A Soft & Feminine Día de los Muertos Shoot

May 25, 2012 in Styled Photo Shoots by Kat | 1 comment

“Almost 2 years ago I saw a beautiful Día de los Muertos painting”, photographer Ashley Forrette writes. “It was the first time I really looked at anything Day of the Dead-related that was not a kitschy nicknack or halloween costume sold at Hot Topic, but actually a really beautiful piece of art. It was soft, and feminine, and dark… romantic even. I fell in love and immediately I knew I wanted to someday shoot a bridal photo session inspired by that painting.”

After some big plans that were nigh-on impossible to pull off, Ashley decided to just keep the shoot simple and make it happen! “The ideas I had for it in my head were too grand and overwhelming to actually think about pulling off. I wanted to go to the desert during a windstorm, I wanted a $7000 dress, and a herd of wild horses… etc. etc. All things that seemed too big to coordinate for a shoot without a budget and for no real reason other than fun. One morning I woke up and realized not doing the shoot just because it couldn’t be as big as my imagination wouldn’t help me at all. It wasn’t a good excuse anymore. Why not do the shoot here in Portland with what I have and try to make it the best I can with my available resources? Why not start somewhere and see where it goes? Why not go for it, just for the experience, for the process, and for creativity rather than letting the fear of failure keep me from doing anything at all?”

And so she did. She pulled together an incredible team of creatives (credited at the bottom of this post) and made her dream become a reality. I love it!

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A Homemade Tipi Wedding in Wales: Nathan & Laura

May 25, 2012 in British Brides, Wedding by Kat | 10 comments

When I get wedding submissions like Nathan & Laura’s I’m literally bursting at the seams to get them published. So sometimes I sneakily share a picture or two on my facebook page. The shot I shared of Nathan’s reaction when seeing his bride walking down the aisle totally encompassed this awesome wedding. And it would appear you guys loved it too – over 200 likes and I didn’t even show you the stunning bride! Well the wait is over my friends, I’m sure you’ll agree it was worth it and that his face was 100% justified. Just look at her!

After proposing with a ‘Laura will you marry me?’ tattoo (!) the couple got to planning their wedding for earlier this month. The celebration was held at Penybanc Farm, hosted by Welsh Green Weddings, and the relaxed vibe of the farm really set the tone for the whole day.

“We had a marquee which was put up by made by Roger, Simone and team at Welsh Green Weddings“, the couple explained. “We then added our own personal touches including bunting made by the Mother of the bride and hearts on line made by both our Mothers and the groom’s daughters. Our wishing tree was made by the Mother of the bride and the cake stand was made by Laura. We had individual homemade ‘plant pot’ cakes too. We had tea cups and saucers for favours which we collected from car boots and charity shops. The bridal bouquet was made out of of vintage buttons and featured items from both our grandmothers, Edelweiss (Austrian relatives) and the Father of the bride’s numbers from his police uniform. As Nathan proposed to Laura with a ‘Laura will you marry me?’ tattoo, we also had temporary tattoos as favours and both of us had our own ‘secret tattoos’ on the day.”

“Think about the kind of people you are and who you are going to invite” the couple advised when I asked them what influenced their wedding, “in our case we knew that around a third of the guests would be under 12, so a venue where children and their parents could feel relaxed and excited was important to us. Being true to your self is vital and having some sort of connection with the people running the venue as well as a faith in their professionalism helps enormously. For us, when we went to see Simone and Roger at Pennybanc we knew we were on the same wavelength.”

“A professional photographer is also totally worth the money” they continued. “The married couples we spoke to who hadn’t had one said it was their only regret from their own weddings. If you can, budget with them at the centre and book them early on. Nicola from Daffodil Waves Photography was amazing.”

“Don’t get too hung up on being original”, they concluded. “Wedding blogs and magazines are great to help you think about things and give inspiration, but they can also be intimidating and make you feel that your ideas are ‘old hat’. It ebbs and flows so don’t compete. We both like Elvis and vintage style so it was inevitably going to feature in the music and look of the day, but we didn’t want it to be to ‘themed’. We wanted to have a structure to the day but it also had to have enough flexibility in it to to deal with overruns and the unexpected…and we wanted unexpected things to happen!”

