Nicole + Marcus: Hitched + Haute

I have been so excited to blog these since the moment Nicole contacted me about shooting their hitched and haute session! Nicole and Marcus have such a cool love story, Marcus is Dutch (which I find so cool since I lived in holland for a year, listening to his accent when he talked brought back so many memories) and him and Nicole met while they were both working on a cruise ship. So when Nicole and I were brainstorming for their shoot Nicole came up with the idea to do a sort of vintage travel theme. As we live in Arizona (which is where all of Nicole's family is from) I pretty much just gave up on any kind of boat theme, since we are all beach here and no ocean lol... So instead we came of with some other great ideas...

This first set I loosely based on passport photos or those portraits you get while on a cruise....


The amazing flowers we had were done my my favorite florist Posh Petals, they were soooo cool!


And then for hair and make-up we were super lucky to had the also amazingly talented Rachel Dawkins of War Paint!


After a few shots at the studio, we headed over to the Pima Air and Space Museum where Joey had gotten us an all access pass to walk around and take photos... it was amazing!


I love the vintage film noir feeling all of these have!


I am so in love with this photo!!!! How dashing and mysterious does Marcus look!?


Did I mention it was cool!?


like really cool!?




Seriously... I was in heaven...






Then, it got even cooler when Nicole arranged for us to get to shoot with this amazing vintage truck! With which I got to finally achieve my long standing dream of shooting with a fog machine!!!! So excited...


However, next time I will have to bring a better power source... I had no idea how much power those things draw!!!


But when it worked it was so cool!!!!!










How amazing was that!? Thank you guys so much for spending an amazing day with me!

INSPIRING THURSDAYS - Carl Bengtsson

I'm getting really excited to keep up with these inspiring Thursdays, because there are just so many amazing photographers and artists out there that inspire me so much, wether it be for lighting or posing or backgrounds or composition or whatever. So hopefully you've been getting just as inspired as I have by some of these amazing people.

I was bored and poking around the internet one day and happened to stumble upon Carl Bengtsson, I have no clue how to pronounce his name, but I am in love with his work. I love how beautiful and simplistic they are. I pulled out a couple of my favorites to share here with you, but he has TONS of amazing work up on his WEBSITE.

Life

No matter how hard you work or how much you try, life is always unpredictable. You can't control it and you'll go crazy trying to. I've been learning this the hard way. I try so hard to make things happen the way I see them in my head, and in my perfect little world but no matter how hard I try something always comes along and messes up all my plans. Then the more I try to fix it and make it be the way I wanted it to work out in the first place, the more I mess it up.

There has to be a place of letting go.

Letting go of not only the picture you had in your head of how something was supposed to work out, but letting go of the feeling that you somehow messed up when it doesn't go as planned. Letting go of the blame.

And believe me I am the queen of the blame game. Not that I blame other people, but myself. A bird could poop on somebody's head in China and I'd be over here in the corner apologizing to him for it. I LOVE to apologize for pretty much everything. It drives my family crazy.

For example.... the weekend of the 9th was my 5th wedding anniversary, (woohoo!) and I got food poisoning (not woohoo). I was so sick I slept on the bathroom floor for two whole days, while my poor hubby took care of me like I was an invalid and the whole time I'm laying there puking I'm apologizing to my husband for messing up our anniversary weekend. !?!?!?! What the heck!? How was getting food poisoning my fault!? I have no idea but somehow in my brain the world didn't work like I wanted it to that weekend so I must have done something wrong to screw it up.

But I've realized you can't live life like that. You can't blame yourself for things out of your control. Instead, everyday wake up and take it one step at a time enjoying the ride (because everybody knows the best parts of a roller coaster are the bumps and the dips in the track).

I'll post up more in the coming weeks why I had such a big gap in blogging for a while and what we've been up to, but for now here a picture I took a couple weeks ago of the sun rising over the Grand Canyon from a spur of the moment trip Joey and I took. Every time I look at it, it just resounds of peace to me, and of letting everything in life fade away so you can simply enjoy the beauty all around you.

Nicole + Jake

Let me start by saying this was one of those weddings where I literally never put down my camera, everywhere I turned there would be more gorgeous little details. I felt like a little kid in a candy store running around and photographing all of them! Everything about this wedding was perfect, everything. Including Nicole and Jake, I knew from the moment I met them that I loved them and it was so amazing to share their wedding with them. Here are just a few of my favorites from their day, it was soooo hard to narrow it down!

To see even more images from Nicole and Jake's wedding view the slideshow by clicking HERE!

Inspiring Thursdays - Inner Genius

A little while ago this year I discovered the coolest resource ever... TED. TED is an amazing nonprofit devoted to sharing ideas. Starting out as a conference in 1984 it aimed to bring people together from three different worlds: Technology, Entertainment and Design. Every year it brings together the most amazing group of people to speak at their conference in Long Beach (which sells out a year in advance every time). These people are the dreamers and the thinkers of tomorrow who are literally changing the world. They get together and simply just share what's on their mind, their dreams, their ideas, their passions. It's amazing. The best part is they put a bunch of the lectures up online afterward so you can watch them FOR FREE.... I could literally loose myself to this website for days soaking in the mass of information is has. One of my favorite videos I have seen so far though is this one I posted up. The lady in in the video is bestselling author, Elizabeth Gilbert and even though she isn't in the same field of art as I am so much of what she talks about has a direct correlation to all artists on a very deep level. So watch and be inspired! But I warn you, if you go over to TED. COM be prepared to get sucked in!

Inspiring Thursdays

Ok I know this is a little more random than most of my Inspiring Thursdays are, but, I do have a good reason I promise! I have found in my life that the more I can keep tapping into my creative side... doing ANYTHING creative... it always always always benefits other creative areas of my life. It's like working out. You COULD just work out one muscle, but your body is going to function better (and not to mention not look very strange and creepy) if you work out all the muscles around it to. That's why I love doing crafts and anything else to just get my hands moving. My brain can zone out and go into creative mode and then that's when I always am suddenly struck with inspiration for something else I'm doing. It's like a trigger to a chain reaction in my brain or something.

So.... to help you out with that, I thought I'd give you a little inspiration in case you're not sure where to start, or what to do. I found this AWESOME website yesterday it's sure to give you a few ideas and a little inspiration to get your creative right brain the jump start it needs!

Cut Out + Keep