MudEyes

Sorry I haven’t been able to do official posts guys! We have been really feeling the rush, and have 3 weddings to finish before we are off to So Cal for the second week of august. In the meantime if you aren’t my friend already hit me up, I am still putting up some pictures here and there.

Ryan Richard Gauper | Create Your Badge

Upcoming Blogs:

Video blog for The Maternal Lens about what other then lenses! Primes of course =)

Video blog about the time money and stress we take on for potential wedding clients, and why we are worth the money!

And maybe even some 52 updates since we are on like week 24

Check back in a while, don’t lose us!

Hey guys, I have a super awesome couple PJ & Maggie from Memphis, TN that we did a session for their engagements but we aren’t available for their wedding. Their date is August 15th.

Check out my earlier post for the rest of their engagement pictures but they are a super fun couple that made it really easy to get great images. I have really bee trying to explore all my options to get them a good wedding photographer but with no luck. One of the problems is they don’t have a ton of money, and can’t go much past $1,000 for photography.

Also they are in Memphis. If anyone out there is interested and is willing to throw them a deal please let me know and I would be willing to maybe throw a favor your way as well!

Like I said please read their engagement post to get to know them a little better. But trust me if you have a way to get down there it will be a great time and they know a lot of people that I’m sure you could get a lot of work from!

Thanks guys!

EVERYTHING MUST GO! SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!! WELL NOT EVERYTHING! WHY AM I STILL YELLING?????

IN ALL SERIOU…Sorry, in all seriousness, we have a buttload of stuff to sell and now we have some more motivation (as if we didn’t have enough)

The Image is Found announced a ‘shootshop’ the day after we arrive in LA this august so we decided we HAVE to go to… They are going over a lot of the stuff we need the most and also we basically want to BE them. They are way creative and awesome. They were kind enough to let me pay for one spot and give me another week to pay for our second spot (since they fill up in like a day)

Soooo here’s some great gear that we would love for you to have… I mean pay for. I am a photoshop novice and didn’t spend hours on this so go easy on me =)

First up are the biggins. I have been holding on to my D700 because I just love it and didn’t feel like giving it up for butt-cheap so here it is now for butt-cheap because I have to =( I am going to be pretty firm at $2,100 for this thing. It is in very nice shape and was used for about 6 months before we made the switch. It IS a US model, there is nothing at all wrong with it. This is the best Nikon option period. You can read my review side by side with my new camera the Canon 5D mark II here but seriously this camera rules… feels so much better in your hands then my camera.

It comes with everything you see… I dont have the screen protector but there is no scratches miraculously enough. I also dont have the strap but if I dont sell the one below and you need one I will throw it in. The battery still reads new. I charged it after every use to keep it happy. The sensor is pretty clean as far as I can see. This thing is spotless.

The fisheye is the last lens I have with it… It’s a DX lens but it still looks really great even with the reduced resolution. Pretty fishy fisheye and it was one of my favorites… it is a great lens. Pretty much flawless as far as I see. Never dropped. I am asking $525 for this one and I don’t have the cap. Lost it at a wedding. Adorama retails it at $700 so I think thats pretty fair. If you want one you can get the cap here. It comes with a soft case that I never took out of the bag.

My last Nikon item is the Battery grip for either a D300 or D700 This is a must with this camera if you are holding it for any amount of time. It feels great and matches up with the build quality of the D700. You can even get 8fps with this grip and the right batteries. It has a little bit of paint rubbed of exposing some metal but otherwise never dropped or anything. You can buy it new for $260 so how about $185.

Another biggin is our basically brand new Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L Telephoto zoom. It is just too expensive for us. We have too much to buy to make it worth it. But if you are in the market for one you know how great this lens is. For a zoom lens the sharpness doesnt get much better then this. The IS works amazingly at 1/20th of a second my shots are consistently sharp even at 200mm. This lens is also flawless and retails for $1,800. So I thought $1,400 would be very fair especially since we have used it about 2 times.

I wouldn’t be selling this if I didn’t have a second, nor would I if I didn’t want a TS-E so bad! So I am selling this amazing lens for $375 as it retails for $500. Again this Sigma is mint. We have used it since early this year and since we had 2 it stayed in the bag most of the time. We had no problem shooting this lens wide open for a whole wedding. I actually prefer this lens to the Canon version. Sharp focus every time unlike the canon. If you have a f/1.8 50, trust me this is worth an upgrade. you would have to shoot at f/3.5 to be as sharp as this lens, and you get a lot more background blur and speed. Check out all my images I have made with this one! flickr w/ 50mm

Since Holly and I bought the same computer right before we met we have always had 2. Now that we have a MacPro, iMac and 2 MacBook Pros, it might be time to trim down. This one is mine.

