Albertex Photo Blog » Wedding and Event Photography for Fort Worth, Dallas, DFW and beyond

This week has been pretty uneventful compared to our norm. After Bill took the CPP exam on Monday, we stayed an extra day in Fredericksburg TX (woo-hoo!) then drove home on Tuesday. Anyone who knows us is probably aware that we travel so much we rarely take an extra day anywhere – we just want to get home. Needless to say we had a great day, even if Bill had to spend half the day on the phone.

Having grown up in Alberta and just a few hours from the Rocky Mountains, it has taken me a while to notice how pretty the Hill Country in Texas is. The drive home was beautiful – I enjoyed the view while Bill talked on the phone. I am starting to believe that the sky really is bigger in Texas 🙂

Another thing that happened this week is that we found out a consulting job we were really looking forward to has been postponed until next year. We had blocked the month of October for a consulting job in Australia (how could we turn that down?!?) but it looks like they can’t make things work for this year. Now we are opening up the month of October for anything – weddings, portraits, corporate work… whatever comes our way! I am excited to see what happens and what our travel schedule will turn out to be. Last year in October, Bill and I did hit the DFW area, Washington DC, San Antonio, Houston, Jefferson City and Tulsa.

Anyone who has worked with us knows that I like to compartmentalize my work to some extent. It can be very difficult to go from shooting a wedding one week to a 3 week location job the next, then back for 1 wedding, then back to corporate work. I used to book anything at anytime until I realized I was driving myself crazy. A few years ago I decided to regain control of our lives and block certain months for specific types of work. It has worked well and we have regained some sense of normalcy in our lives – we have actually had 4 weekends off so far this year! I guess my point with this is that opening October 2008 up to anything is going back to the way I used to take bookings, but I am feeling a little nostalgic this week so I think it should be fun and interesting to see what happens!

I have known for a few years that I should be blogging and I actually opened a Blogger account over a year ago. I didn’t post anything on it, however, because I thought I would wait until I had something interesting to write. What a boring year we must have had, HUH? Well, my revelation today (actually yesterday) was that even though we think our lives are thoroughly boring, everyone else seems to think our lives and work are interesting. Let me tell you what made me realize this:

We drove down to Fredericksburg,TX on Sunday so that Bill could take the CPP exam in Kerrville (keep your fingers crossed). We have a very dear friend whose family owns the Fredericksburg Winery and we always love to visit them. We were hanging out and sampling wine while our friend Gene was giving the “wine tour” to a few other people. Suddenly we noticed Gene was pointing at us. He was saying “…they are professional photographers. The last time I saw them was last fall and they had just done some work for National Geographic, and were flying off the next day to do some work for Microsoft.”

The group of people turned around with great fascination, only to see Bill and I staring blankly at them. Well, we know we did the work, but by now it was just two more gigs from last year that we had packed into our vault of “past jobs”. The incident made me think… while we think the life we have chosen is just our life and nothing worth blogging about, maybe our stuff is interesting to others, so here goes!

I would like to clarify something about the two jobs that Gene was referring to. First of all, we were not capturing Pulitzer Prize worthy images that were featured on the cover of NG – we were doing a corporate event at their headquarters in DC, photographing children on green screen and placing them in a new cartoon that had recently premiered on the National Geographic Channel. As for Microsoft, we were doing stock photography of employees for their marketing dept to use in internal publications. BTW, both jobs were referred by our good friend Scott Proposki, a fellow photographer in Boston – Thanks Scott!

In between the corporate work, we did manage to photograph Brenda & Paul’s wedding in Houston and they were one of the most wonderful couples we have worked with to date. Their story and their wonderful families made a tremendous impression on us, and that is the most significant memory I have from that two week period. In fact, Brenda is the bride with the fabulous dress that I decided to make our “signature image” for this year – she is the first image on our website, she is on our current business cards and in our current ads.

Now, back to our blog: I have spent countless hours enjoying other photographer’s blogs and have decided I like the ones that mix personal and work, so that is what our blog will be. I guess I feel that is most suitable to us because our lives are so completely intertwined with what we do for a living. We love what we do, so it rarely feels like we are working. You will see a mix of our corporate work, our weddings, and our family and friends – maybe a little bit of us thrown in for good measure :-). I debated whether I should post photos or not and have decided that I will do a mix – you will see some photos but it will be mostly blah-blah about what is going on in our lives and our work, and hopefully we won’t get too many virtual rotten tomatoes!