Fah la la la la...la la LA LA!!!

I love Christmas parties! Fun, food and festivities. :-) And of course, running into a few friends from the industry is always great!

Do You Dare To Shop on Black Friday?

Well far be it from me to pass up a good sale, but this Black Friday I decided to get into the Christmas Spirit by going to a Black Friday with no other agenda except to enjoy the hustle and bustle of the atmosphere. It was great, I ran into a few friends, soaked in the sights and actually managed to NOT buy anything (of course that trend didn't last through the next day). :-)

Here are some fun shots I took on my Black Friday!

First things first: Canon is Better than Nikon :-p

Tom and Kerianne - cutest couple in the entire mall!

Really now, who can ever resist playing with the puppies?? Just don't tell my puppy Tico I was cheating on him!!

The Carousel - one of my favorite places to go as a child.

Goodbye 2008 :-(

(for those of you viewing this in facebook...be sure to check out the original post so you can see the video content!)

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Vj

Something old, something new, nothing borrowed and a touch of blue!

Can you guess what all of those things are referring too??

(for those of you viewing this in facebook...be sure to check out the original post so you can see the video content!)

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Thanks so much Yvonne, Darren LeBlanc, Gen, Justin, Chris, Kelley and Michael from Creative Video Editing for your amazing help with this project!!!

Vj

My Recent Travels

I love to travel...love it! Throw me in any random country on or off a resort and I am just in heaven. With my busy season these past two months, I didn't get to go to another country, but I did get to go to Providence, Rhode Island for their WaterFire event. It really is something to see. The entire river that runs through the city is filled with wood-burning structures that are lit by torches after a dramatic presentation. The streets are filled with food vendors, street performers and music all night long! Take a look at some of the shots I took along with some others from my trip. :-)

(fyi...not the safest thing to do while driving over a bridge in the rain) :-)

Nelrique's Tailor

Hi all!

It's been a little while since my last post, but all for good reason! I've been shooting weddings once or twice a weekend for all of September and will continue to do so through all of October. I've been having such a blast photographing with John Heyn, Marissa Levin, Cara MacNeil, Jakki Strickland, Kenny Kim, Tomas Flint and Andres Valenzuela, I don't even know where to begin!

In the "downtime", however, I did have the chance to shoot for an amazing tailor in my area, Nelrique. He is the man when it comes to alterations and custom designed pieces; he does all of my tailoring. Nelrique is in the process of reconstructing his website and he asked that I do the pictures for it. I can't wait to see it when it's finished!

Lately, I've come to realize that I LOVE shooting details, so this was a perfect outlet for me, especially after shooting for Kay Unger New York a month ago. Particularly, this applies to the weddings that I photograph...everything from the brides shoes (ok, maybe especially the shoes) to the table cards at the reception. I just love the tiniest details that I can focus on. :-)

Take a look at some of the amazing work by Nelrique:

Marisa & Keith

Finally I've made a slideshow of another wedding I shot with Andres Valenzuela. This is the same Marisa who we let take pictures of us during the reception!

One of my favorite things about this wedding was the park that we went to afterwards. It was great being able to have a relaxed photo session in a beautiful park with no time limits because the wedding was already over. Haha, see if you can spot the Shire-like house in the slideshow!

Erin & Michael

My first wedding shooting for Andres Valenzuela was such a fun one! With a 33-member bridal party, how could it not be??

Erin and Michael had a beautiful wedding followed by a reception overlooking the Hudson River. The view was amazing!

Kay Unger New York!

Last week I was invited by Grace Hanlon and Yvonne Moss to take photos during a video shoot with Kay Unger herself in the fashion district of NYC. Um, is that a girl's dream come true or what!?!?!

I can't even describe how amazing it was to be there in the showroom while buyers from Macy's and Bloomingdales were there, to be in the back workroom while designers were sketching and seamstresses were carefully pinning and sewing every unique seam, and to be in the presence of so many AMAZING Kay Unger New York and Phoebe Couture dresses that hadn't even hit the stores yet! Some of the fabric prints are actually hand-painted designs by Kay herself which are made into fabric. Others are stitching, cutting and designing textures by hand with strips of fabric to see how they lay on mannequins. That just screams the type of passion she has about her art, doesn't it?

