Amanda & Jose | Engagement

It is always a joy getting to experience new locations while doing photography. I’ve seen a ton of photos of Morton Arboretum and I’ve wanted to check it out for quite some time. So when Amanda told me that this was where we would be taking her and Jose’s engagement photo, I was very excited for their session. The day of this session was my first time there so it was good that Amanda and Jose had visited recently and taken note to stop in the arboretum for photos. It was a beautiful location for an engagement session and we even had some great weather for this late October engagement session.

November 2019

I did not make as much progress during November as I would have liked. However, I’ll count my progress this month as a victory anyway. I headed into the month looking forward to doing quite a bit of photography with a couple outdoor sessions scheduled early in the month and finishing the month out with a Saturday filled with holiday mini sessions. It was a little disappointing when it didn’t work as planned. My one of my outdoor sessions ended up getting rescheduled due to the weather and the other was cancelled due to an illness in their family.

Meanwhile despite my effort to make 2 very cool sets for my holiday mini session, I did not receive much interest in booking a session with me. Granted I think since my holiday setups didn’t get much use this year, I don’t feel too bad about running back the same set up next year. I mean this year so far this year they’ve been used sparingly with only one paid session on Small Business Saturday. My other bit of paid work during this month was doing event photography for Faith in Place’s Annual Luncheon and Fundraiser.

This month was interesting since I reconnected with a couple people that' I have not seen or talked to in quite awhile. The first person that I was surprised to reconnect with was Tomasz Plonowski. Tomasz and I had been friends in middle school before he moved with his family to Poland when we were in the 8th grade. His family moved back to the area about a year later, but they settled down a town over in Gurnee and really never got in touch with each other. I’m pretty sure there was a time during a college break where I got together along with another friend from middle school. So prior to going out for breakfast with Tomasz at Denny’s, it had probably been at least 10 years since we last hung out. So you better believe we had a lot of catching up to do.

The other person I was surprised to run into was Daniel Bressler. I know him from our time in college as members of the same fraternity, Pi Kappa Phi. I actually ran into him while I was at the local Walmart buying decorations for my holiday mini sessions. Meanwhile, he is currently working seasonally for Nintendo so he was there that day helping to setup a display at the store. I really just happened to be wandering the store at the right time to run into him. We talked for a little while and made plans to get together at some point in the new year.

Tuvara & John | Gender Reveal

One of the things I love most about photography is the fact that it brings a nice bit of variety to my life. In my work as a photographer I’ve certainly had quite the assortment of sessions and know that there are great deal more sessions that I have yet to do. I’m always happy when I get inquiries for a type of session I have not previously done. So naturally when Tuvara and John contacted me about photographing their gender reveal session, I was looking forward to capturing this moment for them.

Pielmeier & Peterschmidt Families

If these families look familiar, it’s because it wasn’t all that long ago since the other time I photographed them. The previous time I saw these families was back in late July when I was photographing the wedding of Katie and Dylan. On this day in mid October, I made the trek up to Holy Hill to both some individual and combined family photos. Started off this session by getting some photos of Katie and Dylan with their son. Then the timing worked out well so that right about the time that was winding down, Katie’s sister, Andrea, and her husband, Adam, showed up along with their three boys. From there I mostly focused on Andrea’s family, but also got a few shots in between of the two families together.

Janeth & Sean | Engagement

It’s interesting seeing firsthand how the world is so small sometimes and how people can be interconnected without our knowledge. I vaguely remember Janeth from high school since we both went to Waukegan and graduated the same year. However, the real surprise came after the shoot when I was telling my mum about how the engagement shoot had gone and happened to mention Janeth’s name. Soon my mum realized that she knew Janeth is a former paraprofessional my mum used to work with. In a situation like this you realize how small the world is sometimes.

Janeth and Sean’s engagement session happened in early October. Originally we were planning on having this session at a barn out in McHenry, however, they decided they wanted a bit more of a natural backdrop. So I suggested a couple different local forest preserves and they decided on Van Patten Woods after paying it a visit the day before our session. An added benefit of them visiting the day before was the fact that they had a pretty good idea of spots where they wanted to take photos.

