Get ready for the longest blog post ever! I want to start 2009 off with a bang. It’s a new year, a new blog, and I’m excited to ring in 2009 the right way. Plus I promised Megan the new blog would be done for her wedding so I need to make it extra nice :)

Showing up the morning of the wedding always gives me an indication of the details we are going to be working with throughout the day. Starting off with Monique Lhuillier, Manolo’s, and a gorgeous bouquet usually means I get more excited than Lillie on Halloween.

Plus a living room that has better light than a photo studio

Megan is absolutely gorgeous to begin with, but adding a Monique and…. well Lillie put it best when she saw my computer and said “princess!”


I love it when we can sneak up a stair or two (or three) on the alter to get some facial expressions


Alisha actually rode in the limo to make sure we still had contact with the driver because of the crazy snow (Chris and I were stuck for a while and couldn’t move)

The bridal party was a ton of fun and treated us like BFFs

We had to sneak outside for some portraits, even if it was 7 degrees (literally)


I admit, sometimes I may ask my couples to do things that not every photographer would ask to get “the shot.” However this one was not my fault! We were getting the shots above and then all of a sudden a WICKED wind blew up and dropped all that snow in the trees right on us. I felt sooo bad (and cold, but mostly bad!).

The Hall of Springs looked gorgeous


I heard there were a couple soccer fans? Megan’s expression says it all I think

An Irish tradition

3, 2, 1….



And from all of us over here in the studio…. Happy New Year!!!

When I first looked up the venue that Maria and Jose were having their wedding, I knew from the start this was going to be a fun weekend. What I didn’t know was the great view we’d get and 60 degree weather in NYC right after Christmas! The wedding photography Gods were shining down on us for sure. Errrrr, wait maybe it was Alisha’s video light? Either way we were able to get some really great stuff this past weekend and the night stuff was a real highlight for me.


The guys were looking daper

I really love what Maria did with her design and details


My fav



I loved the reception decor as well

Because the wedding was at a film studio in NY the hallways were lined with flyers and magazine articles which I thought would make for a cool background.

Thanks so much for having us at your wedding! Stay tuned for the video trailer to come along soon.

Well I guess it’s Monday, and back to work for the week. I’ve had a great time over the past week and a half enjoying some time with my family and taking in the holidays. What an awesome time of the year and a time to really relax and take in what happened in 2008 and also all that we have to be excited about for 2009. 2008 has been the best year ever for Luke Walker Photography and I expect nothing but the same for 2009 with a slumping economy and all.

Here is a shot Alisha snagged of Lillie all excited on Christmas morning.

She’s also making love to the present I got Alisha - a Canon 50mm 1.2 lens (mostly so she’ll leave mine in my bag).

Alisha surprised me with a new Nintendo Wii for my big present. I have to admit, even with 100 guesses this wouldn’t have even made my list of expected presents. I’ve never even played the Wii! The past system I was big on was the original Playstation and before that was the Sega Genesis. Coming from someone who hasn’t played video games in a while… holy cow video games have come a long way!! We set up the Wii at my parent’s house immediately and I fell in love with it in about 10 seconds. Even my 80 year old grandfather was more sad to see the Wii go than me I think :) We were in a dual in golf right as we had to get out the door.

One of the cool things we were also able to do was to sneak up to the Turning Stone Casino for a night with my father and uncle to try the craps tables. As some of you who follow my blog know I have a serious man love for the game craps in the casino, and my uncle just recently started playing out in Vegas so we decided to make a little family gathering out of it. The table was pretty good to us and combined we were able to take home about $400 of winnings which made for a fun outing that I really enjoyed.

Alisha’s family has flown out from St. Louis and has been staying with us which has been a real treat. Her family is very cool and we were able to have a Christmas 2.0 on the 26th with her family. Her mom got me a really cool Lions shirt just in time for me to see them go 0-16. Hey at least I know things can’t get any worse for them. Besides you can’t enjoy the good times as much unless you’ve been through the bad times I guess. Now go freakin hire a decent coach and use the numerous high draft picks you have this year (thanks Dallas) to get some talent.

I have a wedding to post here in the next day or 2 that we just shot in Brooklyn (can’t wait for the video trailer too, it’s going to be sick), an announcement about a new hire we just made, as well as another gorgeous wedding to share that we’ll be shooting here on the 31st. Stay tuned because it’s time for me to catch up on the blog over the next 7 days. Thanks for reading and I hope you all enjoyed too much eggnog and a couple trips under the mistletoe.

