We often get asked how we got started being Michigan wedding photographers.  Photography started as a fun hobby at first.  When I was working at General Motors, I had a good amount of vacation time and took every opportunity I had to travel the world.  I learned how to do photography better because I wanted to capture some of the beauty that the world offered and bring it home.  So, it all started with landscape and travel photography which is visible on our fine art site.

Cheridy and I met in January of 2000, were engaged in April 2000, and got married on June 2nd, 2001.  When we got married, we had never seen really beautiful or artistic wedding photography and did not do any research into it to find someone that could shoot like that.  Our goal was to enjoy our wedding day and not worry about photos.  I think that was a huge mistake.  Looking back on it now, I wish we had hired someone for the whole day to make us a beautiful wedding album that we could pass on to our kids as a family heirloom.  We have a couple of nice wedding photos and that’s all we wanted at the time.
Soon after getting married, our goal was to move out to California and enjoy the mountains and the ocean for a few years.  We were so serious about it that we even bought a condo out there.
Well, the engineering job market was just starting to take a turn for the worse and there were no jobs available for me out west.  I still had a nice job at GM here in Warren, MI.
Cheridy started to encourage me to do photos of people instead of just landscape and travel images.   I was starting to buy expensive equipment, so it would be nice to at least pay for that.  At the time, I never really had a goal of becoming a Michigan wedding photographer.   I really had no training in wedding photography and honestly didn’t know what I was doing and we made sure to tell everyone that so they didn’t have the wrong expectations.   After shooting a few jobs, we realized that I was actually pretty good at it.   The photos were turning out fantastic and when I compared what I was doing to what other pros were doing, I thought that I had some potential.
Cheridy came with me on every job and she always carried around my equipment and backup equipment.  Since she was always carrying a backup camera and lens, we realized that it made the most sense for her to just take some pictures with it even though she didn’t know what she was doing.  After each job, I would critique her pictures and let her know what worked and what didn’t.  She started to learn the relationship of aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and white balance.  Her pictures started to get better and better and that eventually turned into a second shooting position working with me.
Our business started to expand and we started to invest a lot of time into building the business along with marketing and networking with other Detroit wedding photographers.  After two years, things really started to pick up and we realized that moving out to California was not going to happen.  So we sold our condo in Sacramento and made the decision to stay in the Detroit area.
I started to attend lots of workshops and seminars about photography and realized the true potential to do it as a business without being a starving artist.  The Detroit wedding photography market looked to be stronger than I initially suspected so I put all my time and energy into learning about business and learned everything necessary from accounting to marketing and all the boring stuff that you needed to know to run your own business.

There were a few things that became the catalyst for wanting to do this as a fulltime business:
1) wedding photography could be a form of art and inner expression
2) we were going to get to work with people on one of the happiest days of their lives
3) the Michigan wedding photography market was strong
4) Cheridy and I would be able to work together and be together all the time

After about my third year of burning the midnight oil and trying to work at GM and do photography on the side it was time to quit.  Soon after, Cheridy quit her job as well so we could both work from home fulltime which has been a blessing.   Our business has grown exponentially since then.  In 2007 we were voted the Best Wedding Photographers in Detroit in the WDIV vote 4 the best contest.  We started to get wedding clients from Birmingham, West Bloomfield and Ann Arbor all the way to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.  As our skills and product improved, the venues that we started to work at improved as well and we now are regular working at places like the Royal Park Hotel in Rochester, the Meadowbrook mansion in Rochester Hills, the Detroit Athletic Club in Detroit, etc. etc.
We believe that everything that has happened for us in the last few years is truly a gift from God and hope to always use the gifts and blessings that we’ve been give to bless other people.

