Maryville College shoot

As promised here are a few shots from my shoot at Maryville College last Wednesday. MC is re-doing their look for some of their promotional material and website. As part of the campaign, we shot real students in front of a white seamless background with a prop they brought themselves. Here are a few favorites:





Discs are real popular on campus. We had about 10 different kids show up with discs (I was corrected that Frisbee is a name brand... I can't gripe though, I used to do the same thing when I had a Jeep and someone called any old 4wd a Jeep.)


The OC meets MC. Longboards are also "in".




Yep, that's a snake.


This guy is the only male on the dance team. The MC crew sort of put him on the spot to dance for us and he was flummoxed. So I cranked up some music on the iPhone (just another reason I'm glad I have one). Yeah, it was Ben Folds Five and not really something dance-worthy, but he still tore it up.


Playing with the school tartan.






The obligatory self-portrait. I just thought I'd show the setup in the board room of the college. When they can't come to the studio, the studio comes to them!


We're all surviving. Danielle has been having a little more baby-related sickness then she had with Maddie (I'll spare you the gory details). And little Miss Maddie has a bronchial infection and start of an ear infection. Yeah, fun stuff at the Hope house! Aside from being Husband and Dad of the year, I'm starting to get caught up on some album orders. Hopefully I'll have a layout to show by the middle of the week.

Take care and thanks for stopping by!

-Wes

Junior

It's official.

Danielle is pregnant!! Well, we've known for a couple of weeks, but today we had the first ultrasound and got to see It's heart beating. So now that the risk of miscarriage is down to 3% we thought we'd officially share the news. For those that don't know, we lost a baby last February about 7 weeks into the pregnancy, so we've both been really tense for the last couple of weeks until today when we both gave a huge sigh of relief (and shed more than a few tears) when we saw that little heart just fluttering away. A BIG thanks to all our friends and family who have been praying for us (but don't stop... we've still got a long road ahead of us).

Maddie has been super-cute lately talking to D's belly and asking if the baby can come out and play! One minute she says she wants a brother, other times she says sister. We don't care as long as it's healthy (cliche, I know, but it's the truth). We've had several people guess boy already so for now we're going to call It Junior.

Here's our first picture of the little guy/gal. In case you've never seen a sonogram before, the black egg shaped object is the uterus and the little thing on the left of the uterus is our little critter.


Looks just like me, huh?

More updates to come. I've got a big shoot at Maryville College tomorrow so I'll try to post some of those next.

-Wes

275 brides

I have no idea how many brides were actually there, but we handed out roughly 275 informational packets yesterday at the Premier Bride show. That's a lot of brides! No wonder we were so tired when we finally got home last night.


We had a really good time though and got to chat with some really nice girls. It sounds like there are going to be some nice weddings next year and hopefully we're going to be a part of the picture (no pun intended).

If we did talk to you and you visited our site, drop us a line and let us know what you think. And if you have any questions or chat with us feel free to give us a call or email:

info@hope-photo.com or 865-977-6483

For those that didn't get to make it to the show, here are a few snaps of our booth:

We had a really nice spot. Right in the middle and on the corner of a center thoroughfare. Here Danielle, Beth and Kathy are making things pretty.


The crew.


Some of our books and Hershey Kisses (I promise I only ate 5).


A close-up of our display. Our setup always get a lot of compliments, from brides and other vendors.


After things were over, our good friend Steven Bridges, who also had a booth at the show, stopped by and tried to get a few action shots.


And then I attacked him, photog style.


Lastly, another good friend of ours Brian Wagner (Brian and I go way back to our UT Daily Beacon days together) had a photo booth set up so before the show started, he invited us to squeeze in it for some happy snaps.


On a personal note I have to thank my mother-in-law Kathy for all her help yesterday. We definitely needed all the help we could get. Our assistant Beth did an amazing job as well, but she's used to putting up with my crazy ideas. It's not everyday I get to boss my mother-in-law around. I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel a little good.

We've got a few shoots this week so check back soon for more updates.

-Wes

Premier Bride Show tomorrow!

Well, we've stayed up late the past two nights getting everything ready for the Knoxville Premier Bride bridal show. Our booth is set up (mostly) and the troops have been briefed. Danielle's mom Kathy (the best mother-in-law I have) and our assistant Beth Watson are going to help us work the booth. D and I did this show last year and it about killed us seeing so many brides by ourselves.

If you're planning on attending the show, make sure you stop by and say "hi". Let us know that you read the blog and we'll give you a hug. We were planning on giving something away if you came by the booth and told us you're a faithful blog reader, but we didn't have time to do anything since we've been scurrying around since Tampa last weekend. The best we can do is a hug. We'll even let you pick who you get the hug from (though by default it'll be Beth since she's the assistant :) )

Since I don't have any recent photos to show, here's our 6x9 handout card we're giving away. We have to give special props to one of our best brides ever Mary Ellen Elkins, who is one of our featured weddings on the Hope Photography website. We asked all of our brides this year to write a little something about their experience with Hope Photography for a scrapbook that D has put together and Mary Ellen went above and behind by giving us a Top 10 List. It was so good, we decided to put it on the back of our promo card.




