As many of you may have read last year, Cheridy and I were involved in a really fun commercial photography project.  We were hired to shoot photos all around the Dominican Republic that could be used as images for brochures, videos, websites, etc. that the advertising company was creating.  We’ve done some commercial photography jobs before, but this was one of the largest commercial photo projects that we’ve done as it involved multiple international trips.  Since we love to travel, this was right up our alley so there was no reason to not become commercial travel photographers and add that to our resume.

Anyway, just today I came across the preliminary website for the building project that these photos are for and I thought I would share it with everyone because it’s pretty cool!  The building project is called Palmera de Cabarete on the north shore of the Dominican Republic.  You can check out the website at www.palmera-dr.com.   All the images from on the website are ones that we had done as part of the project.  Make sure to check out the “destination video” that is linked at the bottom.  For the majority of the video footage, we were right next to the video team, so you can see what it’s like down there.  In case you didn’t see our previous blog posts, we took two trips there:

Dominican Trip 1

Dominican Trip 2

Some of these images can be purchased as fine art prints here:
http://www.arisingimages.com/fineart/00_all/index.html?show=__Dominican%20Republic

Cheridy and I love Blerta!  She’s been working with us for a few months now and helping us out watching Mayz while we’re working.  She’s so good with him and good to us too.   Today we got a chance to do a little thank you for her and photograph her senior pictures for next year.

Our website has been getting hundreds of hits from the Knot message boards for people checking out Jen and Chad’s pics from this past weekend. Since a whole bunch of you guys are probably stalking our blog, I’m posting some more pics just for you guys!!
For any of you that might be looking to hire us, check out the latest Knot Michigan magazine where one of our weddings (Kasey and Jordan) was featured as a “Real Wedding”

For those of you just tuning in, here’s some more pics of Jen and Chad. There are other ones a few posts down.
The rest of their pics will be online soon at JennyAndChad.com. We’re just waiting for them to get back from their honeymoon to post them. You’ll have to get the user ID and password from Jen though as we don’t give that out.

To learn more about our weddings, go to our wedding website at www.ArisingWeddings.com 

Ralph and Devon had a very unique wedding at the Royal Park Hotel. Everything from their custom made attire to the setup of the room to the band was all done their own way with their own style which is always fun. We had a number of delays during the day which cut out their “creative” photo time which was a bummer but they had so many unique things at their wedding that we still got lots of fun photos. We enjoyed working with our friends Julie Rossey from the Royal Park Hotel along with Don and Joanne from Take 1 Productions who did the videography. If you want to see the amazing video trailer that they made, check it out here:
http://take1productions.blogspot.com/2008/06/devon-ralph.html

Here’s an image of Devon looking like princess:

This shows how ornate some of the details on their attire was:

They had a very ornate stage area brought in which is where they had their head table:

When the guests walked in they knew there would be some kind of surprise when they saw an ENORMOUS stage with elaborate lighting setups.
That surprise was Morris Day and Time (who used to perform with Prince back in the 80’s). They were flown in from California to perform at the wedding.

Here’s Ralph and Devon on the dance floor together

Devon’s bouquet Toss:

To learn more about our weddings, go to our wedding website at www.ArisingWeddings.com

On Saturday we photographed Chad and Jen’s wedding. They had a perfect day with amazing weather and lots of fun. Their reception was at Partridge Creek banquet and conference center in Clinton Township, MI. We always have a good laugh with Tom from JD entertainment who did the videography today.

Here’s a few of my favorite images for their wedding:

To learn more about our weddings, go to our wedding website at www.ArisingWeddings.com

I’m in the process of doing some major evaluations on our business. Our goal is to be one of the best Michigan wedding photographers along with having a success portrait business serving high school seniors, kids, families, and babies. We spend a lot of time running our photography business to make this a reality…too much time in fact, which can make family life difficult sometimes. I really needed to understand what jobs are getting done, how long they take, who’s doing them, etc. to help me evaluate our current state and plan for the future of our business.

I knew that we spent a lot of time working, but I never really knew how much. During peak season, on average we might have 1 wedding, 1 portrait session, and 1 sales session. Sometimes it’s more than that, and some weeks it’s less, so I used that as my median. If we did everything that needs to get done, we put in about 113 man hours per week between Cheridy and I which doesn’t include anything related to taking care of the home/family. I typically spend about 81 hours per week on the business and Cheridy spends about 32. By the time you account for our home related chores and activities, we both are busy for about 85 hours per week and that includes having some help. The numbers used to be higher before we had any help.

A large portion of my time is spent working ON the business which is important for continued growth and long term success and this whole project has made me realize that for the sake of our family, we need to either cut back on business or get more help. That led to another analysis to determine the costs of running our business to figure out if hiring more help is even feasible. Most people would laugh at the excel spreadsheets that went into figuring all this out. I’m an excel nerd but at least I’m using that engineering degree for something!! It’s always eye opening to start looking at the real numbers!!