We are always continuing to improve our skills and build on what we have already started.  We began to introduce more fashionable posing into an otherwise mostly photojournalistic style and have lately been trying to incorporate more dramatic lighting to vary the look of the photos.  The best part about this job is that there is potential to never stop learning and growing and there are always new things to try out and learn.
To find out more information about our wedding photography business, please go to our main website at: www.ArisingImages.com

Here’s just a few of our favorite images taken at weddings in Michigan:

One of the best things about this job is that there is always something new to learn or something to get better at.  Thankfully there are some very talented photographers that tour the country to teach workshops.  As you’ve probably seen on my blog recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time learning off camera flash.  One of the best ways of doing that was signing up for an intense workshop called the One Light Workshop taught by Zack Arias.   It was a workshop that went from 10:00 am - midnight.  Actually, it went after midnight, but I left a bit early because I’m flying to Utah today so I really needed to get home.  The workshop was hosted by Melissa Squires in Ypsilanti, MI.
Zack spent a few hours talking about theory of off camera flash.  Most of this was reinforcement for me because I’ve spent a lot of time reading the Strobist forum which was really helpful.  The best part for me was that we spent a significant amount of time going out and shooting in and around the Ypsilanti area.  David set up a few shots with some models who did a fantastic job bearing with our group all day.  I had decided that I would bring my monopod and flash rig so that I could do a little bit of playing on my own.  When the models were not busy fellow photographers Kristen Taylor, Abby Rose, and myself pulled them aside and did some experimenting with light which was a great opportunity to practice and play around.
Although very long, this was one of the best workshops I’ve been to in a long time due to all the hands on training that we did.  Zack really puts everything he has into these workshops, so I would strongly suggest that anyone who wants to learn off camera flash sign up for one of his workshops!!!

Here’s a few photos:

Here’s just a couple of shots of the work in progress:

Here’s a pic of Zack working:

To help aid brides and groom in deciding on a wedding reception venue, we have provided some mini-reviews of some of the venues in southeastern MI. We hope that the hundreds of photos that we have compiled for these mini reviews will provide a resource that will be helpful to people for years to come.
We will add new venues to this list along with updating and adding photos to the current listings as new weddings happen so please bookmark this blog post and check back in the future.

1) Meadowbrook Mansion in Rochester Hills, MI
2) Cranbrook in Birmingham, MI
3) Roostertail in Detroit, MI
4) Detroit Athletic Club in Detroit, MI
5) Royal Park Hotel in Rochester, MI
6) Cherry Creek Golf Club in Shelby Township, MI
7) Inn at St. Johns in Plymouth, MI
8) Grosse Pointe War Memorial in St. Clair, MI
9) Detroit Golf Club in Detroit, MI
10) Pine Lake Country Club in Orchard Lake, MI
11) Wyndgate Country Club in Rochester Hills, MI
12) Pine Knob Mansion in Clarkston, MI
13) Wellers in Saline, MI
14) The Townsend Hotel in Birmingham, MI
15) The Dearborn Inn in Dearborn, MI

To learn more about our wedding photography business and see some current photos, please see our wedding website at www.ArisingWeddings.com

Today I had the pleasure to hang out with Marcin Harla who is a great photographer and friend. We spent some time playing around with off-camera flash.
We played around with everything from a single flash to four flashes just to see what we could do.

Due to us both being business owners and professionals, we felt that it was very important to take some good photos that convey the utmost professionalism.

Here’s a couple of images that Marcin took of me:

This one was one of my favorites that he took with a fisheye lens:

Here is Marcin:

I just got back from a seminar tonight taught by Mitche Graf. Mitche is a photographer who teaches business and marketing practices to other photographers. His seminar was fantastic! I learned a ton of great stuff and some new ideas and fun promotions, some of which we will try to implement in the next few months. Thanks Mitche!
It’s amazing how valuable education can be. I spent four years getting educated in Mechanical Engineering and didn’t use a lick of that in the real world even after becoming an engineer. When I left that world behind a few years ago, I’m going to all sorts of seminars related to photography and get to come home and implement this new knowledge immediately. It’s very satisfying and rewarding, and I’m just grateful that so many photographers and business people are willing to share what they’ve learned.

