Trystan Photography: An Intimate Portrait.

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Renee and Robert wanted a small wedding.

Renee was adamant that she have awesome wedding photos, no matter how small her wedding might be.

So she hired Charlotte and I!

How lucky for us!

I’m serious. A wonderful and beautifully simple ceremony in the cute little Red Rock’s Chapel followed by nearly 2 hours with just the couple in a place as gorgeous as Red Rocks in Denver?!? How lucky are we!?!

I’ve said it in many blog posts before, and still, I can’t say it enough: ample time with the couple in a picturesque spot with time to play (and especially time to get to know them)… it’s a wedding photographer’s dream.

Some photographers ask us why we would take the time to photograph a small wedding?

Well my kind colleagues: these photos are why!

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Tanesha was one of our “really-on-top-of-it-brides”. She booked with us a good year out (or more) from her wedding date. She had her engagement session done a few months later, and her choice for her matted 8×10 signing board back to us well before the deadline. The amazing thing to us was how she somehow pulled off planning her Colorado Springs wedding all the way from the Western Slope of Colorado (Glenwood Springs, I think…)

Sometimes you can just sense how badly a bride wants to get married. Tanesha’s excitement and desire for nuptials was almost palpable.

Tanesha and Carlos area truly happy couple, with very large and loving families that came togther that day for a simple, beautiful and moving ceremony and a “party-of-the-century” kind of reception.

Thank you both for an beautiful wedding that made photography almost easy!

Side note: I’ve seen a lot more white tuxes in ‘08 than any other year. Could that be that logic is finally creeping into the minds of the average wedding couple: summer weddings are hot; the bride and her girls get to wear cool light colored dresses and the guys wear stifling hot black tuxes.  I say, let the men wear cool clothes, too!

Groomsmen unite! Demand light cotton, breathable clothes! Let the hot black tux (albeit still very flattering, I’ll admit) be reserved for cold East Coast weddings in the fall and winter.

Now I’m just rambling off of the top of my head here, but someone should develop a portable liquid cooling system for tuxes that utilizes tubes of cooled water supplied from a discrete pump-pack under the coat on the belt… hey, wait a minute… that’s a good idea!

Hmmmm… please excuse me, while I secure the necessary patents…

So you’re engaged!

He’s the man of your dreams and you can’t believe the BIG day is finally going to happen. All of those daydreams of the perfect fairytale wedding are going to pay off in the most fabulous wedding ever…

But where to start? Let’s see… there’s setting the date, the save the date cards, invitations, dresses, tuxes, flowers, rings, wedding party, ceremony spot, reception spot, wedding planner, officiant, favors, table settings, event rentals, music, food, drink… photography?

Wow. I know what you’re thinking: “Where do I start?”

I’d recommend starting with the locales (the “where”), because sometimes you might get some great recommendations from the staff for your other vendors, or you may realize that you want vendors with experience working at your reception or ceremony sites. Personally, I think experience at a venue is a good attribute in a photographer, but not required. You should never base your decisions solely off of whether or not a vendor has worked at a location before. Because, yes, they may have experience there, but they may also be a huge a**!

Which brings me to the absolutely, positively, no-question-about-it, most important aspect of choosing the perfect photographer for your wedding:

Personality!

That’s right. It’s not style or price! Both are valid, but in my humble opinion they’re not as important, and here’s why:

You may absolutely love a photographer’s work, style, and price point, but if your photographer does not make you feel comfortable on your wedding day, then the photographs will reflect that. Make sure your photographer’s personality reflects your own preferred vibe for your wedding day (i.e. fun and sexy, or serious and reverent, etc…)

For example: Charlotte and I are goofy, fun photographers. We love to goof around and play with the couple and the wedding party. I often will speak with a vague artsy European accent as I ask my photo subjects to “give me sexy”, or “work it”… It’s always fun and I’m a clown because we’ve found that laughing fun couples take the best fun/sexy shots. I mean, what’s more sexy and romantic than a shot of a bride completely in love with her new husband and laughing gorgeously as he holds her in his loving arms? Nothing.

And how do you get a bride/couple to do that; to look great on cue? Do you shout out, “Laugh and look good doing it!”? Nope. That only works for professional models, and usually not that well.

