YAY! Here we are with 1st Picks from Heather and Matt’s wedding this past weekend — our first Jewish wedding EVER! Woohoo!

Seriously, there were some AWESOME vibes at this celebration. I’m not sure exactly how to describe it, but the peace and joy that surrounded these two was palpable. It was an honor to share in their day!

Dan took this shot during the ceremony.  A little bit of DIY Tilt/Shift action going on here with the 200mm…  The “bubbles” you see were these gorgeous glass globes that hung from the chuppah and surrounded the couple with beautiful sparkles of sunlight and color.

I like this shot as MY Sneak Peek, because it shows the chuppah and the globes (now with candles in them) from the other side during their first dance.  It was hard to decide between this sweet first dance shot, or some of the wild’n'crazy dance shots from later in the evening… but you’ll just have to wait on those, wontcha?  *wink*

More to come!

We must beg your forgiveness. I told you in a previous post about the new blog design that it would not really affect you the reader, but that turned out to not be entirely true.

There are some different things happening with our RSS feed now, partially due to the new blog, and if you were previously subscribed, you’ll now have to re-subscribe because the old feed no longer works. Again, we’re really sorry about this, a totally lame error on our part. So, if you would like to be subscribed to our blog, the new feed can be accessed by the following link, and copied into your RSS reader of choice:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/almasyphoto

With all that, you’ve probably noticed the addition of the RSS subscription bar at the top of our page. This is mostly an easy way for new readers and old to subscribe to our blog and keep up with our posts. Props to Mike Davidson for the idea and the code behind this neat little “widget”.

If you’re not using an RSS reader, you really should consider it! It gives you a nice organized way to keep up with all your favorite sites and blogs without having to manually visit every individual site. If you’d like to try an RSS but aren’t sure where to start, we highly recommend Google Reader. If that doesn’t fit your fancy, you may also want to check out Bloglines.

Now everything is working properly, and we’re looking at smooth RSS sailing from now on. We hope.

Little hooligans?!?  JUST KIDDING!  These cuties are Jeff’s daughters, and they were SO fun to hang out with!  We can’t wait to see them looking beautiful at the wedding — hopefully they’ll share some more dance moves with us!

(Oh, and since you’re probably wondering… NO.  Jeff is NOT Dan’s long-lost twin.  *wink*)

These two CRACKED. UP. when Dan stood over them to make this photo.  They thought it was pretty funny.

We haven’t shot an E-Shoot on location in quite a while, so it was fun to do something a little different from the old ‘hood here that we’re used to!  We loved this little walkway in Smyrna Village where Allison chose to have our shoot.

Allison…

…and Jeff…

Don’t they both have such gorgeous smiles?

The flash at the bottom of the picture is the light we were testing before shooting a portrait at a wedding.

The purple hat Dan is wearing is actually some sort of bizarre anomaly, a reflection perhaps.  

I PROMISE you, there was no Photoshopping done here. This is the image, straight out of camera, as it appeared in Lightroom.

This might be the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life.

Upon seeing this, my dad said, “Somehow, it just makes sense.” HA.

I love our job.

2008 has been a great year for us so far. We’ve gotten to work with even more amazing couples, and shoot some great weddings, but a lot of the fun of moving into a new year is looking back and seeing what you were doing the previous year.

So, Anne and I thought it would be fun to take a peek into the past, all the way back to May, 2007. Here’s a look at what was happening:

Fellow comic book geeks :) Lisa & Jason got engaged…

Arielle & Logan got married…

We had the pleasure of working with Bliss Events for the first time, and experienced their masterful production of Laura & Matt’s wedding…

And with that, Laura & Matt got married…

Anne’s longtime friend Ashley & her boyfriend Josh got engaged…

The super-creative duo, Joni & Chip got engaged…

Gainesville natives, Alesha & Drew got married…

I shot my good friends El Scorcho for their press kit…

Finally, Sara & Jacob got engaged…

So, that’s it! We hope you enjoyed our first flashback. It’s been an awesome year and we’re looking forward to another great one.

