Expressing Your "Personal Style"

Last November I attended a two day conference of bridal consultants from all over the world in Orlando. I've been a member of this organization since 1995. It's been fun to watch it grow from a tiny little organization of around 400 members when I first joined, to a couple thousand worldwide.
Our last session was a talk by David Tutera (you might know him as the guy who put together Starr Jones’ wedding as well as those of many celebs and also non-celebs with bucks! :) ) He was amazing! So interesting, so open, so FUNNY! He had some video and slides of some of the most amazing weddings I have ever seen. These weddings had budgets in the HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars! Incredible! But what really struck me, was that what he was saying was so applicable to ANY wedding, regardless of the budget.
Here is some of what he said. First, that having “style” is taking care of your guests, giving them an “experience” that is different from anything they have ever seen. Style is being conscious of your guests’ comfort, needs, and happiness. He said that the wedding and reception should reflect the lives of the bride and groom. It should make statements about their interests, what is important to them, what they love. Most important, he said that every thirty minutes, something should change, whether it is the music, the food, the place; something! It keeps the guests interested in what is happening and curious about what will happen next.
Now I hear what you are saying. “But Denna, WE don’t have that kind of budget!” But let’s think about this. Why do these goals require money? They don’t! What they require is imagination. We just need to think “outside the box”.
One of the things David talked about was that he hates wedding favors that are on the tables just for the guests to take home. He feels that what you give your guests should be something that they will use, value, enjoy, and that will reflect something about you, the couple. The example he gave was of a wedding where the bride expressed how much she wished that her grandmother could attend her wedding, but her grandmother had passed away a couple years before. As they talked about her grandmother, she told David about the wonderful apple pies that her grandmother had made and how she could still recall the smell of those pies baking when they would visit her. So what did David suggest? Each guest went home from this couple’s reception with a burlap bag (that had the couple’s monogram on it by the way) that contained enough apples for a pie, a little cellophane bag of spices, sugar, etc. according to the grandma’s recipe, and the recipe itself so that the guest could duplicate grandma’s apple pie themselves. Now how cute is that? And how sweet, and touching, and totally so appropriate to this couple’s celebration?
I recall a wedding we did at Aberdeen a number of years ago, that was for a darling couple who had met working at a lemonade stand for the summer. As we talked about them and their relationship and how they had met, the wheels started to turn. Their wedding ended up centered around the theme of lemons and limes. The centerpieces were footed bowls of lemons and limes with a few blossoms stuck in between. Their favors were boxes of lemonhead candies with a yellow bow. It wasn’t a zillion dollar idea, but it reflected who they were, and was significant to their lives as a couple. Years later I still have people come in and mention that wedding and how much they enjoyed the touches that this couple incorporated into their day.
This is why we love having our clients come by our shop, talk with us, share with us, and let us get to know them. If we know what you are all about, we can help you to bring things into your celebration that will make your day special, personal, and memorable.

It is what really makes our job fun. I hope that you will take

advantage of all that we have to offer, particularly in the idea department! Our ideas are free, you just have to stop in and pick them up! :)
So, what are YOU doing to make your day a personal reflection of you as a couple?

Fifteen Minutes of Fame--Youtube Style

Well if you haven't figured this out yet, I am trying all the little blogger bells and whistles like uploading photos, uploading videos and such. This is really pretty easy!


At any rate, about those 15 minutes of fame. Have you seen the following YouTube video?


Well, as Paul Harvey would say (and I know that most of you have no idea who Paul Harvey is but that's another subject for another day) here's "the rest of the story":

Michelle who is our bookkeeper and "shop person extraordinare? and her husband went to San Diego to this wedding, and THEY filmed this video! Michelle put it on YouTube so that their friends could see it, never having any idea that it would go viral the way it has! She was excited when the hits went over 100,000! To date this video has had 8.5 million hits! Go figure. It has been really fun when people have told me about this video or sent me a link for it to say "Oh yeah, I know all about it, Michelle put it on YouTube."

The couple in the video, who are also named John and Michelle, just like our Michelle and her husband John (is that too funny?) appeared on Ellen Degeneres Show, The Today Show, Entertainment Tonight (or one of those video People Magazine Shows anyway) and apparently a couple other more local shows in California.

They really did a fab job with this dance, it was terrific! I'll bet they are getting kinda sick of doing it by now though. :)

Thoughts about Photos and Photographers

This is me with one of my favorite photographers, Ed. He has done lots of weddings at Aberdeen. We always have fun when Ed is around. He was showing me how to take a picture of yourself. I had tried it, and ended up with a photo of the top of my head! He says the key is to have a bigger lens. Isn't that just typical! So now I am shopping for lenses for my NikonD70. I do need something that goes to a lower f-stop, so that I can get more depth of field in my photos where the light is less than bright.

