What’s ahead in 2016

Welcome spring! The first official day of Spring was yesterday, and even though it was cold and we saw a few snowflakes, we’re excited for what this season brings. Spring means wedding season, and wedding season means lots of joyful days watching our couples exchange vows, and celebrate with their friends and families. It also means we get to step away from full business mode, and dive back into our creative mindsets as we work to create timeless and beautiful images, preserving our couples’ love stories. This weekend marks the official start of our “busy season” and we’re hitting it off with one heck of a long weekend! We’ll jump into wedding season with a wedding, a big styled shoot, and two engagement sessions in 4 days! As we prepare for this weekend and the months ahead, we thought it would be good to share the direction we want to take our work in 2016. Here’s a small list of what’s to come in the wedding season ahead…

 

A refined brand!

We’re right in the middle of a complete brand overhaul! As we type, the amazing Katie Durski of Ribbon and Ink. She is taking our current brand to a new level, elevating it to where we’ve always wanted it to be. We just approved our new logo design, and we can’t wait to share it! Don’t worry, we aren’t completely starting from scratch. Over the years, we’ve unknowingly developed the core of our brand, and some pieces of it are exactly right. Other parts need some help, and Katie is bringing everything together around our vision for Birds of a Feather Photography. In the coming months we’ll celebrate the launch of our brand new website, blog, logo and overall brand image. Along the way, we might even share sneak peeks of what to expect, just like this snipped of a brand board Katie designed for us! Below you can see just a little bit of visual imagery Katie is using to lead the artistic design of the rebrand project. We’re in love and can’t wait to see where she takes it!

 

 

Quality over quantity 

This may get a little technical, but as photographers we want to focus more on slowing down, and really seeing what’s in front of us. We’re self admitted over shooters, especially on a wedding day. This year, we want to dive deeper into a state of conscious shooting, hitting that shutter with even more intention and focus than before. Now don’t get us wrong, we’ve never just rapid fire shot with our fingers crossed. No, no. We’ve always had a sense of documentary storytelling as a basis for how we photograph a wedding day. Rarely do we tell our couples to “fake” something or “pretend” to create a photo. We want our images to be real and authentic. This year, we want to take it a step further and put even more effort into staying very aware of what’s going on around us, looking and waiting for the real moments and emotions that we could be missing if we are focused on getting through a list of “must have” photos. Never will it be necessary to take or deliver 72 images of the Bride’s bouquet. The couples we work with value photography immensely, but they also value the integrity of their photography. Our couples would much prefer to have 6 to 8 impeccable photos of the bouquet, making room for more photos of moments and people. We’ll be doing our best to remember that delivering 1000’s of pretty good photos to our couples is not the best for them. Rather, delivering 500 or 600 gorgeous, take your breath away photos is best for everyone.

 

Embracing our love of black and white

We talked about our love for black and white photography a few months ago. After realizing that we had been denying ourselves and our couples more of this beautiful and timeless style of photography, because somewhere we heard black and white photos were “bad”, we decided to embrace our style and bring black and white back into our editing process. In the coming wedding season, we’ll be leaning a little more into the black and white post production world, and we’re so excited about it! This doesn’t mean color will go away. Heck no! Color is everything but we’re making a small adjustment in how many photos we deliver in black and white. If before we delivered photos that were 80% color and 20% black and white, we’ll now deliver a ratio closer to 60/40. Still more color, still plenty of color, but even more gorgeous black and white images will be added to the mix!

 

An even better client experience

Along with our rebrand efforts with Ribbon and Ink, we’re updating elements of the things we deliver to our couples, and elevating their experience while working with us. Almost 6 years ago when we began this business, we automatically felt the need to spoil our couples and create an experience for them that helped them understand how much they meant to us. This idea was second nature to us, and wasn’t something we learned at a workshop. We’re the type who likes to deliver baskets of cookies, tea and flowers to the new neighbors across the street, and we never arrive to a dinner party without a hostess gift. It’s just who we are. Now a days, “spoiling your clients” is a thing. New businesses are born weekly, as a way for photographers to easily send gifts to their clients. Showing our appreciating is genuine and not a marketing tool for us, but with this pop in the industry, so many resources are coming out of the woodworks! This means we can take full advantage and revamp the little gifts we send our couples along the way. From our welcome gifts to every hand written note we send along the way, we want our couples to know how much we appreciate them and love working with them. The look of our packaging will evolve and we just love getting our hands on pretty ribbons and boxes!