Needless to say I snapped away at every detail I could find and when I wasn't doing that I was sitting in for Kay Unger while Grace and videographer Jeff Buccellato dressed the set. Needless to say it looks like my attention is most definitely on the Spring '09 collection around me, particularly that yellow dress behind me! Thanks for the sneaky pictures Yvonne! :-)



This was really a great experience and what made it even more awesome was meeting Kay and her staff, some of which you'll see in below. Enjoy!!

Vj

Olivia and Andy

A little while ago now, I had a life-changing experience photographing a wedding with Kenny Kim and Andres Valenzuela. We had such a great time with Olivia and Andy, they were such an awesome couple (we even got goodie bags at the rehearsal dinner)!

One thing I really have to talk about is the way that Andy proposed to Olivia. Being the sci-fi dork that I am, I really, really was impressed by it!

Andy took Olivia for a walk in the park one day and strangely enough to her, he pulled out a charcoal looking rock in his hand (if any of you are avid Smallville watchers, you know where this is going) and showed it to her. Using his almighty Superman strength, he crushed the charcoal with a force so intense that it formed a diamond ring with which he ask her to marry him!

How great is that? Not only did he put such thought into the method of how he would propose, but he even took a ton of time preparing the "charcoal to diamond" prop! Kudos to Andy for such creativity!

So now after all of the hype, here's a peak at their wedding day!

Vj

New toys!!

For a while I have wanted an infrared camera, and FINALLY I found one that I L-O-V-E! I've been playing around and these images with this camera just got me so excited!!! I love doing new things and this is just so much fun I don't even know what to do with myself!
:-)

Having my cake and eating it too!

I've been reading this fantastic book by Dane Sanders called Fast Track Photographer, and I am addicted. There are a good many books out there for photographers dealing with business sense and all, which I love, but this one so far deals with the photographer as a person, which is awesome. It talks about knowing where you want to be in photography and having fun with your passion and for me, having fun is what makes this industry so great! Meeting other photographers, picking each other's brains, shooting with each other on weddings, etc, really helps keep the passion alive.

And then of course there's the actual weddings! I've had so many fun weddings this year, but two of the fun times were actually caught on camera and I thought I'd share the fun with you all!

Right after Megan Baiada's wedding with Heyn Photography, Cara MacNeil brought up that everyone once in their live before they're married should feed cake to someone and vise versa. So we thought we'd give that a try with myself, Cara and Marissa Levin. I think you can tell I enjoyed the cake because I'm laughing with my mouth wide open and you can see the cake! Ewwwwwww, haha.

My second fun-time-caught-on-camera was with Andres Valenzuela, where we let the bride, Marissa, take a few shots herself!

The second half of wedding season is still to come and I have weddings almost every weekend for the next two months so I'm totally psyched about it! Can't wait for some more fun stuff, preferably caught on camera!

Vj

Guess who?!?!

So I had an awesome time last Thursday night with makeup artist, friend and aspiring photographer Yvonne Moss photographing a special someone....can you guess who this is??? Think "Friends"

Haha, well it's not Courtney Cox, but it is Grace Hanlon, a talented producer from the area here. We had so much fun with our photo shoot I just had to show some of my favs!

Enjoy!

It's live, it's live, it's LIVE!!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, novios y novias... after many, many months of work by myself, my friends and family giving me constructive criticism and of course DJ for making the best web-building program in the world (along with his support group Jason Lackey and Andrew Barlow).... my website is finally complete and LIVE so check it out!!

www.vanessajoy.com

(Ah, I'm so excited!!!!)

It's Official!!

Well it was official when I first registered, but now its officially official because I received my business certificate from the State of New Jersey in the mail today! YaY!