Here’s just some of todays geekiness!!

Cheridy and I started doing high school senior photography a few years ago because we were looking for other avenue’s of photographic expression. High school seniors pictures can be a really important thing for a lot of kids. We were not too happy with most of the pictures that we had seen because most kids get the same type of pictures as everyone else. They are typically studio based and traditionally posed, traditionally lit, etc. On top of that, at many studios, it’s like a factory with the amount of kids that come in and out the door in a given day.
We really wanted to get out of the box and offer something unique and different for the entire experience from the personal attention and service down to the photos themselves.
Our goal is to not even compete with the chain studios but instead to offer a completely different service and product to the students that are interested in that. Our service is for students and parents who value photography and want something artistic as opposed to coming to us solely because they need to get the pictures taken somewhere.

We do a limited number of high school senior photos each year so make sure to book in time. Since we started opening our doors to high school seniors, we have had students coming from all over southeastern MI, from our own city of Sterling Heights, north to Clarkston, west to Ann Arbor, and south to Detroit. We photograph so many seniors from Troy that sometimes we feel like we’re the official photographer for Troy High School.
We’re looking forward to photographing the class of ‘09 and suggest calling to get your photos done early as the late summer dates book up fast!
For more information, go to our senior site at www.ArisingSeniors.com
Here’s a few recent favorites:

Troy High School (Troy, MI)

Chippewa Valley High School (Clinton Township, MI)

Cranbrook Upper School (Bloomfield Hills, MI)

Troy Athens High School (Troy, MI)

Oakland Christian School (Auburn Hills, MI)

Lake Orion High School (Lake Orion, MI)

Clarkston High School (Clarkston, MI)

Rochester Adams High School (Rochester Hills, MI)

Avondale High School (Auburn Hills, MI)

Stony Creek High School (Rochester Hills)

To learn more about our weddings, go to our wedding website at www.ArisingSeniors.com

Also serving:
Rochester High School – Rochester Hills
Academy of the Sacred Heart – Bloomfield Hills
Andover High School – Bloomfield Hills
Grosse Pointe North High School – Grosse Pointe Woods
Grosse Pointe South High School – Grosse Pointe
Groves High School – Birmingham
Henry Ford II High School – Sterling Heights
Lahser High School – Bloomfield Hills
Laker Academy – West Bloomfield
Marian High School – Bloomfield Hills
Model High School – Bloomfield Hills
Plymouth Christian Academy – Canton Twp.
Plymouth High School – Canton Twp.
Roeper School – Birmingham
Seaholm High School – Birmingham
Sterling Heights High School – Sterling Heights
Stevenson High School – Sterling Heights
West Bloomfield High School – West Bloomfield Twp.

Please call even if your school is not on the list above as we are always adding new schools.

This morning I had the opportunity to work with some really good guys.  One of the guys that I went to Utah with a few weeks ago has a heart to serve.  He found out about a woman from our church who had just recently been divorced who had to move all of her belongings (and that of her two daughters) to a new house.   She had a lot of big things and no way to move them so Mike got a group of 9 guys together and we all went out there and moved her stuff.
I realized this morning that Cheridy and I are really blessed with our family and our home and our business and sometimes it’s really easy to get wrapped up in our own world and our own happiness and forget that other people are struggling and dealing with difficult issues.  Spending time with someone like Mike, who regularly serves and helps other people, helped open my eyes and my heart.
One of the things that Mike mentioned is that after going through a divorce, this woman most likely has lost some of her trust in men and to have nine strangers show up at her house and move all her things will hopefully restore some of that faith.  I think that’s a big part of Mike’s mission and ministry which I think he’s calling “Jesus on the move” and it was really cool to be a part of that this morning.

While we were moving everything, my friend Dion got a call that he had to rush to the hospital because he was about to have a baby!  Him and his wife are adopting and the birth mother went into labor, so we had to unload everything from his car so he could get on the road.  Congrats Dion…can’t wait to hear more about it!!

Cheridy and I had front row seats to a little National Geographic Special.  A robin has had her nest built right outside our front door for a few weeks now.  Every time we go in and out of our house, we scare her off with a quick apology.  Today, we realized for the first time that she actually had a baby in there.  Then we saw there was not one but three of them!  We quickly washed off our dirty glass front door and then sat and waited for her to bring some food back to the little ones.  I shot this from inside our house looking out the front door.

I just wanted to welcome Curtis Wiklund to the Arising Images team. He’s going to be working with us for the summer and helping me with some of the processing workload.
He’s currently going to UofM for his bachelor in Fine Arts. He’s one of the most creative young people that we know, so we’re really excited to have him on board!
…and we learned that he’s better at grammar than I am so he just adopted the new responsibility of grammar checking everything I write!!

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:

This is Cheridy’s first Mothers Day with our little guy.  She was pretty excited to show him off with his UGG boots.

Check out the chubby little leg rolls!