You can see the stats but it is a 2.16GHz dual with 2 gigs or RAM and 120gb HD. I used it for all my editing until we got the iMac about a year ago. Now if we do use it at all it’s when we travel. It shows signs of wear as you can see but really besides the battery needing to be replaced there’s not much wrong with it. Everything is cosmetic. It does not have any AppleCare and it runs with the Leopard OS. A new battery is like $100 bucks and I am asking $900 for this. Still runs very well and is completely capable (especially if you are upgrading from PC) 😉

Next I have an older surround sound system that I bought a few years ago. I didn’t use it a ton and the speakers sound great and the sub sounds well if you are fairly nice to it. I am not sure of the wattage and don’t have a box but it gets pa-ritty loud and sounds great with action movies and music. I am asking $75 for this.

Last is a few random items.

A neoprene strap $10
A couple Lens pouches you can strap to your belt. $8 (each)
Legal Forms $10
And a Gary Fong Lightsphere Cloud P2 or C2 it fits the bigger 580EX $30 and I will include a stofen or whatever flash diffuser.

Sooo hopefully you guys wanna give us all your moneys so we can go and learn how to get even better so that we can feed the fever for the Gaupers =)

Please email me at ryan@GAUPERphoto.com or call me at 269.929.8777

All items will have shipping tacked on if you arent local so we can work that out when you contact me. Thanks guys!!

post by: Holly

It has been a while since I have posted anything since i’ve been in an editing wonderland and will be until…oh..october 🙂 but this felt worthy of my time to write about.

Kalamazoo had its first MWEP meeting last night. I wasn’t sure what time it was earlier in the day so I was searching around for a website to fill me in and I just started reading through some of the things on their site and came across the greatest little article they had re-posted from Seth Godin’s Blog. Now, it has made it’s way here. 🙂 I have personally never heard of Seth Godin but after reading this I have bookmarked his blog in hopes to find things more like this.

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How to be remarkable

1. Understand the urgency of the situation. Half-measures simply won’t do. The only way to grow is to abandon your strategy of doing what you did yesterday, but better. Commit.

2. Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.

3. Being noticed is not the same as being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much. It’s easy to pull off a stunt, but not useful.

4. Extremism in the pursuit of remarkability is no sin. In fact, it’s practically a requirement. People in first place, those considered the best in the world, these are the folks that get what they want. Rock stars have groupies because they’re stars, not because they’re good looking.

5. Remarkability lies in the edges. The biggest, fastest, slowest, richest, easiest, most difficult. It doesn’t always matter which edge, more that you’re at (or beyond) the edge.

6. Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable. In fact, most people don’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway. Your goal isn’t to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up, spread the word, buy new things or hire the talented.

7. If it’s in a manual, if it’s the accepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It’s boring, not remarkable. Part of what it takes to do something remarkable is to do something first and best. Roger Bannister was remarkable. The next guy, the guy who broke Bannister’s record wasn’t. He was just faster … but it doesn’t matter.

8. It’s not really as frightening as it seems. They keep the masses in line by threatening them (us) with all manner of horrible outcomes if we dare to step out of line. But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that’s for sure.

9. If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it? No use being remarkable at something that people don’t care about. Not ALL people, mind you, just a few. A few people insanely focused on what you do is far far better than thousands of people who might be mildly interested, right?

10. What’s fashionable soon becomes unfashionable. While you might be remarkable for a time, if you don’t reinvest and reinvent, you won’t be for long. Instead of resting on your laurels, you must commit to being remarkable again quite soon.
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I feel this way but I am never able to put it into words as well as he has. I have a way of looking at life as kind of a series of things I commit to. If I have committed to something, It just has every part of me and letting up will never be an option….thats just the way it is. With time, I feel like things in this life will naturally lose their excitement and we fall into a rut but being committed to something really keeps me pushing forward.

