Welcome to this our 10th Pandemic Weekly Wednesday blog post-! This week we wanted to take time to re-introduce ourselves to you-! We captured new Self Portraits of ourselves this week in our Studio for our website, so we wanted to share these new photos with you as well the past 7 years’ worth of annual Professional Portraits of us-! Along with the photos we’ll be sharing more about us, our pets, our home, our career trajectory, and our hobbies-!
(>>Our blog post In Memoriam to our client who passed away last week from Covid-19 is coming next week. Since wedding couple Bee & Jordan changed their wedding date from this coming weekend to next summer June 2021 (with us also capturing their legal wedding on June 13th in a month), we figured a post about the reality of how this Pandemic is still affecting our community & clients directly would be appropriate for next week’s blog post).
First off though, Hi! We’re Jenny and Jason. We’ve been Professional Wedding & Portrait Photographers for over 10 years (each of us!) and this year (2020) we’re in our 7th year together (which feels fitting since most of the couples that we work with have been together for 5 to 9 years and we can definitely relate)!
We put our clients FIRST meeting with them in person at our Consultation Office (or now-a-days, video chat) to really get to know they and their relationship, helping them plan for over a year or more, actually putting together an entire hour-by-hour Photography Wedding Day Schedule OR Portrait Sessions schedule, creating a formal photo list to ensure every family member gets a photo with the newlyweds(!), scoping out the physical locations the week of to get an idea of natural lighting/ exact Portrait Locations (while the whole week keeping track of the exact forecast for the photo day), speed editing over just a few days so that our clients get to see up to 250 Teaser photos of their Session or wedding ASAP (before we get to delve into the longer editing process), and we uniquely include Physical Professionally Printed Photo Products with EVERY wedding and Session with us (since we have 20 years’ experience in professionally printing images)-!!
We always want to go above & beyond for our clients because they entrust us with this luxury service, so we work extremely hard to do anything for the ultimate payoff: Our clients being thrilled with the gorgeous captured memories of their loved ones & emotions all memorialized in tangible mementos-! At the core of it all though we like to feel like an extension of clients’ families (or close friends), work hard to be good people (actions speak louder than words), and like to be honest & up front with our clients.
Now onto more about us personally: Though we have no human children, we’ve had 4 fur children & about 8 crabs. We currently have an elderly cat named Kevin that we rescued 4.5 years ago, a dog Coco that we rescued 3.5 years ago, and a puppy named RIzzo that we rescued 7 months ago (all from different local rescues)-! We like to keep the names given to our pets by the rescues because the rescues saved them and we like to pay tribute to the love that their rescuers gave them by keeping these names. We love all animals and tend to befriend even mice, rabbits, & birds outside of our house (even feeding the ones who seem sick or temporarily sheltering some if their homes get destroyed).
Anywho, the two of us met in 2014 in our 20s at school while getting additional educational degrees- well, it was actually technically the weekend after our final classes that week-! There Jenny gained her 3rd degree- an MFA in Fine Art Photography-> what is the highest educational degree for a practicing photographer/ artist & equivalent to a PhD in that it allows her to teach at universities. Her other degrees include Entrepreneurship & Psychology from Miami of Ohio with dark room black & white film photography courses expanding back about 20 years (from high school in 2001 through 2009 at university, though she’s been photographing on color 35 mm film since she was about 6 years old). Jenny prefers unposed, well-framed portraits & fine art and will go to great lengths to advise on nature backdrops & wardrobe/ styling.
Jason has a few fantastic degrees in Commercial Photography (and digital imaging), loves posed photos and studio lighting, and is one of the BEST editor/ compositors in the entire area as he’s been practicing his Photoshop & Graphic Design skills for over 10 years-! Jason tries his best to convince most of our clients to incorporate some form of a ridiculous composite (collaged photo) into the day’s shoot (with only a rare occasions having enough time to add this to the shot list). His obsession with technical Commercial lighting, posing, & editing skills balances perfectly with Jenny’s obsession over unposed images, the perfect color palette, framing, and natural backdrop. Though totally different in our approaches, we tend to complement one another well professionally balancing emotion & form with technical skill.
Some Stats:
-We started our professional photography websites over 10 years ago,
-Have photographed weddings in Italy, Puerto Rico, & 8 states, and
-Our wedding couples have come in to work with us from 14 states-!
Speaking of states, like so many of our clients who’ve moved for school, career, and more, we’ve lived in 3 states together so far-! We started out together in Santa Barbara, CA for school, then headed to Southwest Michigan, then about 45 minutes away back to Jenny’s home city/ state of South Bend, Indiana where we bought our house 4 years ago-! We loved hiking together and enjoying Santa Barbara nature adventures at Mesa Lane’s cliff beaches, Lizard’s Mouth, Cold Springs, Knapp’s Castle, Solvang, and Santee Alley (in LA) in California, but we LOVE the seasons and gardening in the Midwest-! We’re currently on our 7th summer garden that may or may not have 45 food plant varieties AND during quarantine we built our first perennial flower garden (massive half circle surrounded by foraged antique bricks)! We also have about 150 unique tropical plants that are indoor in the winter/ on the porch in the summer, so we basically live in a greenhouse.
