MudEyes

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?…

I just put up new items in my etsy shop!

Save the Dates, Graduation Announcements and Invites, Original Paintings and more!

They will only be up for sale for a limited time, so be sure to check it out! Once wedding season starts up again with photography I will be pulling everything down again.

I hope you find something you love!

-holly

post by: holly

Christy and Garret were our last wedding of 2008 and the first one with our new Canon 5D markII gear.

Getting their wedding really was a blessing for me. I had been tossing around getting a job somewhere during the few months where we didn’t have any work and then Elisa (their wedding preview is coming) had told I believe Christy’s aunt about us so that is how she found us. Last minute weddings are exciting for me, I feel like they seem to come right when I am just itching to go out shooting so it is always good timing. Anyways, back to my story… I was so happy to get them because this keeps me working for another month. I certainly like doing this more than just any job at a store or something. On top of that, it was a pretty great wedding! I did awesome on it and have a lot of keepers, which was another blessing because I was kind of worried about the new Canon gear. I feel like it usually takes me a long time for my hands to learn things as I don’t have the best coordination and Canon is basically the complete opposite from Nikon but I adjusted really well. I have noticed that I learn best when I HAVE TO and at a wedding you know, you only get one shot at getting it right so it was a miracle how quickly I got used to it.

I loved her flowers in her hair. Flowers are such an awesome accessory. I wish I would have thought about that for my wedding. I don’t know how she stuck them in there, but those roses stayed in there until we left the reception which is pretty impressive.

This girls dress was awesome. That is all that needs to be said.

We had so many awesome dress shots. The big stained glass window was as awesome place for them.

Ryan calls the one below “doves delivery” haha he is a genius!

I thought this was pretty hilarious. I didn’t even see it until I looked through all the photos. This is a very good idea though, boys tend to forget things easily….such as washing themselves…thoroughly.

Since it was a winter wedding, she was all ready for the misery of Michigan in December. She had the fancy gloves and a fur wrap and even a fur muff!

The lovely bride.

Time to eat! Something to note about this is the left photo is an extreme crop. I am pretty impressed with the cropping abilities of the 5D markII

I just love this photo, the colors and composition are so interesting to me. Her dress was fabulous as well. It was something different and that was refreshing.

ok last bride shot…but I had to include it, I love it!

The girls being tough in the cold..wind…and rain.

…enough being tough…time to run back inside!

The mens.

This wedding was different from all the rest we have had and thats good for us, it keeps us sharp. I was following the girls back to the room where they were going to walk out of to go down the isle and we walk in, and there is Garret! Typically, the groom is already up there so I was kind of shocked. Luckily, I was able to get this great shot of his face upon first seeing her!

I love how we can get shots from different angles of such great moments like this. The ceiling in this place was amazing which always makes me happy since I always do the shot from the back. 🙂

There was a glass overlook on the top floor of the church which was really exciting for me since I love when places allow us to do some different things.

This was right after the ceremony. He just had enough I guess. He perked right up for the reception though, he was crazy!

See? I told you.

I love how soft this is, a cloudy day really makes things all kinds of magical.

I hate to use this word again so quickly…but seriously, this really is magical. 🙂

They really were troopers with all the rain we had that day. After we took these shots, we went to go back inside as the rain was getting worse and we realized we didn’t wedge something in the door and locked ourselves out. Nobody was around there so I ran around the church to go open up the door and found that the quickest way around included jumping off this ledge in my heels that was like 5 feet off the ground. If you follow my posts, you probably know I am not all that coordinated but surprisingly I didn’t fall. Landing in those shoes sure wasn’t comfortable, but i’ll take that over falling down into a big puddle.

The bridesmaids gave this to Garret at the reception. Not sure of the story behind that…but I thought it would make the greatest ring shot.

The reception was held in a theatre so they had the catwalk going around on top which made for another sweet shot from above!

Haha yay! They love our logo!

The light was seriously crazy in this room. It was black everywhere so our flashes were having problems so I just ditched it and I glad that I did. It really captures the mood so much better with all the crazy lights everywhere.

Haha…oh how I love the comparison.

Ryan took the shot of the woman on the left and showed me and so I told him to go up to this guy who was collecting the money for the dollar dance and hold it out and make a crazy face as I had a feeling it would be pretty nuts…and I was right. This guy was crazy, If only I had video of everything because it was pretty funny.

Overall, it was a great wedding and had lots of fun things to photograph. I am finishing up editing it today so I will give a preview of Gruss soon. 🙂

Pst by: holly

One very important and very interesting thing I learned in college is that when you have a million things to get done, you accomplish so much more than if you have only a few things to get done. Well, at least that seems to be the case with me. I think it is the pressure and the structure that really gets me naturally motivated.