“Being noticed is not being remarkable”, gosh what a great way to put that. I want people to know us because we try to be quality people doing quality work to the best of our ability. I think Ryan would agree with me that we are just not the kind of people to run down the street naked, to flow with his analogy. 🙂

I love pushing to be different and edgy. Average isn’t enough for me and it never really has been. In college I didn’t have as much downtime or fun as most probably do, but working my butt off to do quality, interesting work was always worth it. Looking back, I am proud to know that I made it through. I struggled a lot in college because I don’t pick things up or learn like most people do so to have conquered that I think gives me confidence to get through everything else for the rest of my life.

Pushing to be remarkable is often harder than being content with where you are…but isn’t it worth it? It is hard to stay on top of daily tasks while trying to amp up creativity and discover new things but I have found its harder for me personally to be content where I am because I know there is always more interesting things out there we could be doing…and I want our little business to be a part of that. I think being remarkable also means being organized.

I truly believe God made Ryan and I to do this. Out of all the things we have done in our lives and struggled with along the way, photography pops up and within a couple years, it’s changed us. We view the world and life differently and its integrated into pretty much everything we do and a lot of what we think about. So if this is the one big thing God gifted us to do, then I want to live up to that gift and never stop pushing boundaries to be remarkable. To be an extremist. To be a little weird but always relatable.

So thanks Seth Godin, this was really inspiring for me today. 🙂 I hope this finds some other people needing some inspiration to keep pushing today. Our culture always wants to tell everyone we are the greatest to inspire us, but perhaps that just breeds mediocrity? How will we ever know what our best really is if we think we are already there?…

My next blog was going to be about our wedding in NY but I wanted to wait have have Holly edit a few fresh images that no one has seen so that gives me the chance to show you guys what I did last night! It was raining and I have been wanting to do some raindrop-on window bokah shots… But since Jay-Eads just showed me how to make a tilt-shift out of any lens, I thought I would try it out and see how it works!

It… was.. AWESOME!I have never ever seen Bokah shots like this so I am pretty pumped about them!!! So for all of these I am using a non-tilt/shift lens. just my trusty 28mm f/1.8 twisted off the mount

These shots are difficult to achieve because you have to manually focus while holding the lens off the mount, and it gives you a headache after too long but its so worth it!

It was a great light show moving about in my viewfinder, so I shot until my arms were tired from the task of twisting the lens around and holding it up to catch the light just right.

This one looks like the sun with flames exuding from it! amazing

You can see how the focus plain goes from front to back to top to bottom

It was great fun I am for sure going to have one enlarged! Which one do you like best?

And so we begin the long journey to Boston, Long Island, NYC, Dallas, back to NY and then the long drive back! It was a very eventful trip so lets start in Boston. We had a 14 hour drive and how else would we entertain ourselves?

We cut through Cana-duh to Buffalo through the land of hockey sticks. So after all the Canadian craziness we decided to rest in Niagara Falls… the town… Sorry no interesting pictures here… just this

When we finally arrived in Boston after a long day of driving, we decided to show how good we looked.

Holly just couldn’t commit so I had to pick up the slack:

That’s so hot.

MAN it’s been a long time since I have wrote anything on here! Never knew how much that long trip would take out of us and how long it would take to get back into the swing of things!

We may have been a little too ambitious to take on all the things we did but hopefully it will all pay off.

We had to pull a lot of favors the last month and I wanted to dedicate a whole post to thank all those people that really saved us this month. We couldn’t have made any of this possible without you guys!

As you might know the Radisson people were putting on a Bridal show for their preferred vendors and we were really upset when they asked us to do it because we had the New York wedding on the same day! Part of having a FREE booth was photographing the event in exchange so I worked it out to hire out someone so that we could set up our booth and be on the preferred vendor list for the year. Diana from Moxie Photography came to mind right away, and thankfully she was willing to come out and shoot the event. She got some great shots and I want to say thank you so much for coming out and doing a great job!!

Just to have the booth ready in time turned out to be a huge undertaking which required a lot of help. Thank you to my good buddy steve who is always willing to help!

He designed and built the main wall out of two sheets of plywood and some 2×4 bracing it looked awesome!

A HUGE thanks to Dave and Lacey who did a ton of work including setting up, painting the wall, staying up till 4am the night before to make a slideshow we forgot to do, and a bunch more you guys are amazing!

Helping them out with a lot of the same stuff was our super friends Andy and Nicole Foster! Unfortunately Nicole got a bad migraine so she didn’t get to help at the actual show but she was still a huge help. And another help to andy for helping Dave bring the couch back home to our apt.!! Thanks sooo much guys, and thanks for being our fans =)

The booth really looked amazing! You guys did such a good job.