To get real people to do what we want, we have to get them to really do it! So if we need a confident and sexy bride, we need to help her feel confident and sexy. If we want a playful shot of the couple, then we need to help them feel comfortable letting their guard down and flirting on camera. And the easiest way that we’ve found to get past most of our clients guards is to simply be honest, friendly, and playful. And it’s almost never a hard thing to do because it’s a wedding! It’s a big party anyway, and we treat it as such and simply make friends.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because it helps to illustrate my point that personality matters most. You may love our work, and you might love the idea of having photographs from your wedding that look like ours, but if my description of how we work sends a chill up your spine or curls your toes, then no matter how much you like our work, in reality we would be a horrible choice for your wedding photographers.

Brides who want a reverent, very serious day with an almost fashion photography atmosphere (where the photographers basically say all that I say, but the difference is they are completely serious about it!), would be making a huge mistake by booking us. I don’t have a serious bone in my body. I’ve been verified by the FDA as 100% pure fun-guy. So, if you’re a couple who wants to basically have a day long party and wants the photography to be fun and artistic, then we’d be perfect for your wedding.

So what’s the key to choosing the perfect wedding photographer?

Start with style and price, but always base your final decision on personality. It’s the formula for perfect wedding photography.

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Brooke and Randy had a vision of a wedding at the Woodmen Valley’s Stone Chapel in Colorado Springs followed by a riotous reception at the Marriott.

We previewed Brooke and Randy’s engagement pics a while back on our blog, and we were hoping that the wedding photos would be as much fun to capture as their engagement photos were… and how!

Brooke and Randy have such a fun, carefree love. They laughed and played all day long, shrugging off the usual wedding snags and stresses with a joke and a grin. They loved being close to each other that day, and it shows in our photography of them.

We love our job, but weddings like this remind us how lucky we are not only to be wedding photographers, but also to be in love as husband and wife!

I’d photographed a number of weddings at Woodmen Valley’s Stone Chapel before, but I’d never captued a photo that really showed they hidden Jesus inlay in the stonework behind the altar. Charlotte got a great shot of Him this time, so keep an eye out!

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I know I say it over and over: a huge aspect of how Charlotte and I capture awesome photographs is directly dependent on how responsive, comfortable, and intimate our couples are. We can’t take happy, cool and funny photos of people who aren’t happy,cool and funny. One of the smartest things we ever did as a studio was we started to “pre-screen” our couples by essentially telling them how we like to work in a very informal, lighthearted way, and if they don’t like a fast paced, goofy, irreverent, joking atmosphere then we frankly aren’t the right photographers for them; and it’s worked wonders.

The caliber of clientèle we’ve booked over the last year or so has been a phenomenal crop of subjects. So cool, fun and relaxed that it’s a sheer pleasure to take their photographs.

Brittany and Rhead were no exception.

I met them in the lobby of the Brown Palace in Denver and we eased into shooting by doing a few test lighting shots around the hotel, talked about the reception set-up, walked around and shared ideas about the day of the wedding. Then we headed outside with the eventual goal of getting down to Coors Field. We stopped wherever we saw something cool or interesting to the eye and they were totally chill and fun about eveything. Brittany said, “… it feels more like we’re just hanging out and you happen to be taking photos…”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

We didn’t make it to Coors Field, but we did find this amazing little sculpted office park garden where we got some really neat long shots with remote lighting, too. It was funny though, the security team for the office building came out and informed us we could take no photographs of the building itself. It seemed like a strange rule, it must have been a secret Dept. of Homeland Security building of something. It didn’t have a markings or signs… very interesting.

Thanks so much Brittany and Rhead. I can’t wait for your October wedding!

Ahhhhh… the small weddings. This completes my series of small weddings from the Spring months of ‘08. I can’t tell you how much fun small weddings are. My absolute favorite photos to capture are couples together, in love. When it comes to the small weddings, it’s pretty much all we do. Most bigger weddings we’re lucky to get 45 minutes with the couple, (if that!), and at the small weddings we usually get 2-3 hours. Talk about time to make a shot work! No rushing, no stress, just fun, fun, fun photography with the couple (and sometimes with the wedding party).

Beth and Kenny had an intimate April ceremony at the Garden of the Gods. It was cold enough there was pretty much no one around, so it was really fun to have the park to ourselves. However, whatever mojo Beth worked to get nice weather for the ceremony came to an abrupt end the very moment they signed their marriage liscence afterwards. The wind suddenly roared in, and howled throughout the ceremony site, and we hustled off to get as many photos as we could before what ever monstrous storm front was blowing so hard moved in!

