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Fort Worden: Trash The Dress Fashion Shoot

June 9, 2008 – 12:29 am

There’s nothing like getting together with a bunch of great folks in your industry and having a great time when you love what you do. A couple of weeks ago, something like 20 or 30 other photographers and I traveled across the water in the wee hours of the morning to meet up at historic Fort Worden to shoot until we dropped. I dragged some of my clients with me, Arica and Eddie, (okay, maybe not DRAGGED… maybe they wanted to go!) and we all romped around the fields, rocks, barracks, bunkers, and beaches and had a grand old time before passing out in one of the 100-year-old Officer’s houses that you can rent on the park grounds.

If you’re not familiar with the one of the latest trends in wedding photography, it’s to have your own fashion session a day or a week or a month or a year after your wedding.

In the industry, we’ve taken to calling them “Trash The Dress” sessions although our aim is not to trash your gorgeous couture wedding gown that you saved your weekly allowance for since you were 8 years old, but to go somewhere and make some really fun fashion inspired images that you normally wouldn’t be able to make on your wedding day because of time or location constraints. (and your dress will survive, unless you decide to go for a swim in a swamp!)

If you’d like to book a session like this of your own (whether you’re up for wearing your wedding attire or just pulling some fun duds out of your closet!) contact me so we can schedule something for you- summer is tight (as it’s prime wedding season!) so dates are limited!!!

Special thanks to Steve Smith for heading up this whole event-we all had THE greatest time and can’t wait for you to plan the next hoedown! Wink wink!!

By Laurel | Also posted in real weddings, travel | Tagged Fashion, Fort Worden, photography, Trash the Dress | Comments (6)

Trash The Dress: “Leavin’ Las Vegas” style!

March 22, 2008 – 8:16 pm

I looooove the desert. If you know me well enough, you know that it reminds me of where I grew up. So when I heard about this Leavin’ Las Vegas shoot the last day of the WPPI conference, I was so in.

The folks that put a name to the Trash the Dress trend (you know, the fun day after sessions that we can have after your wedding, where we can do stuff and try things that we normally wouldn’t on the wedding day??) and people from Don’t Box Us In planned a day of fashion models and real brides in Nevada’s Red Rocks Canyon. We got to shoot alongside photographers such as Mark Eric, Jason Domingues, Tana Huffman, Sofie Louca from Amorphia Photography , John Michael Cooper, Mike Fulton from Tri Coast Photography, David Beckstead, and Anne Ruthmann.

Here is a video documenting the Leavin’ Las Vegas Shootout from Patrick Moreau and our cinematography friends at Still Motion.

We had such a great time (me and at least nine others from Seattle). Not only did we take home some awesome images, but we also got some fancy sunburn patterns, scratches from the cactuses (Gerald wins that contest, he sat on it just like in the old Warner Bros. cartoons!), lil miss hottie Jenna from JFK Photography modeled among the pros, and more fun memories from Vegas!

So… you current and former brides of mine, give me a jingle and we can plan some Day After shoots of our own in and around Seattle! Or heck, I’m up for a road trip to the desert if you are!!

By Laurel | Also posted in travel, wedding planning | Tagged Las Vegas, Red Rocks Canyon, Trash the Dress, wedding, WPPI | Comments (1)

Couture Albums: Flushmount Style

February 6, 2008 – 6:10 pm

I’ll bet my DHL delivery man had never seen a customer so excited to see him as I was. Â Some days, it’s like Christmas every day here between albums, prints, equipment, and periphery that gets delivered. Â I probably scared the beans out of my DHL courier when I opened the door and squealed like a little girl on Christmas morning. Â This delivery was a new sample from one of my fantastic 2007 weddings. Â I loved the details fromÂ Casey and Suzi’sÂ celebration, and couldn’t help making a huge sample book because their church had cornflower blue walls. Â Seriously,Â I’mÂ a sucker for good wall paint (if you’ve been to visit me, you’ll remember that my walls are a dusty blue! Â I should post pictures of that for my cross country readers and my cross the world readers, you know who you are!!!)Â Â So anyway, here it is! Â These albums come all the way from New Zealand fromÂ Queensberry & Co.,Â and are of course custom designed and handmade. Â For this 12×15″ album, I chose a green leather and the new photo front to pick up on the shades in the bouquet. Â The pages are flushmount, meaning that the entire page and all of it’s image is one continuous print, but my Couture Albums are also available with custom cut mats for a more heirloom and timeless look (likeÂ HERE). Â I included one great fold out page, and did lots of full page spreads, and even had a couple of panoramic image spreads, too.Â

By Laurel | Tagged wedding album, wedding photography | Comments (2)

Fine Art Albums

January 18, 2008 – 4:51 pm

This season is a great time to get caught up on all of those rainy day projects- not because you normally wouldn’t do them unless it is raining, but because you aren’t shooting because it is raining, giving you actual, non-interrupted time to do production work. Here are some great albums that we’ve designed in the last two months. These are the handmade Fine Art Albums- each real photographic print is mounted on heavy card stock pages, a throw back to the vintage wedding albums of our grandparents (minus the photo corners).

First, a large album for Matt and Mary’s parents. Since Matt’s parents were local (everyone else is out of state!), they came to me and we had a little design meeting, picking their favorite images, navy blue for the cover, and a text tile. It’s 12×12″ and each page has a different layout depending on how the day was unfolding at that moment.

Next was Molly’s 8×8″ belly album. This is volume one, the second one will be a larger one of baby Miles (post to come on that one!). The cover fabric is my favorite one offered (greeeeeen!), with an image trio. Each page holds one 5×7 print.

The last Fine Art Album was for Danny and Bria’s wedding album. It’s a 12×12″ album in a shiny black animal-friendly leather, with an image title trio. This one also shows the vellum title page that starts the story.