So a big THANK YOU to Mary Ellen for her awesome contribution. And of course the lovely Eleshia Scholes who is on the front of the card (1st image). Her wedding is also one of the featured weddings on the website now.

Wish us luck tomorrow. We'll probably be hoarse from talking so much, but hopefully we'll sign about 50 brides (just kidding... I'm shooting for 1000).

Talk to you soon,
Wes

Goofballs

Alright, here you go. What I'm sure all of you (well, two of you) have been waiting for. The goofy snaps from our weekend.

Where to start? How about this shot of the three amigos from Knoxville lit by a mall directory. I guess you could call this a Danielle sandwich.


Jason trying to be like all the cool smokers, but with a lollipop stick.


Moving on to new friends Sandra Johnson and Chris Brown lit by Jason's autofocus assist light after dinner at the Bamboo Club on Bay St. The food was sooo good.


Something about this reminds me of the Last Supper. Our new best bud Lisa Thomas from Memphis had a car in Tampa and drove us to the convention center for the Imaging USA Tradeshow (free stuff!). Parking in Tampa is fun (facetious) and after a few unwanted tours down one-ways we found a spot. And then the debate began whether or not the meters ran on Sunday. Back and forth until we decided they did and then it was, who has change? Being empty pocketed as always I jumped into the road for this shot. At the far right is Kelly Vasami who joined us for lunch.


Walking through downtown.


And then on to the Florida Aquarium for the party. As I mentioned, we sort of went off and did our own thing. Jason tries to pet a shark.


This was my nickname in high school.


We found this really cool round window and decided to play. This is a half second exposure with Jason's flash from his point and shoot lighting him up. Looks cool...only took about an hour to get the timing right.


Danielle striking a sexy pose in some fun light in an area that we found that was closed off.


And Jason had to play along too.


"Roxanne!"


We found some funky lighting and felt inspired by the earlier shot of Jason so we borrowed a flash from fellow Tennesseean Jake Morrow who was sitting nearby and experimented some more. This was a two second exposure with Jason standing next to Lisa hitting the test button on the flash during the exposure. This one was a little easier than the other shot.


A little Charlie's Angels silhouette with (from left) Lisa, Melissa Tirado, and Danielle.


Mac Daddy.


Fishy face.


Lisa's new studio.


At some point someone realized that there were no shots of me. And since I was getting all hot and sweaty getting all these awesome shots my hair was doing a crazy Oompa-Loompa thing. Danielle snapped me with my morning face.


The shark Jason tried to pet comes back for revenge.


Nice hair.


Lisa yearning to be a California girl again stood on a 2-inch ledge for this shot. I swear it was her idea.


Head-to-head action in the entrance of a shopping mall.


Then we walked down to Ybor City and played with some lights.


I grabbed some stools and made the girls play "Oprah" where Danielle did something that was apparently funny. Or so it seemed at the time.


And sometimes you've got an itch only a palm tree can scratch.


And last but not least, D on the bus.


Well, that ended up being a lot more photos than I intended. I hope you enjoyed them. We're busy now getting ready for the big bridal show next weekend. And then a few weeks off so I can get caught up on a couple albums and some chores around the house. Who new a 2 year-old could pull a toilet paper holder out of the wall?

Thanks for stopping by.
-Wes

The Wedding From Hell

Okay, as promised, here are a few pictures from our time in Tampa. I ended up taking one camera and one lens. It made shooting tough sometimes, but also reminded me of the simplicity of photography sometimes. It all comes down to using what you have and making great images with what you've got: your own eyes. David A. Williams, one of the speakers that moved me so much, made a joke about "gear porn" for all the photographers out there that get hung up on having the latest and greatest. When some one asks him what kind of camera he has he simply says, "a black one."

Enough preaching. I'm just proud of some of the shots we got this weekend because of the fact that I did take minimal gear and we were shooting just for the heck of it. It's hard not to get caught up in all the rules of photography, but one of the biggest things I took away from this weekend is that rules are meant to be broken.

I'll start off with some images from the Wedding from Hell. The idea was to show a wedding where EVERYthing goes wrong and to demonstrate how some top photographers handle the situation.

Here Jen Bebb handles "Uncle Bob" played by Joel Wiebner. Uncle Bob's are the guys (most into "gear porn"... see above) who show up and think they can do a better job than we can. Which means they are ALWAYS in the way.


One of the obstacles was a too tall bride getting married to a too short groom. Cute couple!


The Bride played by photographer Bridget Joy and shot by Susan Stripling.


And I played around while they waited to trash the dress.



By trash the dress, I mean Bridget and the Groom, Rob Villena, jump in to the hotel pool.



And from there, Bridget moved to a super-cold fountain nearby.




That's all for now. If you want to see a slideshow of more of the Wedding From Hell, I've uploaded one here.

And I'll post some more in a bit from anti-party photo shoot at the Aquarium.

-Wes