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Thursday Treats: 24th May 2012

May 24, 2012 in Thursday Treats by Kat | 5 comments

Photography Credit: via Lisa Harris Jewellery (new site launching early June – more of these on the blog soon!)

This week I was interviewed by Photo Night Live about my blogging workshops (via Skype – scary!) and it will be available for you to have a gander at, via their website, from 7pm (gmt) tomorrow. I have a horrible feeling I was talking at about 100 mph, but we’ll see when it’s published I guess! l’ll share the video on my blog (in the Green Room) on Monday as well because I’ll be launching my next workshop date at midday! Oooh I wonder where our sparkly pink tour bus will be taking us next?

So what have I been up to for the rest of the week? Well mainly researching Thursday Treats it would seem. Oh it’s a hard life!

♥ Can using different types of models benefit brands – a really interesting piece investigating the fashion industry’s obsession with only using young, skinny and (more often than not) white models and why this could be hindering sales.
♥ White on white beach wedding. Just stunning.
♥ Rainbow Parasol Wedding
♥ A pink house!
♥ Beautiful bridals
♥ Join Gala for her mega love fest!! Her radical self love webcasts are AWESOME and just what you need if you’ve been feeling down on yourself. I dare you not to feel empowered and positive after spending some time with Gala!
♥ Bohemian Romance In The Woods
♥ A Whimsical Vaudeville Wedding
♥ Zoe’s 10 things I love about Tokyo article makes me wanna go back so BAD!
♥ A blissful Stockholm cherry blossom wedding – love that pink dress!

Photography Credit: 2 Brides

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A 1920s Speakeasy Carnival Themed Wedding: Emily & Jesse

May 24, 2012 in Wedding by Kat | 8 comments

Vintage themes aren’t always my bag, but throw a 1920s carnival idea at me and I go weak at the knees! A strong theme like this, done really really well, gets me very excited indeed.

Emily & Jesse were married at The Voorhies Mansion at Edenvale Winery. It provided the perfect canvas for their creative ideas! “I would encourage anyone planning a wedding to use wedding tradition as a springboard and focus on the experience you want your guests taking away from your event,” newlywed Emily told me. “My husband and I went through the traditional wedding/reception order and activities and then changed what didn’t work for us. Everything was a conscious choice from writing the hilarious ceremony with our officiant to deciding to have four bouquets which I presented to my mom, MIL and grandmothers. Once we knew what we wanted we could be very clear with all of our vendors about our ideas and every single one of them bent over backwards to help make it happen. Our guests still tell us it was the most fun, memorable wedding they’ve ever been to and that is exactly what we were going for.”

The speakeasy carnival theme was everywhere – from the homemade stationery, to the food, to the performers. “We have many talented friends and family who contributed performances that totally made the party,” Emily continued. “My sister sang old jazz standards before and during the ceremony, and friends performed our wedding ceremony, performed aerial silks during dinner, taught the Charleston to our guests, fire danced or played the part of a fortune teller, flapper or mime. True Love Sound not only took care of music but were great MCs and with their help we made a silent movie reenacting how me met… it was totally hilarious! You can see it here along with our guests’ reactions in the video below.”

“We also included a note on our invitations and on our wedding site to let guests know that we encouraged them to dress up to fit the theme in any way they wanted… And they DID! It was fantastic! I also want to thank Heather Goodwin, owner of An Inspired Affair, for being my advocate the day of our wedding. She helped me with all of the logistics while we planned and made sure I could have fun by knowing everything was taken care of on the day of.”

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A Quirky Brazilian Wedding Planned in Just Two Months: Juliana & Tomas

May 24, 2012 in Wedding by Kat | 9 comments

Organised in just two months, Juliana & Tomas’ wedding was held in Brazil on the very date that they first met. The bride explains, “Tomas & I met two years ago through a mutual friend. At that time, Tomas lived in New York and I lived in Sao Paulo. In December 2009, Tomas went to Brazil to work and our friend invited him to spend New Year’s Eve in a house I’d rented at the beach. We spent 6 days together and, two months later, we met again, but this time in New York. We started a long-distance relationship, which lasted just 4 months, because I decided to come to New York. My plan was to spend a season in New York, study and invest in our relationship. Back then, we were very uncertain about our relationship’s future, but now we have no doubt we made the best decision.”