To learn more about Mitche, check out his website at:
www.powermarketing101.com

Cheridy and I spent a little bit of time today playing around with some more flash techniques.  I’ve been reading all sorts of articles on a great blog called the Strobist, and they make everything look easy!   It was definitely a lot harder trying everything myself.  Now I know what it feels like to be a student again!!
Here are a few from today:

We have some room darkening blinds in our consultation area and while I was waiting for Cheridy, I setup a couple of lights with some gels on them to get this funky shot.

After attending the Jerry Ghionis seminar last week, I have been really motivated to learn more about off-camera lighting.  For the most part, Cheridy and myself are natural light shooters which means that we shoot with whatever light is naturally present in the situation.  However, after attending this workshop and learning the value of knowing how to control off-camera light, I have been motivated to learn and practice some new techniques with off-camera flash and video light.  It may or may not be something that we use a lot, but it’s nice to have one more thing in the bag of tricks.

The picture below is an example of what I’m talking about.  This was shot on a typical Michigan winter day with a washed out overcast sky and evenly diffused light.  In most cases we like the predictability of that light and we know how we would shoot with it.  But if we wanted to create a really dramatic image, that type of light is difficult.  So for this shot, I used a technique where we underexpose the ambient light to make it go from washed out grey to a really moody and stormy look and then introduce an off-camera light to add some dramatic side lighting.   This is the type of dramatically lit photo that would be nearly impossible to achieve without some type of artificial light source.

I’m really looking forward to  playing with this technique more over the next few weeks.  It’s almost like rediscovering photography all over again. I’m so excited about playing with a lot of new concepts and new ideas and creating images in ways that our new and exciting for us.

Yesterday, the DPPA - Detroit Professional Photographers Association hosted Jerry Ghionis who is a world renowned wedding photographer from Melbourne Australia.
Not only is he an amazing photographer, but he is also an incredible teacher and we were lucky enough to have him come to Michigan and teach a 13 hour workshop for 200 photographers from all around the Detroit area on everything from lighting to business and marketing.

No matter how good you might think you are at something, there is always someone better and seeing that person can be very humbling. Being humbled is a good thing when it comes with educational opportunities and I think seeing Jerry and what he does was VERY humbling for me along with everyone else there. I’ve never seen anyone control posing and light in such a dynamic way and I’m really looking forward to practicing some of the things we witnessed him do.

Thanks for coming to Detroit Jerry!

Jerry is working on a new website and new brand that’s still a work in progress so the the site is not complete yet: www.jerryghionis.com
Or you can look at his old site at: www.xsight.com.au

For those of you that check our blog regularly, a quick and easy way to view our updates is to subscribe to our blog using a blog feeder site like Bloglines.com

We put a button on the right panel of our site to help you subscribe with just a couple clicks.  Altnernatively you can use this link:

http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://www.arisingimages.com/blog 

We are currently running a promotion on our fine art photography. Large canvas gallery wrap prints 24×36 and 30×45 are currently 25% off through the month of March so this is a perfect time to get some big beautiful images for the walls in your home or office. Images can be found in our online gallery at:
http://www.arisingimages.com/fineart/index.htm

The prices in the shopping cart should reflect the discounted prices. Not all images are available at these sizes.

Here’s how a gallery wrapped image is presented. It’s an image printed on canvas and wrapped around a 1.5″ thick wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang.

We will be happy to help you choose images based on themes and/or you can come to our studio and we can show you some fullsize images on our projection screen so you can see the actual size and look at the photos large. Please contact us for more information.

Today we also got to photograph the London family. We met them a few years ago when we did photos of Noah when he was around 1 year old. He’s now much bigger so it was really fun to catch up with the London’s, see Noah, and meet the newest addition to their family!!

Today we did a photo shoot with the Smith family. Steve is a friend of mine from a former Bible Study group that I led. He and is wife Laurel adopted these two beautiful kids from Russia a few years ago. In the afternoons, Gabby likes to be a princess and she dresses up in flower girl dresses as part of that fantasy. It’s really neat to be able to have captured that fun, quirky phase in her life.