I'm uber-excited, especially since my website is pretty much finished. I'm just waiting to hear back from a few trusted friends who are taking a look at it and doing a great job so far with the constructive criticisms. (Thanks guys!)

We're almost there!!

Engagement Session Book

Hey all!

It's been so crazy around here lately working on the website and shooting constantly throughout July with Heyn Photography and Andres Valenzuela. Check out an engagement book I shot and designed for Heyn Photography this past week!

I'm working on getting some images from recent weddings I've shot so stay tuned!!

The envelope PLEASE!!!

Thank you all so much for your votes! I was really overwhelmed by the responses from facebook, myspace, e-mail and comments! In total I had 54 people respond, and what was so great is everyone had great reasoning behind their vote which is what REALLY helped in determining the winner. It was very confusing determining an actual winner because of these statistics:

52% of voters say that color is better than no color so that the business card itself stands out

48% of voters say that white gives a clean, professional look and draws attention to the logo, giving a better representation of my brand

A huge handful of "white" voters, said that light pink was a close second

So with that in mind...here are the final results:

17% Dark Pink

35% Light Pink

48% White




Now, because the majority was white, I'm going to go with white as the overall winner. HOWEVER, because the majority liked color, I'm looking to getting my business cards mixed, some pink, some dark pink and some white (which was actually a voter's suggestion that I really liked)! I'll let you all know how that goes once they're ordered, but for now ... here's the winning business card, front and back!

Thanks again for everyone's help!!

Vj

Argentina!

As most of you know I just came back from a great trip to Argentina and the Dominican Republic. I have my favorite pictures from Argentina in the slide show below, and I promise I'll get to the Dominican ones soon too! Enjoy!

To be or not to be....PINK!!!!

YaY, I'm home!! Vacations are great, and I promise I will have some pictures up soon, but it is always good to be home and back in the swing of things, especially since I have two super-fun weddings this weekend that I'm uber-excited about!

So here's the deal. Business cards are the item on the list and thanks to Kenny Kim and Andres Valenzuela, I've come down to just one more tiny decision...pink, light pink, or no pink.

So it's going to be a silk card 300 from 4colorprint, like I mentioned before, with rounded corners. Here are the three choice which really just come down to color...so I've decided to put it to a vote. Send me your preference by email vanessa@vanessajoy.com, or just leave me a comment here!

Thanks you guys!!

Vj

Tango Lessons!

You can't go to Argentina without taking Tango lessons. What I loved the most about the Argentinian Tango is that it's all about communication. It's not a machistic thing where the man must lead the woman, but a communication between the two of them, an understanding of where they are going in a dance and the 3 minutes they have together to discover if they can communicate with each other. Pretty interesting, huh? Here's a video of my first Tango lesson!

Yes!

Empty seat next to me! Score! What more could I ask for on my 11 hour flight? Argentina here I come! :)

I'm leavin' on a jet plane...

Well I'm on my way to Argentina! Luckily, i have a lay over in chicago so i get to have a very quick lunch with Kenny Kim, who doesn't know I'm wearing his shirt as a suprise (see pic of me waiting in an airport restaurant)! Well I'm off to my gate to make sure my flight's still on time. ¡Adiós!

Business Cards!!

Well, the logo is almost finished thanks to the wonderful efforts of Jennifer Young being an amazing graphic artist and with the help of my friends and family giving me input on it.

So I've started to look at business cards and from everything that I know about marketing, business cards are a huge part of your branding and everything else. I've decided to go with a company, 4colorprint.com , which makes silk business cards. I've seen them before and they're gorgeous, but now they got even better because they came up with a thicker card stock for the silk, which makes my card stand out even more.

For those of you who'd like a small peek at my logo so far, here is my mini-logo as I'm calling it (as opposed to the full logo which we're still working on).



And good news with the website. Thanks to the pushing of my fellow photographers, especially kenny who has now linked my under construction website in one of his blogs, now making it totally public and really putting on the pressure, I have completed a huge section and I'm aiming to have at least a first draft live by Thursday when I leave for Argentina. :-) So, I'd better get crackin'!!!


Vj