“At the end of October 2011, he proposed me and the only thing that we were sure at that time was that we would get married in Brazil in the same date that we met. The tough part – we had less than two months to organize our wedding. We wanted a small wedding, just the closest friends and our family, but Tomas also wanted a ‘wedding that didn’t look like a wedding’. We wanted a party with our touch, our style.”

“So in order to do that we made as much as possible ourselves. We did our own wedding invitations, we painted jars, and we took care of every small detail of the party. We flew from New York to Rio de Janeiro with two bags full of decor items. We really wanted something different and unique, a non-standard wedding. We spent the morning before our wedding together at the hotel’s swimming pool, we helped each other get dressed, and we got dressed in the same room, where some friends stopped by for a pre-party.”

Juliana wore a Cymbeline wedding dress with a striking red headpiece and carried a homemade bouquet created out of felt hearts. ”My dress added a dash of fun style and my bouquet and the wedding cake were also unusual. The ceremony was performed by our mutual friend, our parents and siblings. Chef Damien was in charge of a vegetarian menu. We left a Polaroid camera available to our friends and some of the most memorable pics were taken with the photo booth props. If you asked me what I would change in the wedding, I would say ‘nothing, it was a perfect party!’”

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Why You Should Offer an Album: A Guest Post by Lisa Devlin

May 25, 2012 in Green Room, Guest Posts by Kat | 8 comments

As a wedding photographer, are you including an album with every package that you offer clients? I didn’t used to but I have recently changed this so that I do.

It’s been a huge few years for wedding photography. The arrival of affordable digital SLRs have of course impacted massively on how many people now offer their services as wedding photographers. It feels like a buyers market a lot of the time as anyone looking to book a wedding photographer in the UK has a huge amount of us to choose from. Potential clients are often putting their demands in at the initial enquiry stage instead of waiting to see what you offer.  As an extreme example, I had this in my inbox a while back…

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to you regarding a wedding taking place on XX of XXXXXX 2012.

If you are available for this date, I have a bride and groom looking for a photographer to capture a full day. They are, however, on an extremely tight budget.  The absolute maximum they may be able to stretch to, would be £400 for the total costings. The wedding is in XXXX Church with the reception to follow, down the road. It was originally planned that a friend would be photographing the events of the day, but it has recently come to light that this may not now be possible.

Ideally they are looking for the following:
2 Photographers
Coverage from preparation to first dance
Full copyright of all pictures
An Album

Needless to say I responded with ‘Dear Sir/Madam, thanks for your truly delightful email but I am busy for that day, in fact that whole year.’ I have also had lots of enquiries that state “We don’t need an album as we will be doing our own”. Of course if you are including the high resolution files in their package then they are very welcome to. But check up on those clients a year or even two down the line and see if they ever made that album. Or go back through your weddings and look at who was definitely going to order an album from you and see if they ever did. In the planning stages of a wedding, a few hundred pounds on an album to proudly display your wedding day can seem perfectly reasonable in the grand scheme of things. However after the wedding, when maybe the washing machine breaks down or they start to think about having a family, that chunk of money on a wedding album can now seem like quite a lot to find. Two thirds of couples overspend significantly on their wedding budget and often take quite some time to pay it all off. As photographers you will find that more often than not you will be missing the window of opportunity on providing a wedding album.

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The Inspirations: Naomi Davis of The Rockstar Diaries

May 23, 2012 in Green Room by Kat | 13 comments

Photography Credit: Carissa Gallo

I discovered Naomi’s blog, The Rockstar Diaries, in early 2009, when she published her wedding photographs. I immediately fell in love with her and her husband Josh’s effortless style and achingly cool attitude. I loved the way they shared cute little stories about their life as newlyweds – getting married, setting up home, moving from New York to DC, getting their dog Kingsley, having their first child, Eleanor… It was all very unpretentious and honest and I felt connected with them instantly.

