We tried to shoot wedding photos outdoors, but as often happens with winter weddings in Michigan, we got the predicted “winter mix” which just meant we dodged a few snow like flakes for a couple of minutes. Although my bride, Sara, was a super trooper, the wind chill made outdoor shooting fairly limited.

So like all my well prepared winter wedding couples, they had their wedding reception at the DAC, the Detroit Athletic Club. This is one of my favorite places to shoot since there are multiple spots to shoot indoors, the architecture is wonderful, the food is great, but most of all, the staff treats everyone like family (at least the side of the family they like!).  I love knowing my wedding couple is going to be treated well and taken care of perfectly. Most of the staff have been there for years and years and it shows. This is a great spot for a winter wedding in Michigan. Since our weather here is so wildly unpredictable, many couples search for locations that can accommodate their guests with a separate wedding ceremony area and a different area for the reception. Obviously Mark and Sara opted to have these in two different locations, but the DAC does have lots of room to spread out over several floors so you never feel cramped into one spot.

Grosse Pointe War Memorial is a great option for Michigan couples looking for a great spot to have their winter wedding.

Grosse Pointe Academy Chapel Wedding and Grosse Pointe War Memorial Wedding Reception

I’m trying to keep my blogs to my very favorite shot of the day (along with a very select few). Here’s my favorite wedding photo from Ayesha and Karl’s wedding day. Their wedding took place at at the always beautiful Grosse Pointe Academy Chapel. Their reception was at the Grosse Pointe War Memorial. We’re talking about a day that was planned out beautifully and which the weather didn’t cooperate (as often happens in winter months). So while we did see lots of limos pull up for photos, Ayesha and Karl were having their wedding reception in the main ballroom and we were able to shoot on the grounds and in the house as well (where it was a heck of a lot warmer). So if you’re planning a winter wedding and wondering where on earth you’ll go for wedding photos, consider the Grosse Pointe War Memorial… it’s pretty, it’s dry and it’s warm! I loved working with this warm, gracious couple. By the way… if you’re wondering what’s up with the photos of Karl’s Grandmother with her fingers in her ears, here’s the low down. For anyone  attending the wedding reception, it’s a great time to catch up with friends and family. But for some inexplicable reason, bands and DJs alike have decided that more is better in terms of volume. By here’s the thing. For anyone over, say 40 who started suffering from hearing loss thanks to over use of the Walkman in their teen years and/or anybody who’s starting to lose their hearing anyways, the increased volume is painful and will drive your guests away from the wedding reception faster than any other single reason! Many of the wedding guests are quite horse even after trying to talk over the volume of the noise in the reception venue generated by all the happy guests, let alone the “background” music many DJs want to blast! This wasn’t the case at this wedding, but as the band worked on adjusting their levels during their first few numbers, this was Grandma’s vote to turn it down!

I’d met Megan and Dan two years ago at one of my favorite couple’s weddings. In fact you can see Megan in one of my photos on my facebook page! It’s always a bit easier when I’m working with couples who are not only familiar with my work, but have seen me work and know what they’re in for the day of their wedding.

The challenge for shooting a February wedding when couples want lots of outdoors shots is to find nice warm places so the rest of their wedding party won’t freeze to death. The bride and groom are usually fine with colder weather, but adrenaline only gets you so far! So with a lengthly list of “must have” locations and shots, we set off. We were able to take photos in the Nickels Arcade in Ann Arbor, The Michigan Union and a few at Conor O’Neill’s pub downtown.

At the reception hall, the Travis Pointe Country Club, my favorite DJ, Dan Nichols from Michigan-Wedding-DJ,arguably the best DJ in the Metro Detroit area.

I loved watching the joining of these two families. Almost all of the wedding party were relatives and they’re a close knit bunch!

Here are a couple of my favorite wedding photos from Megan & Dan’s Ann Arbor wedding…

I started off my photo shoot of newborn baby “A” while she was still groggy from her ride and I was able to take photos of her sleepingish through one outfit change. I have my couples arrive with their baby dressed in the “must have” outfit for this reason. Then we can move into other outfits and props depending on the baby’s needs.

I shot this photo and it seemed to me that the pose ended up looking a lot like Michelangelo’s “Hands of God and Adam” picture that’s at the top of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Well, the God part anyways. So what’s a photographer in her down season to do? Create the picture, of course! Here’s the original;

baby in hands of God and Adam picture

And here’s what I couldn’t help but do myself. All I need now is to find a baby who can sit up and play the part of Adam!

If you’re wondering about the rest of the newborn Troy Michigan in home studio baby photography shoot, here are some of the other images.

Things got a little easier for couples trying to find their wedding photographer when we all started putting all our stuff online. It made it easier to look through our portfolios, see what our styles were, maybe get some questions answered and you might even be able to find out about pricing and availability without ever having to actually contact the photographer.

That might be a great way to start your initial wedding photography search, but when it gets down to figuring out who you actually want to meet with, it gets a little more difficult to sort out our nitty gritty wedding photo package details.

I have lots of friends in the industry, am a professional photographer and frankly even I can’t make heads or tails of some of their packages. It’s especially difficult to figure out three things; what’s included in the pricing for rights, what’s delivered to you and how much post processing is done to the images (whether you get prints or digital rights).