 **Click HERE to see the slideshow!

Sarah and Derek’s wedding was the 1st of 2 Callanwolde weddings we’re shooting this year — the next one takes place tomorrow in fact! It’s SUCH a gorgeous place!

Sarah and Derek are a REALLY fun, expressive, caring, AWESOME couple. It’s hard to find the words, really. And it’s so obvious that their friends and family feel the exact same way about them — they were so surrounded by love and excitement on their wedding day! We want to give a big, fat THANK YOU to everyone who made us feel SO welcome, and helped to make our job SO EASY!!! We loved being a part of this celebration!

The Ceremony was held at Northside United Methodist Church, which is a pretty huge building with lots of cool nooks and crannies for photos.

Their Reception was, of course, at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, where Sarah sang with the young choir there when she was younger. I’m a choir nerd too, so I guess we were a pretty good match!

Excellent, organized Coordination was provided by Kourtney Coleman, who seriously worked her butt off to make everything run so smoothly.

Sarah’s GORGEOUS Makeup (as well as the mothers’ makeup) was done by Kimberly Mack.

The lovely Flowers were provided by Catherine Waithall — she doesn’t have a website, so e-mail her for more info!

Deliciously-presented food was created by Affairs to Remember.

And the party was kept alive and rockin’ by the Band Flavor, who not only did an awesome job, but they also gave us some great photos!

Last but not least, the yummy cake was created by Bakersman, Inc. — isn’t that a cute name for their company?

So now for PHOTOS!!!

Derek fixes his hair while his dad chills in front of the TV…  Guys don’t usually do anything fun with their hair, so Dan had fun with this one!

Sarah puts on her dress with the help of her mom and bridesmaid.  (BELLY BUTTON!)

Sarah checks out her jewelry in the mirror… I love this shot because it’s so fuzzy and elegant.  This is some DIY tilt-shift action here.

Derek x 8.

One of Sarah’s brothers bumped into us in the hall.  He was so excited to see her all dressed up!

Sarah x 4.  (More DIY tilt-shift.)

Sarah’s brothers both played the guitar and sang from the balcony during their ceremony.

Derek’s sister got a little teary-eyed before the girls walked in for the ceremony.

Sarah wanted photos in front of the gorgeous stained glass windows at Callanwolde, but with the sun already set we had to get creative with our own lights.

Their first dance started off all nice and sweet…

Then it dissolved into a hilariously, meticulously choreographed version of C&C Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat”, (aka, “Everybody Dance Now”).  It was AWESOME!!!!!

Sarah’s brothers played again for Sarah’s first dance with her dad!

Then the party started:

CAKE!

Sarah tossed her bouquet a little early; she and Derek were EXHAUSTED and wanted to head out a bit ahead of time…

BUT THE PARTY DIDN’T STOP THERE!  You’ll have to check out the slideshow to see a few of the post-exit dance photos!  This was one of our favorites:

Sarah and Derek, was seriously hard to choose only 20 to post on the blog, and just as hard to narrow down to our favorites for the slideshow!  We’re hope you guys are as excited about ALL the photos as we are!

CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!

(Okay, and Dan!)

Here are our first picks from Kate and Steve’s wedding!

I like this “ring shot” that I took because A) I used my DIY tilt-shift on it, and B) it’s pretty. (What IS it with me lately and pretty pictures as Sneak Peeks? Oh well.)

For Dan, I chose this funny picture of one of the cousins (?), who was such a ham at the reception. He was really well-behaved, but Dan got lucky and caught some awesome little-boy moments like this one, when he was being tossed around by one of the older girls.

ENJOY!

Well, it’s been almost a year since the last facelift, and since it’s Spring-cleaning time, we thought it was a good idea to knock out some of the bugs and kinks here on the blog.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy the fresh new look and feel, and a repair to images being overlapped by the sidebar, which was a problem that we let go on way too long. Seriously, if you see us it’s ok to give us a slap in the face for that one.

Annnnyways… poke around, and have fun. We’re still tweaking some stuff on the backend, but you shouldn’t notice much from a reader-standpoint.