So I thought Naomi would be the perfect person to interview today. If you have a blog and you worry about what to share about yourself, then Naomi and her family are the perfect role models to inspire you.

Hi Naomi, I’ve followed your blog for years and I’m so excited to have you in the Green Room today. For those readers that might not know who you are, could you briefly introduce yourself?

I’m Naomi (also known as Taza in the blogging world) and I live in Washington DC with my husband, Josh, and 16 month old baby girl, Eleanor. In 2 or 3 weeks, we’ll be adding a new member to the family as I’m due with our second child, a boy, in early June! We also have an English bulldog named Kingsley who is sort of our world.  We love him dearly.

My husband and I met while attending school in New York City (him, Columbia, me, Juilliard). We were married in NYC and lived there for a few years before making our way to DC about 3 years ago.  I started our little blog shortly after we were married as a way to share our wedding photos with family and friends. After I posted our wedding photos, I continued to update here and there about our newly wed lives in NYC and it sort of just took on a life of its own from there.  I never started my blog with the intention or desire to gain a large following or make money from it. We never advertised our blog or pushed it out there… I remember when we first started receiving comments from people we didn’t know… It made me terribly nervous and I almost made it private. But it’s been a wonderful experience (for the most part, ha!) and I’m thankful for it.  I’ve met some of my best friends through blogging, find constant inspiration and support from fellow bloggers and feel fortunate for the opportunities and experiences that have come our way because of it.

Is your blog your full time job and what role does your husband Josh play in the business?

I got my BFA in dance at Juilliard and was teaching up until Eleanor’s birth.  At the moment, I find motherhood to be my full time job. Although I’ll admit that our blog could definitely be considered a full time gig if we allowed it.

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Doing Things for Yourself & The Benefit of Unpublished Work

May 22, 2012 in Green Room by Kat | 10 comments

I was struggling this week with what to talk about. I sat starting at a blank page for what felt like hours begging for the inspiration to come. I started to look through my draft articles hoping that a past explored idea might jump out at me and evoke a new article of genius…and then it hit me. I’ve written a lot of articles that I’ve never published. For various reasons really, but when I looked at them all as a collective group I realised something striking – that in every single instance the unpublished works are ones that have been written more for myself than the benefit of others. There isn’t really an overall message or lesson within them, but I find writing writing very cathartic, and the time I’ve spent writing these articles has actually been time spent working through certain ideas or problems in my mind.

Some of the articles have gone on to build the foundations of other ideas (workshop topics, things for the print magazine, the beginnings of other posts) while the rest have just sat there, for no one else to see. It’s also probably no coincidence that the majority of these unpublished works tend to be my way of dealing with negative experiences or feelings. I guess it’s been a little like writing a diary. No one else needs to read it for it to serve it’s purpose.

So I started wondering if any of you ever do the same with whatever line of work you’re in. Photographers, do you ever do shoots and never share them? Designers, do you ever draw up concepts that never make your final collections? I would imagine some of you do, but for the rest of you, if not I’d encourage you to do it. Sometimes when I decide it’s best not to publish something I feel deflated, like I’ve wasted hours on something that no one else is going to see. This is entirely flawed thinking as to explore and experiment without the constant need to share is actually completely freeing. It enables you to be honest with yourself and explore ideas you otherwise wouldn’t for fear of of judgement. Maybe it’s something dark, or scary, or just simply irrelevant to your line of work. That doesn’t mean that spending some time exploring it is time wasted.

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If You Love Her, Let Her Grow: A Guest Post by Gareth Williams

May 18, 2012 in Green Room, Guest Posts by Gareth | 72 comments

Almost exclusively the Green Room centres on the successful businesses, the people who run them and the strategies they employ to get, and stay, where they are. These are all super-important and you should be learning something from every article but we have absolutely neglected something equally critical from these pages. Something it took me too long and too much effort to realise on my own.