Some photographers offer “Full resolution digital proofs”. What’s that? Usually proofs are low resolution and usually full resolution aren’t called “proofs”! “All the images are retouched”. Really? What exactly does that mean? For me that’s always meant they have been color corrected, contrast altered and are ready to print. But someone might think that means everything’s been photoshopped to create a perfect fantasy image of what the couple might wish their wedding looked like complete with altered backgrounds, braces removed, people photoshopped out of the images, etc. It’s subjective and it’s important for you, the consumer to totally understand what you are and aren’t getting. Are you getting images that are watermarked?

If you can figure out exactly what you anticipate you’ll be doing with your wedding photos, that will make it easier for you to ask the right questions about what your needs are. If, for example, you know you’ll be posting your images on facebook and not doing hardly any printing at all, you might be okay with low resolution (although I’m sure you’ll want to be able to print them eventually). I see lots of watermarked images appear on people’s facebook pages. Some photographers use that to copyright their images which means the couple are effectively using those images without consent, while other photographers simply watermark images so that other photographers and corporations can’t steal their work (but that’s for another blog!).

So don’t be afraid to ask questions that might seem silly or the photographer has implied that they’ve answered. Make sure you understand exactly what it is that you are purchasing and there won’t be any disappointments later.

Once you’ve figured out what you need, which photographer can deliver exactly what you’re looking for, then you look at which photographer’s images you relate to the most, who seems like the kind of person you can get along with the best, who has the most experience, timely delivery and whatever else are top priorities on your personal “must have” lists.

Happy wedding photographer shopping to all you newly engaged couples in the New Year!

The one thing almost all of my weddings have in common is that my couples have whittled down all the bells and whistles to what makes the most sense to them and what are the essential elements that hold the most importance and value to their lives. So Lauren and Chris had distilled their wedding day to a short portrait session at the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, a wedding at the massive Assumption Grotto Catholic Church, a visit to the church’s cemetery and dinner at the Royal Park Hotel in Rochester, Michigan. Here are some of my favorite images from the wedding.

Ann Arbor art museum wedding party photo

Bride reacts to putting on her wedding dress in Ann Arbor Michigan

Wedding ring balanced on a shoe from an Ann Arbor Wedding

Bride and Groom head down the aisle in the Ann Arbor Wedding.

Groomsmen in Ann Arbor Wedding Photo

Stairwell art museum wedding photo in Ann Arbor

Michigan wedding couple’s first dance

Wedding reception photo from the U of M’s Art Museum wedding.

Bride and Groom kiss amongst the Michigan Art Museum

We had a lot of ground to cover as this wasn’t just a baby photo shoot here in Oakland County, it was their one chance to get some nice family photos as well. You’ll see that not only were we able to get photos of Baby B doing her cutest smiles ever, but we were able to get a nice family photo with mom and dad in their full dress uniforms.

But that wasn’t the real challenge. Babies turning one are pretty easy to shoot. Sure, they can move around and are happy to show off their new mobility and are as hard to shoot as moving targets. Yes, baby photography can be challenging as babies moods change faster than Kim Kardashian goes through men, but they are just so darn cute!

To add to this particular challenge of taking photos at a one year’s landmark anniversary, was adding into the mix the family pets. Taking photos of a one year old, two wonderful parents and TWO dogs was a bit more tricky. Then we added in the pig… yes, pig! That’s when things got pretty wild. Dog “A” does not like the pig, the pig needs to be kept away from the baby (as he might have mistaken her as something edible), etc. So with a bit of combined patience and a little perseverance we were able to get the non quintessential family photo of the baby, the parents, the dogs and the pig!

The top off my Detroit, Michigan baby photography session, mom had made Miss baby “B” her own set of cupcakes and matched her outfit with the frosting on the cupcakes. The results were a lot of fun. Her aim wasn’t too good, so we ended up sponging her off periodically when the frosting went into her eyes, but we all loved the photos. The glee you can see on Baby “B”s face is priceless. What I wasn’t able to photograph, as it happened while I was breaking my equipment down, was the clean up session. Picture frosting and cake bits all over their hardwood floors, a baby covered from head to toe in frosting. What are parents to do? One grabbed the baby and the other brought in the pig! Clean up time? 12 seconds!

Dustin called to enlist me into his plan to surprise his longtime girlfriend Kate with a Detroit style wedding proposal and he wanted me to photograph not only her reaction, but to take immediate engagement photos. He wanted the event thoroughly covered and brought along Kate’s Dad as another surprise so he could witness the wonderful proposal.

There was only one little possible hitch to all the well laid plans. It was snowing (which as we all know hasn’t happened much in Detroit this year) after pretty balmy temperatures, but this biggest, most challenging part of the surprise engagement was gaining access to where he’d taken Kate on their first date. What had been an abandoned building in downtown Detroit six years ago had served as an eclectic and not typically romantic first date spot. They’d climbed into the wreck of a Detroit high rise and perched themselves on a balcony over -looking all of Detroit, sipping cocktails.

Their abandoned secret lair was now a full blown construction site. So what’s a romantic guy prone to sweeping gestures to do? He enlisted the Broderick Towers construction team, of course. With their blessing, help and supervision, we all piled into the elevator with a baffled and blindfolded Kate.

Dustin guided her out onto the rooftop of the Broderick Towers, untied the blindfold and dropped to one knee. She said, “Yes”!

After a short while, Kate eventually noticed one of the men in hard hats was actually her father! We took photos on the rooftop as well as on the balcony where they’d had their first date. Let’s hear it for incurable romantics!