Training in the Off-Season

The 2009 wedding season is here!  We shot a few weddings and Bat Mitzvahs in February and March, but with Spring comes flowers, fair temperatures and many more brides walking down the aisle.

People often ask us what we do in our “off-season.”  Answer – lots of albums, print orders and meetings with happy couple-to-be’s.   And, as importantly, we also try to use this time to improve our product.  We are always canvassing the market for innovative techniques and new camera technologies, but of course, the “off-season” is when we have the most time to do so.

In the past few months, we’ve had the privilege of spending time with a few world-famous wedding photographers.  One is Gary Fong and we’ve found that Gary and we share some similarities.

Early in Gary’s career, he realized the importance of creating a wedding album that will help the couple re-live all the special moments of their wedding day.  To do so, he may capture some “non-traditional” wedding images.  For example, if the bride tells him that the doorknob was her great-grandmother’s and therefore had special significance to her, Gary would take a photo of it and put it into her album.  We agree with Gary that the wedding album is one of the most important parts of the wedding.  And, like him, we also believe in capturing images of special details and moments and putting them in the album.  As time passes and our memories inevitably fade, what else will we have to remember one of the most important days in our lives?  The images in the album will freeze these important moments forever in time. 

In this age of digital photography, printed photos and photo albums are becoming extinct.  Many couples are not getting wedding albums and feel that they only need a disc of their wedding images.  But, what will you do if you lose the disc?  And, of course, what will you do 5 years from now when you can’t find a DVD-Rom to read the disc?  Even if you plan on making your own album, most people don’t have access to our professional equipment and design software.  And then, of course, “planning on making an album” is not the same as actually making the album.  Our friend is an art director and a published author.  He had intended to design his own wedding album before he had kids.  Unfortunately, his daughter will celebrate her first birthday soon and still no wedding album.  We actually visited him yesterday and wanted to see his wedding photos.  He didn’t even know where the disc of images was.  We hope he finds it before his wife reads our blog!   

Alice designs all of our albums.  And, of course, she had a lot of fun designing our own wedding album.  We were amazed at how much our friends and family enjoyed looking at our album!  Our photographers captured some great moments, for example, Alice’s nieces playing the piano and her nephew having a quiet moment.  Though only 8 at the time, with his “coffee cup” and hand in his pants pocket, Daniel looked much more like a miniature man.
 
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 And, here is Daniel again telling others to be quiet during our wedding ceremony (bottom left of the page).
 
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 James’ nephews are very different.  Rather than playing the piano, they prefer to break dance and get the party going.
 
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We’ve been guilty ourselves of not printing photos and recently came across some old pictures that we never got around to printing.  Sharing these photos with our family at Easter dinner was a lot of fun.   Everyone looks so different now and we all had a lot of laughs looking at them!  Nowadays, we make an effort to print our photos.  We’d like to remember always our wonderful trips abroad and even something as mundane as a little walk together in Central Park.  We hope that you will also do the same, so that you too will always remember the special moments in your lives.
 
This entry was written by aliceandjames, posted on April 30, 2009 at 11:41 pm, filed under Funico Studios News. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.