Posts filed under 'Random Stuff'
Well, 4 months sure ticks along quickly doesn’t it?
Of course we love being parents to our new baby girl, but it’s hard. It’s as hard as everyone tells you. Hard mostly in that it is impossible to get anything done, and that when you have a free moment where she’s sleeping, you’re too tired to do what isn’t getting done.
There’s still so many projects that are just sitting… sigh… including finishing the website to create a Portrait area (our first priority was to get the wedding side of it up and running).
But we have had a couple of weddings this year and a few family portraits that we’d like to post on to this blog. And that will happen real soon….. I’m hopeful for tomorrow. Or maybe Saturday. Well, it’s supposed to be hot and sunny then, so Sunday?
May 16th, 2008
Exciting times around here…..
We apologize if we haven’t been as responsive the last few days to calls and emails as we normally are.
Alexia Harrison was officially born on Jan 2. She was exactly 4 weeks early and so had to spend a few days in the neonatal intensive care unit - mostly for monitoring purposes. She passed with flying colours and has been home for a couple of days doing what babies do best. Which tends to be sleeping during the day, fidgeting during the night, filling a new diaper 5 minutes after it was just changed, and stealing our hearts when her gaze locks onto yours for a few seconds (before rolling up to the ceiling over to the fireplace down to the cat across to a bare white wall and then back to you where your heart melts a little bit more).
So of course the family has been clamoring for pictures, but woe is the daughter of a couple of photographers. Unlike others, we can’t just take some digital pictures and send them out. We take 100’s of pictures, edit them down, post-process them in photoshop, format and save for web posting or email and finally then they are ready.
Here’s a couple of images to keep the wolves at bay. There are more to see for family and friends and current clients that are interested. Just call or send an email and we’ll point you to them.
January 10th, 2008
Welcome to our new and improved blog. What’s that? It looks the same as always you say?
Well, yes, but it’s running on a different machine now. And I’ve upgraded from an older Wordpress 1.5 to the new Wordpress 2.3. And the machine it is running on is upgraded to Vista.
And I had to endure 2 hard-drive failures (it’s ok, they were older drives. They’ve served us well. RIP my loud little spinners).
| There’s always tons of in-the-background work that goes on in a photography studio just to maintain all the computers. |
 |
| All those images need to be redundantly backed-up. Each person needs their own computer. Each computer needs to be configured in near identical manners. Each monitor colour calibrated to ensure the images print out the way we expect them. There’s the website. The constant backups to DVDs. The hard-drive failures that have to be accounted for. The computer upgrades to get more done faster. The newer software versions to upgrade. The management of the lone MAC Laptop in a PC world. The printers that won’t print. The odd network glitch and the 100’s of feet of networking cables connecting everything. The new SATA DVD burner that works fine in one computer but won’t be recognized in another. |
But I love it all……
Jeff
November 14th, 2007
Geez, it’s been almost two months since our last post. Well, obviously we’ve been resting on our laurels, sitting around on the couch and getting fat while learning life lessons from Oprah. (Jeff’s words… not mine)!
Actually, as is typical, the more photo shoots you are doing, the less time you have to actually show people what you are doing.
The theme of this blog entry is “change” and we have experienced plenty of it this season! They say change is a good thing! We have a lot to catch you up on. Where do we start?
In April, we decided to complete the house renovations and put our house/studio up for sale in June. Expecting that the market would slow for the summer holidays we continued on with wedding and portrait season when all of a sudden a couple of offers were on the table and before we knew it our home had sold and we were left with the uncertainty of where we would live by the summer’s end.
We embarked on a search for a new home and found one in Port Moody - yes a change of cities! We had arranged a moving company and had pre-arranged a date to move towards the end of the summer when the moving company called to change our moving date. They gave us 4 days notice, so, we rounded up some friends to help pack our belongings and moved into the new place (on the one weekend we didn’t have a wedding scheduled) within 11 days of finding it!
Many of you have been asking this summer about our new adventure and wondering when we will be unveiling the new studio name and look. Stay tuned… that change is coming!
Now our lives are about to really change…..
In January we are expecting another Harrison family member… yes you heard it right we are expecting a mini version of Jeff and Tanya. Cassie and Dexter are in for a real change of pace since this one is going to be a real whisker puller! The cats have become so accustomed to our clients and their children that we think they are ready for a new addition. Jeff and I on the other hand are excited and freaked out about the change but if you can do it, so can we!
On a final note you might see a slight change in the look of our style of our images - we are finally posting some new stuff. So when you get a chance, we would love to hear from you all. Drop us a note and let us know what you think of the many changes!