I take lots of photos, particularly of our weddings, and consequently I ask a lot of questions when we have a good photographer around. I've learned a lot that way, just asking questions. It's actually getting to the point where I almost understand what I am doing! I actually comprehend the relationship between aperture and shutter speed, f-stops, and film speed. But it's still pretty much dumb luck that anything I take turns out well. :) There's a whole shelf full of pictures I have taken in the shop, some of them are really nice, cool lighting, great expressions, cute kids, etc.

Which brings me to my point. When you interview a photographer, you want to see a couple of individual weddings from beginning to end. If you came in and looked at my shelf full of pictures, you would say, wow, she's really a great photographer! But there are maybe 25 pictures up there, and I have probably taken, literally, over 20,000 pictures! That means that 1 in a thousand of my photos are brag shelf quality! If you looked at one wedding from beginning to end, you would probably see that some of my photos are way too dark, some are overexposed, and I use a lot of cropping in Photoshop to fix things. There are three things that are important when you look for a photographer, that he shoots consistently high quality images, (they don't have to all be fabulous, but the majority should be focused, well lit, etc.) he/she should be someone that you like, that you won't mind having in your immediate presence for 12 plus hours, and the price should fit your budgeted amount for photography.

Another factor that couples sometimes don't consider is the amount of time devoted to the pictures. Do you really want to spend your whole day smiling for a camera? When you look at those sample weddings, try to determine which shots were actually candid and which were posed or more importantly posed to look candid? Keep in mind that you can probably figure 3 to 5 minutes for each of those posed or posed to look candid shots. How much of your day do you want to devote to those shots?

My personal belief is that 12 posed shots can cover every possibility you will ever care to have, and the rest should be candid shots that you aren't even aware that the photographer is taking them. The shot of the two of you smiling at the camera while you are dancing your first dance doesn't mean nearly as much in the long run as the shot of the two of you smiling at each other during your first dance. Emotion and feeling are what most people want in their photos. They want a picture to transport them back to that moment. That's what candid photos do.

Trying to compare packages and pricing among photographers is a mindbending experience. They all offer different packages, different components, different prices. You'll drive yourself crazy trying to compare them to each other. Find one who fits the above criteria and go for it. You'll save yourself a lot of needless confusion.

So that's my 2 cents on photographers. Sometime soon we'll talk about videographers! I have lots of opinions about that too! (Just a hint, I LOVE videos!)

My virgin voyage into Blogland!

Well, being as this is my first post as an official blogger, maybe I should give some history of myself and talk about what has led me to this new business of blogging.
Let me start out by saying that I sent my first email in 1995. My daughter was at IU in her Sophomore year, and all through her first year I heard everything about what was going on with her second hand through my relatives who already had email. I thought, if I am going to have any communication at all with her, I better figure out this email thing!
We signed on to a dial up internet service, and printed out emails on a dot matrix printer that was slower than molasses in January!! But, my goal was accomplished, I finally started hearing from my daughter directly instead of through all the relatives! It was wonderful! I had instant (well, at least pretty fast!) communication with her. We talked about all kinds of things that we probably never would have discussed in person. I learned so much about her and what made her tick that year.
My brother Stu is a certified geek. I have always said that his brain works in bits and bites. In the early 80’s he designed a program for me that would print out a weaving pattern (again, on the dot matrix printer, a line at a time, it took FOREVER!!!) I still remember watching that printer spit out a little coverlet pattern that took about an hour and a half to print. We thought it was absolutely wonderful. I might add here that this was also done on a TRS-80 Radio Shack (aka Trash-80) computer that was about 8 megabytes of memory. Woooooooow!
Stu has never been one to let the new toys cool before he owned them, so I have had the pleasure of being in on a lot of new technology, through him and his business, as it unfolded. Because of his interests I really feel like I have learned more than most of my contemporaries about computers, how to use them, and what their potential can be. My business was one of the first in the wedding consulting industry to have an official website (oh, it was a dandy! no graphics, no pictures, simple blue lined pages of text, BORING!!) It was primitive compared to today’s standards, but it was there.
Over the years I have worked hard to stay on the front edge of technology and have tried to incorporate it into our business as soon as it was feasible. We have had live webcams in our ballroom and garden for over four years. We recently installed live webcams in our new chapel that have pan, zoom, sound, focus etc. They are AWESOME!! We have never been shy about adopting new technology—embracing it, and using it however we could to improve our business.
So here I am today, and I am BLOGGING!! I am still kind of shaking my head and wondering if I am biting off more than I can keep up with, given the number of hours I already put into our business, both at work and at home. But I have always wanted to do an e-newsletter of sorts, and I think this may be the way to go about it. I am excited about the possibilities of this new technology. I am overwhelmed at the number of topics, photos, links, videos and the like that are possible to include in this blog. I welcome feedback from anyone who wants to read this, and promise that I will answer any questions I receive in as timely a manner as possible.
If you have any suggestions of topics that you would like to see discussed, photos you would like to see, or just general ideas of things you would like for me to write about, I am open!
This is an amazing medium. I hope that together we can use it to its full advantage!
Join me! Let’s blog! :)