th. We met in grand rapids and went to applebees for dinner and saw transformers. I left that night knowing he was different and praying that if he was right for me that God make that REALLY obvious at some point. I just knew that I liked him a lot and was trying not to get my hopes up but lets just be honest, I secretly had lots of hopes.

I believe it was the weekend of November 15th 2007 that he first said he loved me. This is also the same weekend he talked to me about marriage. Whoa now buddy.

That weekend he was visiting me at Cedarville and  just mentioned/asked about getting married. He told me it would have to be early that next summer or the following year, which was really far away. I immediately thought my parents would freak out if we got married so soon but then was like…ok :) If my memory is correct, it was all kind of fact, not so much a question. No worries of if we should get married or anything, it was so matter of fact like even though it was the first time marriage had been mentioned. 3 months after that conversation we were engaged. When it’s right. It’s just right.

Got Engaged on February 15th 2008 which was 217  Days (31  Weeks) from our first date.

Ryan’s mom was leaving for China in August so we had to get married before then or we would have to wait another year and frankly, that just wasn’t happening. So we picked june 7th, 2008. We had 113  Days (16  Weeks) till the wedding which didn’t seem like enough time for anything. David Tutera may be able to plan a wedding in 3 weeks on TV with his unlimited budgets and pure awesomeness, but I could not. Mostly, I just wanted to be married to Ryan. If I could go back and do it all over again, we would have gone simple simple simple and then had a “real” wedding later so we could have time to plan it and enjoy the planning process.

After we got back from our honeymoon it was all crazy, all the time. We have not slowed down much but we are trying. In roughly the past 1,153  Days (164  Weeks) since we first talked we have been through everything together. It’s so weird for me to think it hasn’t been that long, but feels like forever. I feel older than I am and am shocked to think I’m already 25 but still confused at how much we have done in only 3 years. We are really trying to get ahold of things and be more organized with our life. To settle down a little and make time to enjoy life instead of always trying to catch up with it. We are great at our jobs, it’s just a little harder to be great at life sometimes too.

We don’t have a ton of photos of us, but I thought I would share some of the ones we have. They are all pretty random, but are some of my favorites out of the few we have.

IMPORTANT note before viewing the gallery of photos. Some of these photos are just normal people photos. Don’t judge my editing skills because frankly, some are just not edited at all. Yeah! Bring on the jpegs straight out of camera! …..but some good ones in there too. Like I said, we don’t have much and some oldies we did have I can’t seem to find. Bummer. Note to self: take more pictures of me and ryan…even craptastic iphone ones. :)

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! :)