Al & Larry

We photographed Nicole and Eric’s wedding two weekends ago and it was a lot of fun. We spent a fair amount of time getting ready for the shoot, but it pales in comparison to the amount of time and energy the families put into it. Everything went off without a hitch and it was a great time.

I know photographing a wedding in a photojournalistic style has been around for quite a few years now, but I’m suprised it had taken so long for it to become popular. Looking at old wedding albums of family members it occurred to me they were pretty much shot in a staged formula, format. No real excitement or suprises. Everyone knew what they were going to be seeing before it happened. As Larry and I were doing a rough edit I began to look forward to showing Nicole and Eric the pictures because there were large parts of the day and a lot of fun moments each of them were not aware of. I think they’ll be happy.

My wife and I had a whirlwind weekend. We dropped our daughter off at George Washington University in D.C. for her freshmen year on Saturday. We left early, drove down, spent three hours unloading and unpacking and then headed back, staying at a friends get-away that overlooks the battlefield of Antietam at Sharpsburg, MD. We arrived after dark and knew we had to leave early the next morning to come back home. I got up about 7 and as I was stumbling about the place, looked out the window into the valley below.  As soon as I did I grabbed my camera and walked onto the deck to make the photo below. The fog drifting over the field was so reminiscent of battle smoke that would have been there, nearly 141 years ago.

And that reminds me … I was asked one time by a novice photographer, what my opinion was as to the best camera. My response was, “the one you have with you.” If you don’t have a camera with you, you can’t take the photo. I’m in luck in that I have found a camera, an advanced point and shoot that I love and it can do so many things. It’s almost always with me. Be prepared.

Change is good. You go first.

After seeing deteriorating service and suffering through frustrating telephone calls for support to “Bob” in India, we decided to change our internet service provider (ISP). It was a tough decision. Despite a small savings by doing so, we added the expense of printing new business cards and flyers that we use. And it was time consuming.

How it happened was that one day our previous ISP just flipped a switch that took us off the WWW for two and a half weeks. Every support call was an adventure because the support technician, a new one every time, wanted to start on square one with every call, rather than bothering to read our history. You could actually hear them flipping pages in their guide books. It took a savvy and very helpful representative from our new ISP to solve the problem, and that’s what had us hooked.

So we made the switch, moving our web sites to the new location and sending out emails telling clients about the change. But in the process we lost all of our old blog material that was posted.

But that’s OK. We’re starting fresh, and that’s a good thing.

Hello: We recently switched internet service providers and in the process our blog was disabled. We hope to have it all restored shortly. - Al & Larry