Our new blog site is up and running!!! Please visit us at our new blog home at http://www.ourweddingmoments.com/blog for all the exciting happenings of 2009!!!

We woke up this morning and found the following in our email and just had to share it with you!

WeddingWire, the nation’s leading wedding technology company, just announced that In The Moment Photographs has won the 2009 Bride’s Choice Awards™!

In its inaugural year, the Bride’s Choice Awards recognizes and honors vendors from the WeddingWire Network that demonstrate excellent quality of service, responsiveness, professionalism, value of cost and flexibility. This year’s recipients represent the top three percent of WeddingWire’s vendor community, which includes over 100,000 wedding vendors from across the US. That means In The Moment Photographs is one of the very best in Wedding Photography.

Unlike other awards in which winners are selected by the company, the Bride’s Choice Awards are determined exclusively by recent newlyweds through surveys and reviews.

“We are excited to launch this annual award program to honor high-performing vendors based solely on the experiences of our WeddingWire community,” according to Timothy Chi, WeddingWire’s Chief Executive Officer. “This year’s recipients have set the bar high, exhibiting excellent service and expertise in the wedding industry.”

Catherine and I would like to thank our past clients for speaking on our behalf and helping us win the 2009 Bride’s Choice Award!!!

Happy New Year to all of you! We want to thank all of our clients, family, and friends that have supported us throughout the year, as all this that we love so much would not be possible without you!

The holiday season was so busy, we hardly had a chance to wish you all a happy holiday. I feel like such a blog slacker! But it was great getting to visit with family and friends, as things were a little different for us this year and involved a bit of traveling. We hope your celebrations were great!

Now with all the festivities behind us, we are ready to rock in 2009! In the coming weeks we will be bringing up a new face to our blogs. Last year we split the portraits into their own space http://www.pinstripes-polkadots.blogspot.com/ to help our clients find stuff easier. We will keep the blogs separate, but make them a little easier to get from one to the other, as well as a whole new look.

We are also revamping our weddings and portraits websites. All new favorites from 2008 will be added as well as a revamp of some of the sections. It seems like we never get to this during the year as we are so busy making sure we take care of our clients.

We are almost 50% booked for 2009 already! We tend to fall in love with our couples, and whether big or small, all our weddings are awesome! We cant wait for our weddings coming up in 2009, and we would love to capture your wedding for you too! If you are considering contacting us about our wedding photography services, please do not wait too long! Even in this sluggish economy, the brides are booking and moving ahead with their wedding plans!

We will be rolling out some new offerings in 2009, so stay tuned for more info on those in the coming weeks!

It seems like some days that the world is unsure of what 2009 will bring. Whatever it brings, I can tell you that we are ready to rock in 2009! Come along and rock with us!

Roadside Families

A couple of months ago, we were contacted by photographer Oana Hogrefe about being her "photographer family" for the Roadside Families project. This was our first introduction into a new project started by John Michael and Dalisa Cooper of Alt F. This is a "pay it forward" project that can best be summed up by this statement on the Roadside Families website -

"Kicking off on the VeryAltF tour of ‘08, John Michael and Dalisa Cooper start a Pay-It-Forward project to help photographers get in front of the lens with their families. Something photographers are notorious for not doing. These are their stories."

So just as Oana photographed our family, it is now time for us to continue our "families" thread by photographing another photographer family. We chose our good friends and photographers Anna and Spencer Clark. We started our session out at the nearby Sonic Drive In, where drinks were in order, especially the orange cream slush!

We next headed to the woods at Kennesaw Mountain for some fall color and fun!








We decided to end our session with some shots from the square in Marietta, on of our favorite places to shoot.












Be sure to watch the slideshow, again we were assisted by our wonderful 'Photographer in Training' and some of Emma's images are included in the show.

We would like to thank Anna and Spencer for being our Pay It Foward family and hope you enjoy your pictures! So now we pass the torch to them for the next family in our roadside families thread. I wonder who they will pick!




Over Thanksgiving we trekked to Virginia to visit Cat's brother and his family, and of course we brought our cameras along.    Having teenagers, we decided to work on our "Senior Session" offerings by taking the kids out for an urban grunge session.  

Driving around the small town we found a couple of great, distressed warehouse areas that provided an awesome backdrop for some grungy shots with attitude. 

Our niece, Casey, had a great time modeling for us.  She can't wait till we come back over the Christmas break so she can model again!  I need to find a cool dress for her to trash while we are there!  Here are some of our favorite pics of her.  






















Our son, Colin, was not really along to model, but was a good sport and we were able to get some cool shots of him as well. He really fits in well with the grungy locale.




Enjoy the slideshow!  We had such a fun afternoon with the kids and look forward to our next 'playtime'.


We have to make a note here... Some of the images were taken by our 'Photographer in Training', our 10 year old daughter Emma! She will soon be giving us a run for our money! You can see some of her photo projects on her blog Picture Girlz

Shoot Out In The Dark

At our last PUG (Pictage User Group) meeting, we decided to have a photography shoot out to do something on the really fun side. So, twelve photographers and two couples headed out into the darkness to see who could get cool images. There was just one catch,  Available Light Only - NO Flash Allowed!  As professional photographers, we often are challenged by things such as no flash ceremonies, both inside and out, and we still have to deliver great images. There's nothing like a night time outdoor candle light ceremony with no lights!

Below are some of our favorite images from the night! Oh, and we have to thank Anna and Spencer, also photographers, for putting down their cameras long enough to be models for us! Thanks guys!

Mike's Images...













Cat's Images...