You might have already read about how this blog came to be, Kat has written about it on a couple of occasions but it’s necessary to go over it one more time to get this rarely discussed point across. This time the story will be from my perspective. And as everybody knows there are always two sides to a story.

A few years ago Kat was working nightshifts, five days a week, including covering the weekends. I was running a small IT company with a friend who I knew from college. In spite of my innovative ideas the business was merely treading water and the work was extremely stressful. I vividly recall several times when one wrong move would have lost millions of pounds worth of data, forever. As much as I love computers (and working with enterprise servers and infrastructure is awesomely exciting) I love my wife even more, she was my only motivation. Providing for my wife was the only reason I stayed at it. I wasn’t making much money but I had the potential, if things really took off, to give us a comfortable life.

The problem was our work schedules conflicted horribly; we had two short evenings in the week when we could spend any time together. Out of this we spawned ‘date night’, which I later found out is nowhere near a unique idea. We would go out to a restaurant, see a movie, and just spend ‘quality time’ together, which I later found out is also a euphemism. This worked really well for a while, until the blog started to take more of Kat’s time. While not working her day (night) job, Kat was busy working on the blog. Seeking out new photographers, posting content, and getting involved in forums and groups. It didn’t take long until I spent more of our date night staring at the back of a mobile phone than into my wife’s eyes. This was a serious issue, more so since at this stage the blog was making no money (we did not accept advertising requests until much later) so it seemed like a sacrifice without purpose. I felt like the only thing that was, is, important to me was becoming harder and harder to reach.

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Ask me Anything…

May 16, 2012 in Green Room by Kat | 12 comments

Photography Credit: Made U Look Photography (being shot in New York – more on the blog soon!)

I’m not calling today’s interview an Inspirations interview because just the thought of me doing that make me die a little inside (!) However on returning from The States on Monday I realised I didn’t have an interview lined up this week (whoops!) and on such a short lead time the only person I could turn to to get the answers back to me on time was…well…me. Thank you to everyone on twitter & facebook who helped this be a less cringe-worthy experience by submitting questions. If you have a burning question that I haven’t covered then leave it in the comments and if I get enough I’ll do another round of them soon!

How did you get started? When did you realise it was a full-time-oh-my-God-this-is-a-massive-success jobby?? (Giddy Weddings via twitter)

My story isn’t that remarkable or different to that of many people who get into the wedding industry. I started my blog when I was planning my own wedding to Gareth in 2007. At the time I didn’t even consider this could become a career, I simply wanted a place to collate all my wedding ideas and inspiration. Throughout my planning I discovered American wedding blogs. I loved the instant nature of blogging – how you could comment and feel part of a community and I wanted to join in!

After our wedding was over I didn’t want to give up weddings or blogging so I decided to morph my blog into a place for alternative wedding inspiration – i.e sharing other people’s weddings and not just my own. Although I loved the wedding blogs I’d found throughout my plans, none of them catered to the specific kind of bride or style of wedding that I had really wanted to find – the alternative, the offbeat and the Rock n Roll. I also noticed that none of these blogs I was reading were from the UK and so that probably meant that most UK brides were only having wedding magazines as their point of inspiration. I loved reading magazines throughout my planning (although in all honestly probably just because I felt like I was finally ‘allowed’ too!) but although gorgeous and beautiful, they were not showing the kinds of weddings I found inspiring at all. I think if a blog like mine had been around in 2007/2008 our wedding would have turned out very differently indeed!

It still blows my mind to think about where my blog has got me today. Every day (literally!) I’m shocked, surprised and honoured by the things I’m able to do because of it. I guess the very first event that made me think “oh crap maybe this could actually be a thing” would have been back in the summer of 2008 when I was still working as a producer of a shopping channel. I’d been running the blog as a secret hobby since late 2007 and one of my managers at work somehow found it and called me into his office. I thought I was in trouble for sure! However he told me that he loved the concept and the idea and that he was sure I could make something more of it. He took me to a few meetings and the like, and although nothing really came of them, his confidence in me and the brand really gave me a kick in the right direction. More solidly, it felt pretty good when I was finally earning enough to quit my job to blog full time!