After college, life has not been all that structured and even though we had a crazy summer, it has been more relaxing than school ever was which has been a nice break. 2009 is going to be nuts for us. Ryan is going full time with me in June and we are just about non stop until October. We are already starting to plan out how we will schedule our days and I am looking forward to it. I feel very ready to be structured again and am SO excited for him to be full time photography with me! It will be great for him to just be in “photography land” and not have to think about construction anymore. With both of us full time I think my workload will be much less stressful. We work well together so it is gonna be awesome.

I have been on a journey to get in shape and the goal is to be feeling good by June. I have never really committed to exercising…ever…but then again I never felt like I needed to which I realize is ridiculous.
It is about weight, but then again its not. I am not overweight for my height, but I just don’t feel good in this body and I know I am not as healthy as I know I could be. I want to run without getting winded in a few minutes and I just don’t want my body to limit me from certain things in life. It is always best to catch things before they get really bad and I want to be in the best shape of my life for this years wedding season. I believe that if you feel good about yourself everything else in life gets a little easier. So that is really what is keeping me motivated.

I am almost done with the Talarczyk wedding and will hopefully be starting the Gruss wedding tomorrow. See…that really isn’t a ton to get done but If I really push and get them done soon then I get to do other fun things! I have really been hoping to get this blog looking awesome lately and I found the perfect guy to build it for us for a price we can afford, so that is next on my list. I have big hopes for this blog this year. I promise to be better about posting for 2009. That is certainly one of my goals. I love looking at other photographers blogs so I realize this is really an important part of the business. I love learning about other people and their lives so I assume perhaps people would enjoy getting to know us too. 🙂

Ok…seriously…gonna get back to work…AFTER I do a preview post from the Talarczyk wedding. 🙂

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note: I did in fact copy and paste their last name every time I referred to it, haha. I have no idea how to pronounce it, I tried to listen for people saying it at the wedding but that didn’t happen. Most challenging name yet and I thought people had a hard time with Gauper… 🙂

Post by: Holly

It’s official, I am all caught up! I just mailed out our last fall wedding to the couple yesterday. It is such a good feeling to be free and not worrying about getting caught up every moment of my life. Noah and Alex were the last couple and I am just in love with their love. 🙂 It was such a joy to have their photos as the last on my catch up list. We rented another D700 (for me!) for their day as we thought it would be really dark being an October wedding. Full frame really does make such a difference when editing. Noah and Alex have the love and it completely shows in the photos which is also such a great thing to look at all day.

We have one wedding left this year, it is actually next weekend, the 27th. So it will cut our Christmas weekend a little short, but that is ok, we LOVE shooting weddings. I have one wedding left to edit before our last one to shoot so my goal is to get that thing done TODAY! Is that ambitious? Why yes, yes it is. I recently gave up caffine as well. My drug of choice is Dr. Pepper but that stuff is murdering my kidneys so it had to go. So the lack of the Dr. makes this even more ambitious. Thus, I look to netflix.

We just got nexflix like a month ago and recently found out they got their “instant” view working with macs! Thus, I can choose from tons of movies and watch them right on my computer. I really love it. I need noise throughout the day so I don’t go crazy and watching the same shows on TV everyday is getting so boring. I can’t handle 5 hours a day of home improvement and NCIS for much longer. The great thing about netflix is there are a lot of “sub-par” movies on the instant play list. My criteria is that it is not so stupid that I can’t stand it, but also not so interesting that I won’t get any work done and in that area, there are a lot to choose from.

If I can manage to get this actually done today, that means I get until Christmas to goof off! I have BIG plans for my goof off days. I have some paintings I have just been dying to do, I would LOVE to clean our apartment up really nice and most of all, get used to the new Camera. I am the kind of person that seemingly only learns by doing so I am going to have to play around with the new Canon for a while to get used to it. Everything is backwards, it’s like I’m in some alternate Canon universe.

Anyways…not getting my editing done procrastinating on this blog now am I? ….but I figured if I wrote it down somewhere that I’m trying to bust it out in a day than I would have a little more accountability to push through it. 🙂

post by: holly

I have been editing like a crazy woman lately trying to catch up on weddings. I been getting sick so much lately that everything just got away from me. I am finally feeling better again and back at it. After a couple hundred photos, I needed a break and my usual tv shows were all old episodes so I went looking for some new music to help me get through the day.

Featured on itunes was Katie Costello. I won’t lie, I only clicked on it because the tiny album icon had stripes and it caught my eye. I had never heard of her and listened to a few clips and I really loved her voice. It is different and spunky, and that is what I like.