October 2019

The work to life balance continues to be a little out of whack since I’m more focused on my business at the moment. For work I had interesting assortment of jobs in the month of October and took me to some new and interesting places for the first time. The first few weeks of the month, I had a gig of one kind or another. My first photo gig of the month was local as I did an engagement session for a former classmate of mine and her fiancé at Van Patten Woods. The first new location that I visited this month was Holy Hill in Hubertus, WI. Since the family session was later in the day, I decided to head up on the early side and do a little bit of wandering of my own. Then the following week, I ran a photo booth for my niece’s birthday party.

The end of the month turned out to be a little hectic as I had 3 different gigs over the weekend and the 1 final gig to close out the month. The final Saturday of October started out with me doing my first gender reveal session. Then in the afternoon on Saturday, I did some before photos of a house that a friend of mine recently bought and will be having remodeled. For Sunday, I made my first trip to Morton Arboretum for an awesome engagement session. To closeout the month of October, I had a friend of mine stop by for a headshot session.

Now as I previously stated, my social life was fairly calm this past month. After the family portrait session at Holy Hill, I came back home spent some time hanging with my buddy and former coworker, Carl, at his place. The following weekend, Carl and I managed to finally find a time when another former coworker, Chris Mallon, could join us. We ended up going out to Salutos for pizza and some well overdue catching up. Although, I did run a little late that evening because I decided to stop by ZombieWauk beforehand. Then on Halloween night, I decided to dress as Shaggy from Scooby-Doo and go on the Waukegan Main Street’s Boos and Brews Bar Crawl. I ended up catching up with the people on that bar crawl at Win Win and followed it up from there with 17 North and Green Town Tavern later.

The month of November is likely to be more of the same with mostly business with a little bit of fun mixed in. So far I have shoots tentatively planned for the next two weekends with a family session next weekend and an engagement session the following weekend. I’m also working to on getting together a Christmas mini session perhaps for Small Business Saturday if all goes well. My studio presents a unique challenge for me, but I’m going to work hard to figure out how to best utilize it. Currently, I don’t have much in the way of social planned, but I am looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with my family. Well, that’s all for now until next time.

Larsen Family | 2019

The annual family portrait session with the Larsens happened the last weekend of September. Just a few days before we were unsure if we would have to reschedule since there was rain in the forecast for that day. Luckily for us the weather held off and we managed to have their session as scheduled. It so cool getting to photograph the Larsen family year after year and seeing first hand how much the kids, Kitty and Rocky, have changed. Also, I was happy that we had this session at Roosevelt Park since I wanted to have one there for quite awhile.

Ryan & Billy | Wedding

To date, Ryan and Billy’s wedding in September is the furthest I’ve traveled to do photography. Their wedding happened at Brighton Acres in Oshkosh, WI. I was really hoping that we would get a chance to explore the grounds a bit more, however, we decided it was best to stay inside for photos since it was a very blustery outside. If you look at the full gallery, you may notice hints of Disney in some of the details. The reason for this is because they are big Disney fans and they even met while they were in the Disney College Program.

Ashley & Isaiah | Wedding

After traveling to Wisconsin and Indiana for weddings the previous two weekends, it was a welcomed relief to photograph a local wedding once again. Ashley and Isaiah’s wedding day helped to remind me how unique every wedding day really can be. Going into this wedding day, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect since I had photographed a wedding at Bowen Park a few weeks prior. However, I soon found out my thinking was a little off in that regard.

A couple differences that I noticed early on was the seating layout and energy from the guest from the previous wedding I photographed at Bowen. Granted what sets this wedding a part from others in my mind was the fact that ceremony started much later than planned. I’m used to weddings occasionally being behind schedule and the ceremony starting a little, however, this one ended up beginning almost 50 minutes late. The reason for this drastic of a delay was the officiant was running late and then got caught in a bit of a fender bender. I did my best in dealing with this delay and I’m only a little disappointed that my time photographing the bride and groom together was limited.

Nancy & Cary | Wedding

In my attempt to get caught up on posting, I am now in the month of August. This wedding was my the third weekend in a row with a wedding booking and was the first time ever photographing a wedding in the state of Indiana. As a result, I made the rookie mistake of leaving a little later than was ideal and being nervous that I wouldn’t make it for my planned start time. In the end, I can happily say I did make it just in the nick of time.

Probably what stands out most in my memory of this wedding was how was the rules the officiant had for the the ceremony. For the processional portion of the ceremony, I was allowed to be at the front of the church. However, after that portion was finished, I was expected to be in the row after the last seated group of people. I guess I can be thankful that the wedding was on the smaller side.