I always recognize you by your hair! I was wondering if you feel that it’s a part of your brand and if you’d ever change it up? (Catherine Guidry via facebook)

Hum…yes…no…maybe. This is actually a really hard question and something I have thought about a lot recently! I love having pink hair, it feels very natural to me like it was the colour I was supposed to always have. As a teenager I flirted with every colour under the sun but I always came back to pink. These days I do like how it makes me stand out in a crowd (attention whore, me?!) and that when people see me at events or whatever they always know it’s me… but sometimes I do think that maybe it defines me too much you know? It’s kinda scary to think that without the pink hair people might not know who I was.

It actually makes me feel quite vulnerable thinking I might one day be without it. I definitely think my hair is very strongly associated with my brand and so I do wonder, would I fade into the background without it?! Who knows…I don’t think I’d ever go back to having ‘normal’ hair but maybe I will change up the shade one day. Let’s put it this way, I’m looking forward to being a granny with a purple rinse!

Photography Credit: Joanna Brown Photography (‘Desperate Housewife’ editorial

How do you decide what weddings or shoots to feature? (Lucy Carter via facebook)

It’s basically all down to my own personal taste. I started the blog with no other agenda than to share the kinds of weddings I loved but didn’t see represented in the wedding media. Even though the blog has grown exponentially that hasn’t changed at all. The most important things I look out for are:

♥ A unique idea or theme. I want to share weddings to inspire my readers and make them think “wow, I would have never thought of that.” I do not want to share weddings that you’d see on every other wedding blog. I admire what many of the other blogs do and feature but it’s just not for me. I want to show new, different and exciting ideas.

♥ Details. First and foremost a wedding is all about a couple in love and dedicating their lives to each other. However a wedding blog is primarily there to inspire other brides and grooms for their own weddings and so generally I want them to be full of lots of cool ‘stuff’ and ideas. Clear and clean photographs of things like stationery, clothing, accessories, flowers, cakes, props etc are really important.

However I have featured many weddings that could be described as detail-light. Sometimes the most simple wedding can be really inspiring, just in a different way. Maybe the vibe or the couple and their love really stands out, or maybe the photographs are truly epic. My readers tend to have very similar tastes to me so if I love something often my readers will too!

♥ Great Photography. It makes me really sad when I’m submitted an awesome looking wedding but the photography is naff or just darn right awful and doesn’t show the wedding in the best way. Sure, I understand not everyone has the budget for a wedding photographer, but if getting your wedding featured on my blog is something you’d like to be able to do then professional photography is nearly always a requirement. I have featured weddings where there was no pro photographer but these are few and far between.

A professional photographer will shoot things in a way to show them clearly to people that weren’t at the wedding and that’s the kind of stuff I need to be sharing.

Photography Credit: Devlin Photos (‘Rock n Rainbow‘ editorial)

What made you decide to make the change from working and writing a blog to writing a blog full-time and what lessons did you learn about that transition? (SixteenEighteen via twitter)

I didn’t start my blog in order for it to become a business. However when I was earning enough money to supplement a portion of my income from my full-time job I decided to go part-time. I set myself (monetary) targets to reach before I did this and I certainly didn’t recklessly decide to just quit and see what happened (I probably would have done but Gareth was very strict!) Then, when I was earning as much from the blog as I was from my job we decided that it was time for me to quit completely. I was very lucky because my previous employer offered me the option of working for them on a freelance basis if I ever wanted or needed to, so I always had that added bit of security. Luckily I’ve never had to go back!

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About The Green Room

The Green Room is the backstage area of Rock n Roll Bride, a quiet place to read about and discuss all things related to running your own wedding-related business.

I strongly believe that the most important thing in any business is being your own person, standing out, having a different outlook or opinion and giving your clients a reason to invest in you. This is what I want to achieve with The Green Room - to give you a place to figure out your personal path in a non-judgmental and friendly space.

Each week we'll discuss topics related to running your own business as well as read interviews with some of the most inspirational people I know.

So sit down, grab a cup of coffee and lets muddle our way through together!

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