Mentoring Sessions for Wedding Photographers

We are pleased to donate our time once again for the Thirst Relief Auction! This year, Enna will be available for a 1.5 hour mentoring session at the WPPI convention in Las Vegas. Alternatively your mentoring session can take place via phone and email, or in Boston any time this spring or summer. Included in the session are a complete set of Grazier Photography's promotional materials, outline of our pricing analysis methods, and a copy of at least one of Enna's favorite business-related books.

Goal-setting, pricing, long-term business planning, marketing & branding, personal values, and artistic vision are all topics that we find especially exciting to discuss, and the mentoring session will be tailored to address the topics that you wish to explore. If you are the winning bidder, we will send you a pre-mentoring session worksheet, so that we can prepare for your session and better address your needs.

Thirst Relief International collaborates with grassroots organizations and programs to provide safe, clean drinking water to those in need around the world.

BONUS: If you're NOT a wedding photographer but still want to participate, we encourage you to make a donation directly to Thirst Relief. Clean water is a necessary commodity for everyone on this planet, and each dollar has a great and tangible impact.

Click here to start bidding on a mentoring session!

Anguilla... a First Glimpse

This blog post is just going to be torture - TORTURE - for Ashley and Jamie (sorry guys!)... We're going to start by sharing some of our first and last impressions of the island. A few wedding pictures will follow. :)

First of all, this was the view from our little apartment at Turtle's Nest Beach Resort.

The view didn't change much, but we photographed it repeatedly.

Here is our resort viewed from down the beach... notice how many people are on this beach?

Here is the inside of where we stayed. Turtles Nest Beach Resort was a perfect base for us - central to all of the wedding festivities, immediately on the beach, daily housecleaning and lots of beach towels, and lots and lots of peace and quiet. I highly recommend it.

A neighboring resort:

We spent as much time as possible exploring the island. Here's Matt in our sporty jeep - don't worry, he didn't shoot the wedding with that camera.

Traffic signs on the island are a little different, but fairly self-explanatory:

I took the following pictures on my "location scout" tour around the island... guess which spot we went back to for a "day after" shoot with the bride and groom?

There are lots of domestic farm animals on Anguilla - chickens, goats, cows, donkeys, and dogs. We didn't see any wildlife, except for many different kinds of water birds.

As we were driving Matt saw a desperate lady with a baby waving at cars for a ride. So he decided to pull over and help (because she really did look like she was having an emergency) only to be suckered into giving a ride for her whole family that was hiding behind the street sign awaiting such fools:) So they all piled in and we ended up driving them to do one small errand before dropping them off. Here we all are packed into the tiny jeep.

On our first day we checked out a couple of the locations for the wedding weekend. The Moroccan-themed architecture of Cap Juluca, beautiful rocks and beach, and dramatic sky let us know that we were in for a really beautiful wedding.

This is the inside of Pimms, the restaurant where the wedding reception was held.

After the wedding weekend we decided to treat ourselves and stay one extra day for a little r & r before returning to cold cold Boston. This meant that we got to watch Barack Obama's inauguration from Anguilla, and we chose a rustic beach bar for our inauguration base. Anguillians are probably 99.999% pro-Obama, so it was really exciting to watch the inauguration with them.

In the back of this crowd is a man wearing a Boston Red Sox cap. Matt later put on his B cap and introduced himself:) As Matt suspected, Robert is from the Boston area and we ended up having a nice long conversation on the beach. He's already emailed asking us when we'd blog these shots:) (Hi Robert!)

(the bartender is pointing to her goose bumps)

We're culling through the thousands of images we captured while on the island... stay tuned for more soon!

Yes we are home:)

As many know Enna and I were recently gone for a week, and we are very anxious to blog the wedding we shot in Anguilla. We have been crazy busy this week catching up and taking Ollie (our 4 year old son) to school interviews. That's right, the schools interview the kids for kindergarten. The Boston school system (public and private) is crazy, I just can't believe how much time we have invested into this. We have found some really amazing schools, and are keeping our fingers crossed that he will be admitted to one of them, or that we win the public school lottery and get one of the top three of our choice (that's how it works in Boston). I feel like I now belong to an underground club, like Fight Club:) Example... I went to see my tailor and as he was pinning my suit the small talk was about the school interviews. Everywhere I go this is now the topic of choice with those I meet. Somehow we just know that we each have kids being interviewed and the conversation starts. Crazy. So we'll be posting some fun images soon and catching up on our blog this week. Until then I wanted to share this note from our accountant John Schacter with you all...

Massachusetts is willing to grant businesses half of the price - to a
maximum of $20,000 per vehicle - to acquire a plug-in hybrid. In other
words, they will give you money if you buy plug-in cars for your company. To
get this free money, apply by February 13 2009. Here is a link to detailed
information:

http://www.mass.gov/Eoeea/docs/doer/pub_info/cc-plugin-pon-12-12-08.pdf

If you need an accountant, John is the best:) He works for a lot of artists!

Lindsay & Matt

Sometimes love is like a train that can not be stopped, and this is the case for Lindsay and Matt. Lindsay and Matt were high school sweet hearts who had an incredible winter wedding at the Chatham Bars Inn on cape Cod just before Christmas. The outpouring of warm emotional support from family and friends beat out the gusty cold winter winds so much that Lindsay couldn't keep herself from kicking off her shoes and stepping into the freezing North Atlantic waters... a symbolic gesture of her love for their home on the Cape. Here are few of our favorites from their wedding day...

Brrrrrrr.....

The Inn had a huge ginger bread display in the lobby and I couldn't resist getting a fun ring shot with the fisherman on the sugar beach.

Then I saw the catch of the day (slap knee, haha):

The best wedding crashers I've ever seen:) The fire department was called in after a bridesmaid's shawl was accidentally tossed over a table candle and went up in flames.

This shot is straight out of the camera.

Thank you Lindsay and Matt for inviting us to be such a part of your wedding day!!

3 is a Big Number!

We are busily preparing to travel to Anguilla for Ashley and Jamie's wedding - and we're super excited about this trip! I just had to take a quick break from editing and packing to share a couple of highlights of our son Will's 2008. He just turned 3 on New Year's Eve!

Here is Will with one of his heroes:

And here he is on his first day of school... I can't believe how quickly he is growing up!

It seems like just yesterday that he was just a little baby!