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.

Concha | Pet

When I got a call back in June inquiring if I did pet photography, I immediately said yes since I assumed the subject would be a dog. So I was a little taken back when I found this pet session was going to be for a turtle. Honestly for most this conversation, I thought this might be some kind of strange practical joke so I just went about discussing plans for the session like a normal inquiry and thought eventually person on the other end of the line would reveal that they were messing with me. So when the conversation came to an end with the plan to have this session on the turtle’s birthday I as certainly a little surprised. And that folks is the story of how my last photo session of the month of July ended up being with Concha the turtle at Bevier Park.

Katie & Dylan | Wedding

It feels kind of fitting that I’m posting photos from Katie and Dylan’s wedding today since I saw them just this past weekend for a family session of them with their son, Landon. When you finally see photos from that session, it’ll probably be a sign that I’m getting close to getting caught on my posting. Although, for now I’m still getting caught up and as a result, here are photos from Katie and Dylan’s wedding that happened back on the last Saturday of July. It certainly was interesting having a client with the same name as myself. On the plus side, there was no way I was going to forget the groom’s name. Of course at the beginning of the day there was a little confusion as to which of us was being called when people said, “Dylan”. By the end of the day, people became pretty good about just referring to me as “the photographer” to make things less complicated.

September 2019

I have a mixture of emotions about the past month. On one hand the positive is that I had a decent amount of work and had a decent amount of social events during this month. In fact, the second weekend of September definitely goes down as one of the more hectic ones that I’ve had during my time as a photographer. On Friday the 13th, I photographed the wedding of Billy and Ryan at Brighton Acres in Oshkosh, WI. The next day on Saturday, I did photography for Faith in Place’s Green Team Summit and VIP Reception at the Field Museum in Chicago. Once that was over I hurried back to Waukegan so I could do an hour of photography at birthday party as well.

It was a bit of a blessing that after that weekend, I had a couple weeks free to get caught up on editing photos from that weekend. Me and my folks decided to celebrate getting caught up on editing by going out to Quonset for some pizza and beer. It was also nice be able to get caught up on my editing in time for my final portrait session of the month as I photographed the Larsen family over at Roosevelt Park here in Waukegan.

I had a little bit more of a social life during September than I’ve had in some months recently. The first Saturday in September ended up being a busy, fun filled day where I caught up with quite a few people that I hadn’t seen in awhile. The first event of the day was attending the party in my backyard for my neighbor’s daughter 2nd birthday. Once the party was winding down, I went to hang out with my buddy, Carl, who I hadn’t seen in a few months. Then the final stop of the night was hanging out with another buddy, Raul, at his cousin’s birthday party.

Then, the Thursday before my busy weekend was a fun day as well. I won tickets compliments of the City of Waukegan Chamber of Commerce to see the screening of Napoleon Dynamite followed by a question and answer session with Jon Heder (Napoleon), Jon Gries (Uncle Rico), and Efren Ramirez (Pedro) at the Genesee Theatre. I ended up inviting my friends Celeste, Julio, and José to come along with the tickets I won. Also joining us were our friends, Rmneet and Taylor, who had bought tickets for this screening when it was initially announced months ago. We all even got to sit together since Julio used his connections from when he worked at the Genesee to get it so we got some good seats altogether.

Now the reason why I mention that September brought a mixture of emotions is because I lost a friend , Jennifer Schneider, to suicide. She was one of the kindest and sweetest people I’ve ever met so the news of her passing caught me off guard. It was just a few months earlier when I was surprised to find out that she was back in the area when I ran into her at a local environmental rally. Then a couple weeks after that we met up for coffee and discussed a wide range of topics. She seemed optimistic about the future and talked about having the opportunity to have a fresh start. I never would have thought that would be the last time I’d ever see her.

Becca & Michael | Wedding

I’ve known Becca and her family for quite some time since our sisters played on the same travel soccer team back in the day. So when Becca asked me to be photographer for her wedding, I did not need any time to think about whether I’d do it and was excited to capture the wedding day of someone that I knew. Plus, it’s nice to sometimes have a wedding that’s local and not having to do a ton of traveling.

Well, this wedding took place on a very hot Saturday in late July. The ceremony was outdoors so leading up to the ceremony people chose to wait on taking their seat and instead chose to utilize the shade from nearby trees while they waited. For awhile, I was unsure if people would want to go back outside once they spent a little time inside after the ceremony. Luckily for us, we got a cold front and some clouds that came through at that time made for better conditions for formal photos.