And thank you to Justin who let Dave and Andy use his truck to get the couch back! Also for fixing up my civic while we were gone!!

The team Minus Nicole … represent!

Holly and I stopped in Boston to see a Red Sox game in Fenway because I have never been in my whole life and I have been a fan ever since my late step-dad was around when I was a kid. He grew up in Boston and had quite a zeal for the BoSox!

Anyway, our seats ended up being obstructed view seats behind a pole covering up the plate even though they are supposed to tell you that before you buy them. This was our view poking my head around the pole:

I’m not going to lie I was a little disappointed… I don’t really like to complain but Holly insisted she would complain about this “injustice” for me =) The people at Fenway were very nice to her when she told them it was my first time and our situation and they moved us behind the plate midway up! Great seats!!!

So thank you Holly for making sure my first trip to Fenway was an Amazing one!

Now on to New York!

The only reason we even got this wedding was because Megan hooked us up with this couple who has been one of our all time favorite couples! We can’t thank you enough Megan!!!

Thank you Orest and Morriah, you have been up there with the nicest and most accommodating couples we’ve had and I wanted to thank you for everything we love your families and you guys are going to be so happy together!! They definitely got “the love”!

We wanted to hang around NYC for a while since we were there, and without doing as much research as I guess I should have, I booked a Howard Johnson in Newark for a cheap rate and I am sure you heard about the whole bed bug fiasco! We called up my YWAM buddy Emily and she was more then accommodating! Thanks sooo much Em for letting us stay like 3 nights at your house!!

Thanks also goes out to Ben for letting us come play at the abandoned building he knew about! It was a blast!

For the last leg of our trip we were off to Dallas.

As always Don and Karen insisted we stay with them for our stay. They are so much fun and we always have so much fun there! Thanks so much guys!! This was actually the first time I visited them and had just getting my first camera we did some family shots. Cole and Austin are sooo much bigger now =)

Last but not least is the Niederhausers. They took us out to Uncle Julio’s and then we went out for a photo adventure with Cheryl and her daughter Heather. It was great fun.

We are so thankful of all the great people that we know that are willing to help. We seriously couldn’t do it without you! Much love!!

So the title says it all… We may be a little to ambitious for our own good right about now! We are behind on last weekends 52 so I will start out with that!

What the deuce week are we on again…. ah, [12/52] I shall call it… Don’t bug me, I’m busy!

I finally have my own computer and it only costed me 5 grand to get Holly one! But I guess it is all worth it… At least she won’t pull her hair out editing 25 weddings this summer.

I have Been working on a time lapse video for the move. Once I find the time to edit it nicely its going to be awesome! we have like 14,000 shots from paint prep to moving and some fun stuff in between heres a couple previews of some fun stills, pretty much unedited just so ya know!

All taken with the fisheye and the D700…it is going to RULE!

Lets see… I have also been putting together a Keynote show for the workshop THIS weekend… I love keynote… I love mac… 100 times better then anything I have seen power point produce and it was my first time. Here’s a couple screen shot previews

I am pretty pumped about it, I’m not gonna lie!

Now the weather, I am NOT pumped about, but we will be praying the rain away 😉

Preece preview to come soon!

So to those of you who don’t know this is our last year in Michigan! We spent the last year researching, and visiting cities. The cities that made the final four was Nashville, TN – Charlotte, NC – Los Angeles, CA and Denver, CO. We were all but set on Denver, CO as most of you know! We have been trying to get Holly’s parents to escape Michigan with us but they want to go to Texas. And I thought, hey! I know a lot of cool people in Dallas! I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before but I wouldn’t mind living there at all! Sooo I made a comparison … I love comparisons =)

So what do you guys think? Should we get a poll going? I would love everyone’s two cents about either city. It’s a big decision, we need some help!!

So I had to buy a pro account for my second flickr account because thats the images I use to plug into this blog. I try and keep my personal flickr more quality then quantity, and we upload some random stuff for this blog that I wouldn’t want on there.

Anyway my point is that when you click on images on this blog it will bring you to that image on my secondary flickr. I just wanted to let you guys know there is a better one with better descriptions, and technical info about each shot. I spend a lot more time making that look good.

Also I just set up a new set, 75 of my favorite photos from the past year. So go HERE and see the one!