It got so bad, so cold and snowy, and so windy that we eventually retreated to the Broadmoor Hotel where Beth and Kenny were staying that night and tried to scrape together as many indoor looks as possible. Apparently that’s no bueno at the Broadmoor, even if you’re a guest there, because right as we were wrapping up, Broadmoor security came and politely asked us to stop photography. Overall, they were pretty cool about it; they understood that we’d basically just been blown indoors by the storm, otherwise we’d still be at the Garden of the Gods. But it was close. If we’d not been allowed to finish our photography, I don’t know where we’d have gone!

But through it all Beth and Kenny were so happy, so energetic, so happy / fun and cool, that the photos were pretty much effortless! Thanks you two!

Also, Beth wants to shoot a Trash the Dress (TTD) session, soon (bless her rebellious heart)! I’ll post those pics as soon as I get ‘em done in August sometime…

Dave and Sherry had a lovely, intimate wedding in March. Unfortunately, because it was March, we were hit with a sloppy wet snow storm and we had to scrap our plans to shoot some photos at The Garden of the Gods.

However, Dave and Sherry did reschedule that section of the shoot for a much clearer day (except it was still really cold, but you can’t tell becasue they’re such troopers!), and it was well worth it, as you can see.

We love small intimate weddings. Even though the couple with the smaller wedding often gets us for less time than the big weddings do, we often get more quality time with the couple and can photograph more creatively without the rushing around that can come with gigantic weddings.

Dave’s an avid elk hunter, and I’m one too, except I haven’t managed to successfully hunt an elk… yet. Dave passed on to me some great hunting tips, and shared some premium cuts of elk meat from his past exploits. The meat was delicious, and actually put a lot more pressure on me as a hunter because my whole family loved it when I cooked it up, and my mom said, “So when are you gonna get some of your own?”

Dave may be a storied trophy hunter, but I could tell from the look in his eyes, as Sherry walked down the aisle, that his greatest catch was right in front of him…

Congrats you two!

You can view all of Michele and Lucas’ Graphistudio album.

Michele and Lucas were married at Raccoon Creek Golf Course in Littleton, CO. Colorado really cooperated on their wedding day with stunning skies, picturesque clouds, and a sunset straight out of a movie.

Our ability to tell the story of the wedding day across the album’s pages is unparalled with Graphistudio albums. Premium covers, professional Kodak photo-papers, lay-flat pages, and custom layouts are why we only carry Graphistudio albums for our entire album line.

You can view Tristyn and David’s sample gallery.

Why do I like Tristyn? (Other than her name…)

I like Tristyn because she was one of our only clients through the course of last year to notice, and mention, that between the time they intitally met with me, to the day I shot their engagement photos, that I had lost a lot of weight (30 lbs in 4 or 5 months).

Why do I like her even more after her wedding?

Because when I told her I’d gained all the weight back she claimed she didn’t believe me! God Bless you, Tristyn! That was, The Perfect Answer.

But seriously, I really enjoyed photographing Tristyn and David because of the true affection and love that shined out between them. They were authentically excited, almost giddy to get married. And it shows: the natural affection, the warmth, and most importantly, the level of comfort and confidence it takes to be naturally close and affectionate with your fiance.

We have a pretty unique system for our Graphistudio albums here at Trystan Photography, in that we (the photographers) allow our clients as much control as humanly possible over the layout of their wedding albums.

They choose all of the photographs in the album. (Not all photographers do that…)

I do the design. I send them the layout to approve. (Not all photographers do that, either…)

Our clients can make as many edits to the layout at they would like! (Almost nobody does that…)

This process may equal many more hours of work on my end, but it guarantees that the client is getting the exact album they wanted and dreamed of. I definitely think it’s worth it.

However, lately our clients have been having a heck of a time narrowing down the photographs to a “reasonable” amount for our 40 page albums (80-100 pics max.) In this event, I offer to delete some photos for them (nobody has ever taken me up on this), or I just go for it and we see how many pages we’ll need to upgrade when i finish the layout…

Jil and David were the first couple to get their chosen pics back to me from the 2008 season (and they were one of our last ‘08 weddings… hmmmm, anybody reading this from May or June of ‘08?). Jil and David’s album is the biggest wedding album (66pages, 130 photographs) I’ve ever designed! But it’s soooooo cool.

I’ll try and post photos of the finished album when it gets back from Italy, but in the meantime you can check out the final approved layout…