You should check her out. Isn’t it lovely is a…well…it’s a lovely song. 🙂

post by: holly

Christmas is coming up so fast this year and I am so excited! I am really enjoying making ornaments for our tree and to finally have a tree of our own. My mom has a much more elegant and “fancy” style than me so our tree for the past few years has been all gold and crystal. It is a beautiful tree, but there is just something about decorating one that is yours, if that makes any sense. We are going to have a Dr. Suess-ish Christmas. 🙂

This is the first ornament I painted and I love it. 🙂 I have a few more but this is my favorite. I am hanging them all with polka dot ribbon too!

I love having the heat on, and all the lights, and the colors, and the shopping…and I think I am going to decorate Christmas cookies this year!

So…that is all. Just wanted to proclaim my love for the Holiday. I think I like winter up until the New Year and then I am certainly over it. So for now…I am happy and totally in the Christmas mood!

post by: holly

We got the “anniversary edition” of the game of life for one of our wedding gifts and we decided to break it open on Sunday.
Ryan took the road of no college, and I took the road of college (just like real life!) and I totally kicked his butt!

The funny thing is, In real life…I work with him so we are the same, what are the odds? haha so much for school, right. But in the game of life, I win by 1 million dollars!!

I only had one son, and he was bad so we put him in the back of the car.

RYAN…however…had 5 KIDS! He could not even fit them all in the car, he had to put the last one on top of everyone else. Sheeeeesh he better not expect that from me in real life, hah.

I like this game, but I think it would be even more fun with more people. Anyone up for some life?

This wedding was pretty relaxed for us. We didn’t have to start super early so it was great to sleep in. The reception was at the Battle Creek Country Club and is also where they got ready. It was a pretty fun group of people which really makes our job easier!

{{I am going to start with a reception photo just because it is so great….and I took it! YAY!}}

{{Perfect for an october wedding! I thought this was really cute.}}

{{I loved this cool mirror}}

{{before the ceremony, the girls were having some fun in the nursery where they were waiting…}}

{{Little tiny chair in the nursery..haha she tried to fit into the little kid car, but that didn’t work as well}}

{{I was so excited that I got such a great walking out shot! It happens so fast so sometimes I just don’t have time to focus fast enough, but I was just soooo happy with this.}}

{{All the mens}}

{{and all the ladies… I was trying to get them to all do a fish face with the “fisheye” lens. They couldn’t quite pull it off, haha, but I think actually turned out much funnier}}

{{sunset, this was ryans…and he is really awesome}}

{{…and this is mine…I’m awesome in a different way. 🙂 }}

{{Gotta have a little dip kiss in a place like this}}

{{What a cute baby! His older brothers were dancin’ fools at the reception! So cute}}

{{sooo i’m not sure what this is called, but Ryan told me…and I forgot. Either way…its really funny.}}

{{hahah I don’t even know what to say about this….}}

{{Lights! I highly recommend having twinkly lights at your reception, this is what happens when they are out of focus so they give a really cool vibe in the photos.}}

{{hahhaah I love to take photos of people dancing. They make the craziest dancing faces!}}

Andddd thats all.

A few weeks ago we met with Ashley, her mom and future mother in law. They decided to go with us for their wedding and about 3 days later we did their engagement shoot. They live in georgia so finding time to get up here is difficult so it is great we were able to fit them in.

We did their shoot in downtown battle creek and had a great time, they were a fun couple to work with so I am really excited for their wedding next year!

{{I absolutely love this photo. We started the shoot at his parents house which is an amazing house at the battle creek golf course. I just love her face in this.}}

{{His parents requested they have a photo with the light post and the gay in it, and I think it turned out pretty well! Looks very october to me. 🙂 }}

{{Not much to say about this, but I think it’s lovely.}}

{{Her Ring! Gosh it is huge and magnificent. Sometimes when we take really close up photos we can see flaws and such in the diamond that close, but this thing is just flawless, well done john paul!}}

{{This is also her ring! We just finished up the shoot and were talking about albums and such for the wedding and Ryan noticed her ring sparkling all over his shirt. Amazing!!}}

{{This is the same spot we had some of our wedding photos taken and I think is it the greatest.}}

{{Something I am really excited for next year at their wedding is her hair. She works at a salon so I am sure her hair will be phenomenal! I love all the volume it has in this photo}}

{{A sweet red door and some fancy editing makes for one fabulous photo.}}

{{This is one of my favorite photos of the day! I Sooooo wish we would have had time to walk around the corner of this building on our wedding day to take a photo like this. I just love absolutely everything about it.}}

{{This is so cute, so I think it is a great ending. Keep an eye out next year for their wedding photos!}}