Tanya
September 29th, 2007
There’s an article over at lifestyle.msn.com discussing the top 10 mistakes that brides make. Like all top-ten lists, take it with a grain of salt, but from our experience the list is actually pretty reasonable with good advice (especially the first two) 
1. Doing Anything…Before the Guest List
2. Reading Aloud to Your Fiance…From Bridal Magazines
3. Freaking Out Because Someone Else Has Your Gown
4. Realizing That Grape isn’t Your Color…With Two Months to Go
5. Trying to Drop Two Sizes Before Your Final Fitting
6. Doing it All Yourself
7. Overloading Your Mom’s Big Day To-do List
8. Crying Over Mismatched Linens
9. Blowing Your Budget
10. Saving Your Place Cards for the Morning Of
June 24th, 2007
[Jeff]
Shout out to Isabelle’s Bridal in North Vancouver for being creative and showing that Canuck colours look great in even the most formal of attire.
BTW - the jersey here and the all blue away ones really rock. They kick major hockey pucks over the other versions of the uniform. Why don’t they make these the official jerseys? It’s what the people want…. (at least my peep’s anyways)
April 29th, 2007
[Jeff]
I came across a website that might prove useful to you future brides.
Wedding Mapper uses Google maps technology to help you create a free map that you can share with your guests.
Each location like your ceremony, reception, hotel, etc. can be marked on the map and the map emailed to your guests or printed out.
From their About webpage:
“Wedding Mapper goes beyond traditional wedding maps by:
> helping your guests see where everything is in relation to everything else, including hotels, airports, etc.
> allowing you to show your guests local attractions and places that are special to you.
> familiarizing your guests with the local area and letting them print custom driving directions.
> allowing you to upload photos and write interesting descriptions, getting your guests excited about your wedding!”
It looks very useful especially for out of town guests.
April 27th, 2007
Well, at last we are home again! We missed you all but are seriously considering hopping back on a plane to a warmer climate. Our trip was specifically and strategically planned to miss a month of typical Vancouver winter and we’ve come home to shoveling snow again. It’s dejavu!
We had a wonderful time in Australia and met some amazing and wonderful people along the way. All of whom we look forward to seeing again next year! If you haven’t already, scroll along and experience Australia from the camera lens.
A large portion of our trip was spent visitng photographers and their studios and spending quality time learning from the best. Through our experiences and interactions with the Aussies, we are inspired to create the studio that we have long envisioned. We have uncovered a mountain of relevant and actionable insights into wedding and portrait photography that will help propel our studio in a new direction.
With the mass amounts of information, workshop material and tonnes of fresh ideas you can look forward to experiencing some of the exciting changes we plan to make to our studio over the next year. So stay tuned!
February 28th, 2007
One of our primary purposes for travelling to Australia was to attend a 4 day workshop hosted by Yervant and his wife Anie. Yervant is a ridiculously good wedding photographer, with Anie being the brains behind the organization. We covered everything: sales, marketing, production techniques, editing, photoshop, albums, ….
Being a photography workshop, the main highlights were a walk about town with Yervant and a past bride and grown - watching him set-up shots as he explained his thinking and methodology, and the following day us students setting out to photograph three past brides who were gracious enough to volunteer for a few hours.
We’ve included some of our favourite images below. It’s hard to narrow them down to just a few as the beautiful brides and the wonderful shooting locations make for great images.
For the next bride, this is her original wedding dress (I think she got married in November). Lots of Yervant’s brides wear these stylized or couture dresses. We loved this retro 20’s look.
We’d like to publicly thank Yervant and Anie for hosting the workshop during the busy wedding season in Melbourne. We had a great experience, learned lots, appreciated everything they shared with us, and are looking forward to implement many of the suggestions offered not only by them but also the other photographers we had a chance to visit during our Australia 2007 tour. Stay tuned for exciting changes to our business….
And a special shout-out to Wil and Reg of Saxon Cole Photography, a husband/wife team out of Sydney that also attended the workshop. We got to know them quite well as we Canadians gave them a tour of Melbourne (an extended tour as it turns out, as we jumped on the wrong Tram not once, but twice…. Jeff claims the Trams were mis-numbered and not following the map).
Here’s pretty much the worst picture I think the 4 of us have ever had taken. It’s at 6:30 am Sunday morning at the Melbourne airport just before they head back to Sydney and we jump up to Brisbane. All of us on very little sleep from a week-long workshop plus we didn’t get to our hotel room until 1:30am the previous night. We’ll see you guys next year. 
Last stop… Brisbane
February 24th, 2007
This is the obligatory Happy New Years post where we wish all of our past, present, and future clients a wonderful 2007.
For us it will prove to be a busy year even before the traditional wedding season gets underway - with extended trips to both Australia and Las Vegas on photography related excursions.
But before any of the fun stuff can begin, there is this little matter of year-end accounting hell. If you own a small business, you can appreciate having to get your books all in order before the Jan 15th deadline to pay the provincial gov’t the PST.
An extremely active Nov and Dec means we got behind in updating all of our expenses (we figured it best to spend our time on getting albums and reprints out to everyone before Christmas)
Hopefully we’ll get around to posting some more of our 2006 weddings and families. Stay tuned…..
Did we mention we’ll be heading off to Australia soon….. like in 4 weeks….
Jeff & Tanya
January 3rd, 2007
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