My production assistant Gary who joined us in August last year has a birthday today, which gives him a legitimate reason to skive!

If you have received your DVD recently or had an album delivered, they have been either prepared by Gary or by us jointly such as the sample album mentioned in the post below. More examples can be seen on my website - click here to view Chunli and Adrian’s album.

If you happen to read this and think he is doing a good job, please show your support and leave a birthday message in the Comments!

We had a great time at theSt Andrews Hall wedding fair on Sunday! There was even a little queue of visitors who wanted to register their interest and view our sample albums.

4 couples who had already booked their photography with us stopped by and had a chat - thank you, guys, for helping us to create a buzz. 

You also had a chance to have a look at the new flush-mount album with Erin and David’s wedding photos and meet Gary, our production assistant, and Jodie, his girlfriend. We designed this album with references to popular bridal magazines, just to make it a little bit more special.

Off to St Andrews Hall tomorrow to take part in a wedding fair. It opens at 11am and will go on till 4pm.

If  you are still in need to book a wedding supplier, it might be a good idea to pop in to have a look around. While you are there you are welcome to stop by our display to cheer us on, meet Gary, my production assistant, and see a new sample album. This sort of thing…

Once in a while I meet couples who are so amazingly original. Emma and Ryan are such a couple! The wedding took place on the New Year Eve, and by the time I left after the 1st dance there were almost 300 guests, a queue to the chocolate mountain, a magician entertaining kids and everyone really enjoying themselves!

Here are some of my favourites:

From the bridal preparations

Unusual hair ornament

Interesting dress

The whole ensemble called for dramatic light!

Emma added a seasonal touch by decorating the tables with guilded fruit, pine cones and candles

The groom and best man

(I do not know what was that all about!)

The ceremony itself was pretty unique. Instead of a church wedding or civil ceremony the couple opted for a pagan ritual presided by a pristesse.

The couple jumped the broomstick as they entered the ceremony room and it became a spontaneous prop afterwards.

This is totally unprompted:

Followed by this:

If you want to see more pics from this wedding you can watch a short movie here:
Emma and Ryan’s movie

On this note, I am going to reclaim some of my private life and spend a couple of hours with John at the UCI watching “Jarhead”.

Movie description: A young marine finds himself on active duty in the Gulf war. The punishing heat of the desert and the long wait for battle sends many of the Marines dangerously close to the brink of insanity. To cope, he and his fellow troops rely on humour.

As you may guess from the above description this was not my choice! Does it qualify as “quality time” together?

I am slipping away again, ain’t I? What has happened to my commitment to write an entry at least once a week?

I am just so busy - album deliveries, reprint orders, gallery uploads, DVD slideshow creation…

Actually last week I read a book called “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber, which indirectly explains this lack of discipline, among other things.

What happened to those cooked dinners and a glass of wine in front of the open fire that my husband and I used to enjoy before I started my photography business? Replaced by endless hours in front of the computer processing photos and doing admin and book-keeping.

What happened to our weekend pitch and put sessions and my weekly salsa and Egyptian dance classes? Replaced by shooting weddings and portraits - and postprocessing, admin and book-keeping.

According to Michael Gerber, it is a common plight of a small business. Well, the recommendations from “The E-Myth Revisited” should put me on the right track to separate the two. Stepping out of the comfort zone of being only a photographer who want to produce great images to being a photographer-business person.

It’s nearly 5am. I have overdosed on coffee and cannot sleep, so I might as well write another post.

If you visited my website recently you probably have noticed that I keep adding various components to improve interactivity. I created a movie page in the Wedding Gallery section to house short 3-4 min long movies set to music.

Here’s Sarah and Peter’s movie (the couple from the post below). Please have a look and let me know what you think.

I have nearly finished editing Sarah and Peter’s wedding photos - just need to convert some images to black and white.

Thank you, Duncan, for coming out to shoot with me - John, my husband, was away in Florida for a conference and couldn’t come.

Sarah is absolutely gorgeous, and Peter and she have a lot of chemistry going on between them making the job of photographing this couple easier. It was fun, guys! Here’s some photos from this wedding:

I told you she is gorgeous!

While the girls are putting some finishing touches the boys are watching sport on the telly and drinking beer

as well as getting ready.

Table decorations and the cake were Xmas-themed - I though it was great!

We went to the bridal suite for a while to do some bride and groom photos:

Just noticed that the programme I am using for batching these web previews somehow creates pixelated images - I have to investigate how to remedy this.

I have been looking for a way to keep the news section of my website www.galinawalls.co.uk up-to-date. Last summer I started creating monthly newsletter, but when I hit the height of the wedding season with two-three weddings a weekend, I couldn’t keep it going. It was either putting a newsletter together or editing and uploading wedding photos. Guess what won!

Since summer I have redesigned my logo, the colour scheme of my main website and my stationery. More galleries have been added. Album design section has been extended. The next step (which this blog can potentially achieve) is to make my website more interactive.

My New Year resolution is to post here at least once a week. Fingers crossed…