Other hobbies that we love outside of gardening are antiquing (at estate sales too), hiking, boating, camping with our pets (with our vintage camper that we bought 2 years ago- 6 states camped so far!), cooking and fermenting exotic foods, hitting up Farmer’s Markets, foraging wild vegetables & mushrooms, making up weird song lyrics to sing at our pets, accidentally matching way too often, riding all of the rides at fairs or amusement parks, & year after year trying to get grass to re-grow in our completely shaded, soggy back yard (heavy sarcasm there)-!
Now for a flashback to our old Annual Website Portraits from the prior 6 years-! All but one of these were Self Portraits, so needless to say they were a bit harder than usual to capture.
2014
Above is from downtown in our old home city of Santa Barbara, CA. This was a semester before Jenny finished her MFA (and about 8 months after we started dating in 2014)! We photographed a few weddings together around California about a month after this which is crazy to think about since when we started dating neither of us even knew that each other had each professionally started photographing weddings back in early 2010. Our Photography School friend Iris Kim actually captured this photo for us at a historic site-!
2015
Above is our first Work Self Portrait after moving to Michigan 4 months earlier in 2015. The winter snow has been disappearing more & more each year, so that year (as with every year after) we really struggled to find any snow to include in this portrait in Southwest Michigan. We ran to behind a small lake/ pond the day after it snowed, moved snow around to cover the ground, and tried to capture this promo photo for our website. (Fun fact: We actually thrifted these Scottish Wool sweaters-!)
2016
For our 2016 Website Portrait we happened to drive past a field of flowers somewhere between Michigan and Indiana… in the middle of the highway. We went back shortly after in our Portrait Session work clothes to ensure the poppies were still up so that we could get a new Professional Portrait for our website-! We parked one of our cars on the highway under bridge, then precariously trudged along on the highway to take some Self Portraits amidst the very prickly flowers and weeds at sunset-! It’s still one of our favorite photos to date, but please… don’t try this at home.
2017
In 2017 a few years ago we took a new Website work self-portrait with our pets right outside our house that we’d owned for a year-! We had a difficult time keeping our pets still in the woods after carrying them down the path, but we think the hell of wrangling them to look at the camera ended up being worthwhile (especially since our 10 year old rabbit Marco has since passed away of cancer). Jason also Photoshopped in portraits of our 4 pet fiddler crabs (some of which we got back in 2015 & all of which have since passed away of natural causes since fiddler crabs can only live about 2 years in the wild/ up to 3 in captivity).
2018
In 2018 when driving from Indiana to Michigan we noticed a field of sunflowers. We took note of it and made sure to get back there within the week before the crop was harvested-! We decided that since there wasn’t anything like it on our website, that it may be nice to show us a little dressed down and acting like we were directing a regular outdoor Portrait Session at sunset (something we do OFTEN)-!
2019
Last year in 2019 in our busiest year to date we didn’t really have time to capture a new Professional Portrait for our website. We did manage to capture a Valentine’s Day Portrait which was pretty close. For this it was a snowy early February day in wedding & portrait “low season,” so Jenny had washable conditional temporary rose gold (with pastel blue tips) hair. She also thrifted these gorgeous peacock chairs & table for us to use in our Studio, so we found some cheap 50 cent flower chains we’d gotten at Michael’s years before and styled ourselves in wedding attire.
Sidenote: For weddings Jenny always makes sure to have brown or white hair to stay appropriate for the gorgeous weddings we photograph, but since we’re in quarantine, as you saw Jenny has had temporary conditioner colored hair again- currently a wash-out lavendar color she made herself from the combo of this Rose Gold and Light Blue she had left over from the prior year-! It’s very handy to get to play with wash-out colored conditioner in the Low Season between clients (Overtone if you’d like to try it) since she taught herself how to bleach & tone her hair pure white on her own.
Coming Up in The Pandemic Month Ahead
We hope that you enjoyed getting to know us as much as we enjoy getting to know you-! Next weekend we’ll finally be capturing a much belated Spring Beach Engagement Session up in Michigan (depending on the Stay at Home Michigan orders & weather) followed by the 4 June weekends of short 2 or 3 hour legal Wedding Ceremonies of our clients who pushed their weddings back 4 to 13 months (from late Fall through mid-summer 2021)-! Jenny’s only sibling is set to have her baby next month too, so July may bring yet another camping trip- this one potentially to Arizona to meet our newest niece or nephew (our first two in ONE year)-!!
Next week we’ll be sharing a bit more of the devastating reality of the Pandemic with an In Memoriam of our sweet client (who lived just 7 minutes from us here in South Bend, Indiana) who last week passed away from Covid-19. Next Wednesday had previously been set for us to share 200 Wedding Teasers from our couples’ wedding that was supposed to be in a few days this weekend on Sunday, BUT they have rescheduled it to 13 months in the future to June 2021 with us capturing that next year as well as their legal wedding in about a month. It feels sad yet again having to miss out on these big events, but the reality of things is what we’ll be sharing next week: REAL Covid-19 deaths here in our city of some amazing folks that we’ve had the privelege to photograph multiple times over the years. The weddings will STILL happen and be JUST as big, gorgeous, and happy as they were going to be this summer, so we’re looking forward to safer, happier times in the future-!