Burning the Midnight Oil

Posted by David

Here's the kick-off of our renewed commitment to blogging our shoots. (Keep your fingers crossed). We've been doing a lot of work on the website, our proofing site, our branding and facebook presence, and especially our photography. Why just the other day Melody and I were out in the orchard practicing with off camera lighting. In fact, the discerning blog reader will notice that the blog layout has changed a little as well.

While Melody and our son slumber, I'm busy tinkering away with HTML and adjusting image sizes. The new layout places the emphasis where it should be, on the photos, letting us post images at much larger sizes and doing away with the distractions in the sidebar.

In the coming days I'll be going through the "Labels" section and cleaning that mess up. I'll also be doing some backposting as there were shoots that we had a great time doing but never got around to blogging. My theory is better late than never. I'll also be hooking the blog into Networked Blogs in Facebook so that our many FB friends can follow the blog there as well.

Also, a huge thank you to the folks at ourblogtemplates.com for developing this layout and then providing it to bloggers around the world for free. I'll be tweaking the code some, but I'd have no place to even start without their laying the groundwork.

So keep a look out. We'll be popping around the corner with a new post soon.

Our New Venture

My husband David and I have always been rather self-proclaimed artsy-fartsy, hippie-dippie types. He went to art school for a time, and I used to dabble in oil paint. In his case, the market for animators disintegrated and I found that I didn't really relish the idea of having turpentine around our son (not to mention that I usually ended up with more paint on me than on the canvas). For a while, Dave got his art fix through graphic design, and I had a creative outlet as Gustine High School's yearbook advisor; however, it always seemed odd that Dave and I never had a mutual interest in any form of art.

And then a moment of serendipity occurred: a former student of mine asked if I might take photos at her wedding. They didn't have a bunch of money to spare, but knew I had an eye for such things and figured, I think, that any photos were better than nothing at all. I am nothing if not unfailingly organized and prepared, and so I set out to learn about wedding photography. A couple days before the wedding, I convinced David that he really wanted to borrow his Mom's Nikon and come as my second shooter. We had a wonderfully productive, exhausting day together, and this was the result:

...at least one of the resulting shots, anyhow! Check out more from our first shoot at http://melodyanddavid.zenfolio.com

The next week, I brought some photos in to work, as I was meeting with the bride to give her proofs. I shared some with a handful of coworkers and students, and people started asking if my husband and I "do photography"...

And thus began our adventure. We hope you enjoy our work.