“You seem busy!”

We’ve been hearing that a lot lately… in a good way!  We love that so many people are following along with us on social media and here on the blog!  And yes– we’ve been crazy busy, which is completely awesome.  January & February are usually our slowest months, but this year they’ve just been ramping up for a great year!  Here’s a short list of all that’s been going on and what some of our goals are for this year:

-We’ve doubled the number of speedlights (flashes) we bought this year.  We now have four professional grade flashes and radio transmitters.  Basically, this allows us to have a lot more control and possibilities when it comes to lighting dark spaces (namely receptions).  We prefer minimal accessories when it comes to lighting, with natural light being our favorite, but it will be very helpful to have more possibilities available, as well as having back-ups on hand if needed.  The pictures below are (poor) examples of what we can do with just two flashes and three minutes.  Adults definitely listen to instructions much better than pre-schoolers!

-New memory cards!  Those jokers aren’t cheap, but making sure we don’t wear them out is important.  If a memory card corrupts during a wedding, we often wouldn’t know it until that evening when we import the images on our computers.  Keeping fresh cards lowers our chances of a card corrupting on us.

-New packaging!  I wrote all about that here— and so far everyone is loving it!

-Engagement sessions!  Did you know we offer a free engagement session with every wedding photography package?  You can check out our most recent ones here and here.

-Wedding Highlight Films!  Check out our last one from 2014 here!

-Paying ourselves.  What?!  Yes– you read that right.  We set out a business plan 5 years ago.  The first year we were going to invest in our business financially, the second year would be to use the money we made from sessions and put it towards new equipment and business expenses, and the third year would be to begin making a profit.  Welllllll, we moved states after the first year, so that started us with a new (and empty) client base.  It built back up quickly, and things were moving along well!  That’s when we decided to venture into wedding photography.  And guess what?  Weddings take a ton more equipment than family sessions.  The stakes are much higher and everything needs a back-up, which costs money.  And once we started flowing well with that, we added video.  I won’t even tell you how much we spent on videography equipment in 2013– it would make you shudder!  But, all of those were wise investments.  Investments.  Not just spending money, but using money we had to ensure we earned more money.  Over the years we’ve made money here or there, but this year we are writing real paychecks and that feels so good for our hard work to really pay off!

–We’ve got BIG goals this year.  Our biggest goal is to book 30 weddings!  That’s on top of doing just as many family sessions as we have in the past.  We have a lot of plans to get us there, one of which is our ability to cover multiple weddings each day by using different teams– and we are beyond excited!  Our brides know ahead of time, and we are so thankful to have several team members who have the same personality and shooting style as us to take care of our clients on their wedding day.  We still edit the images or video, and of course the final results are the same.  It is really the next step for us, and it feels so good to finally have it in place after it’s been in the works for so long!  Part of our goal in this is to replicate ourselves so if anything happened that prevented us from being at a wedding day, others could seamlessly step in.  A wedding day is nothing to play around with– it’s important!

-This week we’ve booked two weddings– one at this awesome church built in the 1850s, and the other right outside of Asheville, NC.  Road trip!

-Next week we’re hopping a plane to Atlanta to lead worship at a marriage conference!

We have, however, been perhaps a little too busy to post on the blog much lately, so we’ll remedy that today and add some cute pictures in as well!  I’d been hoping it would snow at least once this year so I could get our little Elsa to play in the snow for a quick minute!