I Love My Brides

My brides are great. I love when brides look past the "client-vendor relationship" and we become friends. I've had this happen a few times over the years and I just want to express how awesome it is!

Danielle, whose wedding I'm shooting in October, and I went out for some Starbucks about a month back and she was such a great help to me finding bridesmaids dresses and apparently we're good luck for each other because she was able to pull together some details for her wedding later that night as well! We had talked about some more important things like preparing for marriage more than preparing for a wedding and mentioned this book, Saving Your Marriage Before it Starts. Rob and I are doing this book together, so I thought I'd surprise Danielle and send it to her (btw, Amazon Rocks). I got this great letter in reply!

A few years ago, I had another bride who was just so thrilled with her album that she bought John Heyn and I champagne! Well, I was single at the time (although I had already met Rob!), and I decided that I wasn't going to pop the champagne until I got engaged. Well, I got engaged and Rob and I went out to dinner a little later and did just that!

Most recently though, Sarah and Stephen, who I'm photographing this August, send me their contract with a surprise in it! The Shakira Oral Fixation Tour CD! Sarah and I are both tri-lingual, one of our common languages being Spanish and we both love Shakira. So she was thoughtful enough to send me the CD and it's been in my car ever since!!

Really now...does a "job" get any better than this??

Paybacks!

You may remember me talking about the various painting parties involved in getting my house in order (if not click here). Well, it was time for some paybacks!

Trish recently bought a home and she helped me tons with mine so Rob and I took a trip over to her painting party to help out. Thanks to my dad, who among his musical talents is also an amazing painter, I was able to help out with the edging the most, which is quite difficult and tedious! But it was a ton of fun helping out and I really couldn't resist writing on the wall! haha, it's the inner child in me. :-)

Sarah and George's Engagement Session

Rob Adams and I had a blast two days ago photographing AND filming Sarah and George in the New Jersey Palisades Park in Fort Lee. This is a new (among quite a few) venture that Rob and I are working on and so far it's really fun! Rob and I are working on the video early next week and it'll be a video/photo combination that'll be really cool. But in the meantime, here are some of my favs from the shoot!











Pictures can be ordered at http://www.vanessajoy.smugmug.com/.

The Today Show

A little while back I photographed Janice Lieberman, Consumer Correspondent for The Today Show, who wrote the book How to Shop for a Husband, which I blogged about (click here to get to that post).

Well, Grace Hanlon came up with the idea to expand on the project and shoot some behind the scenes stuff at The Today Show , so we did! It was such a blast (except the being on the road at 5:30am part)! I was able to meet and photograph co-anchors Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, weather and feature reporter Al Roker, and national correspondent Natalie Morales. Not only that, but Yoko Ono was appearing that day and I even caught a few shots of her. She was quite cute with her hat and glasses!





















It was really such a fun time because I had the opportunity to shoot while the cameras were rolling live. It's such an adrenaline rush! What is even more amazing is that while one segment is shooting live, two feet behind me the scene is being changed for the next segment. When one is complete, then they all have to run to the next location, which happened to be outside in the rain after Janice's spot! It really gave me such respect for how complicated it is and how much talent is required to put on a live TV show. Kudos to The Today Show team!!

Pictures can be ordered at http://www.vanessajoy.smugmug.com/.

Save-the-Dates

As one of my first real "activities" of being a bride, Rob and I schemed about what to do with the save-the-dates. As I've come to understand thoroughly, every bride-to-be wants to be unique and impart a bit of themselves (and their fiancées) into every detail.

The Save-the-Dates are really the first public communication from a to-be bride and groom to their friends and family. So in my opinion, the save the dates should reek of your personality and share to your friends and family some important things or just fun facts about the two of you as a couple. Even if it's conveyed with a "typical" medium, like a magnet, something that tells a bit about the couple will really make your save the date unique. With Rob and I, that was pretty easy because we have such a huge thing in common, the wedding industry and how we met. So with that in mind, we decided to do a photo shoot of us doing a photo shoot!! :-)

So after bribing Gen and Justin LeBlanc (and really, it doesn't take too much bribing to get a former bride to get back in her wedding dress) to dress up for us, Rob and I hit the streets of Red Bank with friend/photographer Craig Pittelli. We had such a blast, check out some pictures below!!

So now the fun part. :-) Besides these pictures there are many more to pick from so Rob and I picked our favorites and we made a collage of them for our magnets. :-)

~Vj