Happy New Year and welcome to the grandest year so far...2018! Most everyone has a tradition that they like to enjoy to help ring in the new year. As the clock counts down and midnight approaches, some people pop a bottle of champagne, light sparklers, or sing Auld Lang Syne. We on the other hand celebrate the New Year with a ridiculous portrait that incorporates some traditional forms of celebration with a personal touch.
For this year in particular, we wanted to celebrate the shift further into the future, as we move ever so swiftly toward the 2020's. We have arrived in the future and wanted to commemorate this through our skin tight shimmering outfits, worthy of space travel to the most remote reaches of outer space. We chose to light the scene in a purple glow as Pantone's Color for 2018 is Ultra-Violet which is a vibrant purple tone. (For the 3rd year in a row we decided to head up to Michigan with our pets for the weekend and work remotely! It was ridiculously cold with it being in the negative temperatures, but we braved the cold for short bursts at a time since our outfits weren't great at holding up to the feet of snow! You'll note we had to wear legitimate snow boots this time!)
Below are the portraits we created over the past couple of years in celebration of each new year. The below image is from the 2014 to 2015 New Year in our old home of Santa Barbara, CA just 8 months before we moved back the Midwest (to the border of Michigan and Indiana near Chicago):
For the 2015 to 2016 New Year, we were in our new home of Michigan and spent the night lighting off fireworks and some sparklers in a relatively snowless end of December/ start of January. (No puffy snow coats required!)
For the 2016 to 2017 New Year's Eve, though we had our house and studio/ offices in South Bend, Indiana, we headed back up to Michigan for the weekend with our pets and celebrated with more fireworks and sparklers! This time there was a tiny bit of snow just a couple inches deep, but it was still relatively warm (though we could see our breath, you'll notice no real coats!).
Happy 2018 to you and yours! We're FINALLY visiting family on our annual holiday trip in just a day and a half and are SO excited to have our animals watched in our own home this year. We've accumulated one new pet a year for 3 years (bunny, cat, big dog), so finding reliable people who can watch your pets in your own home is increasingly difficult and expensive. Having our pets watched was going to be more expensive than all of our flights COMBINED (to get all the way to the west coast and abroad with family), but we found some awesome women & friends (THANK YOU MARIE) who made that part of the trip much easier. As anyone knows with travel it's very hectic and we'll be gone for over half of a month, so we have our next 2 weddings for the blog in the next couple weeks cued up. When we come back we will blog a third wedding of the month before we do an extensive blog post during our last week of January on our favorite photographs that we captured during the ENTIRE 2017 year of weddings in the Midwest! (We're SO excited about that one!) We have 3 new couples we've been working with this week and when we return we will have 3 full days of wedding consultations in our office with some awesome couples we've been getting to know! We cannot wait to get a bit of a break and know things are about to be a little hectic, so we are not bringing our work with us (unless we get any urgent emails to our phones). We hope you have had a great transition into the New Year and from us to you: Happiest New Year and thank you for tuning in!!