Happy New Year! Welcome to 2010 and a whole new lineup of blog series we will be featuring at The Spiraled Stem. Our first series is called Coffee Chat with The Spiraled Stem, where I sit down with one of my colleagues in the wedding biz for a fun Q&A about them and their biz. Subscribe to our RSS feed to catch all of our Coffee Chat guests!

Episode 1 is with Miguel Pola from Miguel Pola Photographers located in La Habra, CA. We sat down at the floral design studio to chat about his approach to wedding photography, w

hat his clients should expect in their consultation and relationship with him through the course of the wedding, how to create timeless photos that will look just as fresh when your grandkids look at them as they did on the day they were taken, and the highlight moment in a wedding that he loves to capture for his clients. You can visit his website at www.MiguelPola.com for more information and to view his portfolio!

Thanks for joining us for our first episode of Coffee Chat, tune in next week for another featured OC wedding vendor!

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Hello! One of my frustrations with my current website is that I don’t like how the photo galleries work, and what do you – my potential clients – want to see most? Pictures! So I am researching options to have a more photo oriented website, while still bringing you all of the information and resources you like to see on my blog. So… my first trial is with a service that makes videos out of a photo gallery. What do you think? I’d love feedback and if you have a web program that you know of that does a fantastic job of displaying photos, please leave a comment – I’m open to suggestions!

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Darrell and Christine Saunders

I mentioned last week that Wednesday was one of those days when I just love my business and the lifestyle of being a business owner. There are so many challenges and so much work that goes into keeping this engine running, and we are often behind the scenes, all sweaty and gross and sneaking around so no one sees us, that its nice when we get a chance to take a step back, dress up, and take advantage of some of the perks.

 One of those perks is working with some of the BEST wedding professionals in the industry, and Joel from Studio EMP is one of them. He shot a wedding we did the flowers for earlier this year (which I don’t have up on the site yet – I’ll blog it soon) and I was so impressed that he was very proactive in sharing a CD of flower images for me to use on my site, blog and web portfolio.

Sidenote to photographers out there – florists and other wedding professionals LOVE when you send a CD of images pertaining to their field on weddings we do together, it gives us an opportunity to share our work with future brides and our brides get to see your work too! Of the 42 weddings I have done so far this year, I have received CDs of images from the photographer on SEVEN of them. That’s right - SEVEN, or 16%. Imagine if you shot a wedding and only 16% of the images came out, or you mailed out Christmas cards and only 16% of them were delivered, or you invited your friends to a birthday party and only 16% of them showed up. You see where I am going with this… So PLEASE send images to your vendors! Ok I am done begging.

Joel is one of my lucky SEVEN for 2008, so last week when I knew I was going to have hair and makeup done for a video interview, I called him up to see if we could do some fresh headshots and he was so wonderful to oblige. His studio is in downtown Fullerton, right by the train station. Darrell takes the train to and from work from the Fullerton station, and I was going to make it to Joel’s studio about the time Darrell got in, so we expanded it to somewhat of a headshot/portfolio/delayed engagement session for us.

Actually, Darrell and I just celebrated our five year wedding anniversary, so I convinced Darrell we should take these pictures together because when we have our 40 year wedding anniversary and our future kids want to put together a slideshow of us (or whatever other crazy technology they have in 35 years) that they will be asking us for pictures like these! We put together anniversary slideshows for both sets of our parents – BOTH still married after 42/43 years – so he had sympathy on our future children and humored me.

So here is a gallery of images of us courtesy of Joel at Studio EMP, check him out, he’s really good, and he actually got Darrell to relax a bit by the end of our shoot – HUGE shout out to Joel. And I’ve already designed our holiday card with one of the images of us in front of the wall with the big white square, I wonder if they project movies up there or something during the summer?

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