This is a project I’ve had on tap for a while, and Elevation and I were finally able to sink our teeth into this project and make it a priority. My old blog was good to me for over 3 years (I can’t believe I’ve been blogging that long!) but it was finally time to make a switch to a custom designed blog with more features. The main reason for me to switch was to make sure I offered a format that encouraged sharing - emailing entries to friends, easier commenting, voting for your favorite entries, etc. With the recent annual contest generating 330 comments in one blog entry it’s just obvious the blog needed to be done from scratch to make it as user friendly as possible. I want to make it enjoyable and I hope adding new features like voting for your favorite entries will encourage this.

Here is a run down of some of the new features:

Bigger Pictures
The first thing you’ll notice is how much larger the pictures appear now. We’ve almost doubled the size of pictures now appearing on the blog. While I don’t exactly want to make them poster sized, I do want big beautiful images that fill your screen!

Voting
You will now see at the bottom of every blog entry there is a chance to vote it as your favorite. Don’t worry you can vote for more than one blog entry as your favorite so you don’t have to be sparing with your vote. It’s my hope that while some people don’t want to leave a comment, clicking to tab something that they love is an easy and fun way to be interactive and show support for friends. As you can imagine, the entries with the most favorite votes get special prizes :))

Email Blog Entries
It’s now incredibly simple to email blog entries to friends and pass along something you think is worth sharing. Just click the “email” button at the bottom of every entry and it will automatically open a new email for you with a title and place the specific blog link right in the text of the email. Two clicks is all it takes to pass along blog entries now! I know Amazon has the whole one click thing down, damn them, but 2 is still not too bad :)

Social Media
I’ve been sucked into some of these social media sites thanks to Alisha (hey don’t complain to me when less chores are getting done now), and I want to make it easy to share in these experiences with my friends. My Twitter link and status are constantly updated at the top of the site, and you can find both my Facebook and LinkedIn pages in the “Websites” tab in the header. Now you have absolutely no excuse not to know what I’m doing 24 hours a day (since I know most of you were wondering in the first place).

Desktop Backgrounds
You can now download numerous different backgrounds and screen savers straight from the Desktops header above. Being a (hopefully) creative and visual person I like to have a constantly changing and fresh environment around me. I like switching my desktops and I like to leave little notes and sayings around… so I figure why not share those for people out there who are like me. Use it on the computer you are using to plan your wedding online… besides you know you need more material to help you daydream all afternoon.

Prettify
The final change has been of course the new appearance. Rather than having to conform to what TypePad settings were and allowed, my guys over at Elevation designed this from scratch to make it super pretty for your viewing pleasure. Fan mail can be directed towards me, hate mail can be directed towards www.yourelevation.com

Thanks and I look forward to many more years of sharing my life, my business, and my pictures with so many of my friends out there!

Just wanted to wish everyone a great upcoming holiday! We will be in and out of the office next week, but I’ll have my blackberry if anything urgent comes up. An exciting announcement tomorrow also to follow :)

Even though the contest doesn't end until 5pm, I feel pretty safe announcing Lisa and Jordan as my contest winners.  With 112 total votes I am blown away by how many people they were able to attract to the blog.  I'm thinking of perhaps doing a month long special on Lisa and Jordan to try and break my blog traffic record for a month :)

No really our contest this year was a huge hit with more than 330 votes and we had 3,000 unique visitors in the first 48 hours.  For me those are both all time records and the blog has been around for 3 years.  This blog is about on it's last leg right now with the new blog 2.0 scheduled to launch in the next 2 weeks.  This was a nice farewell parting to a blog that I have spent many, many hours writing in.

Congrats to Lisa and Jordan and enjoy your prints (which are on the way as I type)!

As most of you know I shoot a lot of runway for both The Knot and Wedding Style Magazine, so I was excited today to hear from Wedding Style about another spread in their magazine.  They sent over these PDFs of the latest fashion spreads in the magazine of my work.
This is the opening spread, which consists of 2 of my shots

Most of this 2nd spread is my work as well

I had to share a little of the spotlight on the 3rd spread with Brian Phillips.  Brian is a great photographer and a good friend of ours so I guess I can manage :)

We had an absolutely wicked ice storm up here and luckily I don't have any weddings this weekend so I'll be here in my warm house drinking hot cocoa all weekend!  Finally ;)

I’m really excited to make this post and share this awesome wedding with all of you!  Many of you remember Nicole and Scott from their wedding back in May of 2007 that was on the blog, their engagement shoot perhaps that’s in the studio, or maybe their day after shoot that’s on the cover of my website.  If none of those…. then perhaps from when they were on the back cover of national magazine Bride and Bloom?  Yea ok you get the point.  Very good friends of mine at this point and I’ve been fortunate enough to start shooting some of their friend’s weddings as well.

Meghan was actually in Nicole’s wedding so this wedding definitely took on a special meaning for me.  Her, Farnaz, and Nicole are more friends for me now than clients so I knew Alisha and I had to be especially on our game this past Saturday (no pressure of course).

