The other day I photographed a wedding at Castle Hill in Newport. While almost the entire wedding was shot digitally, we also did a few rolls of instant Fuji peel apart film on the Mamiya Universal Press camera. I love that this medium format camera from 1974 is still bringing joy.

Yesterday I photographed Mangmang and Yinqing’s wedding at Castle Hill, Newport. It was the perfect May day in New England. These are just a few portraits of Mangmang. Their full wedding day story is coming soon.

I’m not someone who picked up a camera when I was 3 or even 15 — photography came later. Long before I ever took a photograph, I was drawing and painting. I had a hard time with color so in college I majored in Printmaking, which generally has limited color and relies more on drawing and line. Now, years later, I love color. Photographing weddings — especially when there are beautiful landscapes and floral arrangements — has helped me to see color in a new way. And so before the wedding season craziness kicks in, I’m enjoying color more freely through painting. Here’s something I painted this past week.

There are some great prizes from Zenfolio, RedTree Albums, Pictage, Fundy, Renaissance Albums, LensProToGo, and more! Plus drinks, appetizers, and a photo booth. It should be fun and all of the proceeds go to Photo Nights Boston. You can learn more about Wednesday’s event and purchase tickets here.

Hope to see you all there!

Every Spring I make one or two flush mount sample wedding albums. My 2013 album just arrived. I love it.

Every one of my clients receives an online gallery for viewing, sharing, printing, and downloading their wedding photos. I used a few gallery systems before I found one that I really loved. I had some specific criteria: large and beautiful photo display, digital download capabilities, zipped downloads of client favorites (for album selections), the option to either self-fulfill or do third-party fulfillment, branding customization, self-marketing campaigns and client communication, and finally, ease of client use. In 2011 I found all of these features in Zenfolio.

There are several fun things that my clients can do with their galleries:

• Share their wedding gallery with friends & family
• Mark and share their favorites and then send a link to those photos to friends and family
• View their photos as a full-screen slideshow
• Select their album picks and send a link to me for album designing
• Purchase professional prints and digital downloads for themselves or as gifts

• Upload galleries directly from Lightroom
• Download entire galleries on my iPad, optimized for mobile display, for showing at client meetings
• Have off-site backup and storage for my high-resolution files. If I ever lost a file (or was just too lazy to go through my hard drives to find it), I could download the high-res photo directly from the gallery.
• Provide vendors requesting photos with a quick and easy way to search for and download web-res files with a copyright release for online business use (yeah, this is a HUGE time saver)
• Offer professional quality prints & third-party fulfillment from Miller’s and MpixPro (to name a few). Yes, that means I just view their oder online and check for cropping and then zap — it’s printed and delivered directly to them in a few days. If I want to provide clients with something different from my other favorite printer – ProDPI – I can offer those products through Zenfolio and just self-fulfill.

And yes, compared with the fees I was paying for previous gallery systems, Zenfolio wins in that department too. By a long shot.

If you decide you’d like to try Zenfolio, here’s my referral code: F1N-Q7T-QJN. If you’d like to view a complete gallery and see how I set these up, here’s a sample.