I knew things were going to be awesome though when I showed up and Meghan’s mother gave me a tour of the house and essentially indicated that everything had been set up (even the Christmas tree) to let in the most natural light for the photos.  Yes my photo friends, I do live in heaven with the weddings I shoot.

As you all know I’m a huge fan of a toast in the morning

I LOVE this shot of Meghan as she arrives at the church

It was a good ceremony that made people laugh several times

Classic

This was our first portrait session of the night.  This was the only one we had planned, but we got a surprise later :)

I loved the little ornamental place card holders

I don’t normally post “formal” shots on the blog, but since this is the longest entry of the year why not? I just want people out there to know that even though “photojournalism” is all the rage I’m always happy to take any and all formal shots that people want.  No matter how small or large.

Finally as we were deep into the reception as if on demand it just started absolutely snowing hard.  It was coming down.  What do Meghan and John want to do immediately?  “Let’s go out for some portraits!”

I love it!

I have to admit, a couple of these shots I swiped from Alisha since she hasn’t posted this yet.  I don’t normally do that but there was just no way I could help myself, she was on fire on Saturday and her stuff was amazing.  It’s so funny to me how far she’s come in such a short while.  I mean she isn’t just good now, she’s downright insane with the camera.  She blows my mind with the stuff she shoots so a couple are hers.

Thank you to Meghan and John for having us at your wedding, and for trusting us with such a huge day in your life.  I’m lucky to have you both as friends and can’t wait to continue to see you both and spend time together in the future!

Last night we had a mixer at our office for all of the Capital Region wedding people we know (or now know!).  Alisha and I had been wanting to do this since we opened up our office up here, and we knew we had to get someone to motivate us to finally see it through because of all we had going on.  Christine Wheat is a good friend of ours, and also one of the best wedding planners in all of Upstate NY and she was kind enough to join forces with us on this project.  It was probably more than what Christine originally signed up for, but she was amazing in helping us set this up and now I can see why she is so popular with the brides.  The tables were unexpectedly set up with rose petals and candles and it made the room so much nicer, just the touches that Christine was able to bring into the room made all the difference. 

Anyway, the turnout was awesome and we were able to see some of the many people we've already worked along side, while also meeting some we hadn't yet met.  We made the party end at 9pm (3 hours) on the invite knowing there is no way it would go that late….. and yet it didn't really end until about 10pm.  The room was filled with laughter, smiles, and full tummies all night and it was awesome.

We also got to try out our new Lillie PhotoLab set up for fun at the party :)  One of my couples for this coming February, Jamie and Peter, actually talked to me about doing this at their wedding reception and I loved the idea.  We were able to start the fun a little early last night though and had an absolute blast with it!!  I'm afraid I'm going to have too much fun with these at receptions.  Enjoy some of the funny pictures below and thanks so much to everyone for coming out! 

Dawn's bouquet was featured in the contest below and she needed some free publicity.  The contest is still open so please, listen to Dawn!

I also want to give a shout out to my strong armed friend Vasili for coming from several hours away to make an appearance

Dawn and our office manager Stefanie with the life of the party

We also had to get a shot with our fellow engaged friends JP Elario and Kris Ann Blanchette

Our office manager Stefanie and intern Stephanie

The crew!

Christine we couldn't have done it without you, and Alisha thank you as always for being such a great partner in so many ways. 

And finally, for those of you who want to see how fast Lillie is growing up… just watch below and you'll see the transformation!

I can't believe this is my 4th year of doing this?  That's a little scary!  Anyway, for those of you who haven't been following this blog for the last couple of years (which is more than a handful I'm sure)… I do a little contest at the end of the year in which I allow people to vote for their favorite image in a certain category.  The first year I did "Best Cake" which you can re-visit HERE, the second year I did "Best Boudoir" shot HERE, and last year I did "Best Portrait" HERE. 

This year I am opening the voting for "Best Bouquet."  The rules are simple, you are allowed to vote for your favorite picture for any reason.  If you like it best because of the photography - fine - if you like it because of the actual flowers - gravy - if you like it because it's your friend's - sweet.  You can like it "the best" for any reason at all, I don't like to limit people to having to judge on a specific item or reason.  To vote just click on the comments section and leave the number in which you'd like to vote for.  In future years we'll be able to vote right in the entry for those using blog readers, but for now we will have to use the comments for one more year.

With all of that said… vote away!  The winner will be announced on December 15th at 5pm and will receive a $100 gift certificate.  If you'd like to use them for prints I will make sure they arrive before Christmas as a nice stocking stuffer :)
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I'm sorry I could not put everyone's bouquet in the contest, but I already put up too many choices as is.  These were just some of my favorite shots from the year after looking back.  Thanks everyone!

ATTN : PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU ONLY VOTE IN THIS BLOG ENTRY, AND THAT YOU ONLY VOTE ONCE. THANK YOU