The shoot was recently featured on the Style Me Pretty Canada Blog. Check out the list of amazing vendors who collaborated on this super fun shoot.

Concept Design & Styling: Silverberry Occasions Event Planning & Design Inc.
Floral Design, Draping & Linen: Rachel A. Clingen Wedding, Event & Seasonal Design
Bridal gown: Paloma Blanca
Fascinator: Blair Nadeau Millinery
Hair & Makeup by: John Linkert
Cakes: Pretty Sweet Cakes
Pie Pops: Lottie & Lil
Stationary, Menus & Favours: Palettera
Rentals: Chairman Mills

We highly recommend every vendor on this list so feel free to check out their website and connect with them for your own wedding. We hope this shoot will inspire couples to think a little on the whimsical side when it comes to wedding decor, locations and atmosphere.

Enjoy!

Erika & Ryan

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   Vintage Wedding Shoot
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   Muskoka Weddings – Style Shoot
3. 

   Shelby & Derrick – Gibson Center Wedding – Alliston, ON

During the redesign of our site, I got this idea to make my very first WordPress plugin. Not really knowing what I was getting myself into on the programming end of things, I wound up learning so much along the way. The help I received from Táve developer Jason Pirkey, was invaluable and he managed to make time for me during all the work on the new Táve 3.0 site. Its been nearly 10 years since I last formally programmed anything, other than just my website. I miss the days of ASM, Basic, C, and C++, things just seemed simpler. Programming again seemed fun and difficult and at times it made no sense at all, but only because I have been under a rock for so long and out of practice.

I have created a plugin for Contact Form 7 for WordPress that will allow the information collected on your contact form to be put into the Táve system. Now you dont have to take the info from your email response and paste it in, or use an iframe to add the form to your site. This way you can customize the form and have it look however you want with your styling and CSS knowhow. It is currently being used on this site for our contact form here.

cf7-tave3.zip

cf7-tave.zip for Táve Version 2

If your still wondering what the heck Táve is – its the simplest way to go from first contact to the last check mark on the list of things to complete for each client you will ever have in your business. It keeps track of who you’re shooting, when, where and for how long. What you need to do after the shoot, and how much your making from the shoot. Its a great way to electronically sign contracts (no pens!!!) and ask your clients details to be kept all in one nice tidy place. If your office is a mobile phone like us you can use their mobile site and gain access to all that info at any time you need it. It will track payments, invoices, quotes, referrals, the number of blue smarties you ate, the list goes on. One of the features I like the most is when a client books with us it will pre-fill in the calendar with appointments and task lists to keep track of everything along the way.

I hope that our obvious love for Táve is coming through. And if you havn’t yet signed up for a 30 day trial do so through this link so the kind people at Táve will know who sent you.

Here are the requirements of the plugin:

1. You need to be running WordPress v3.0 or greater
2. It requires you to have a membership to Táve.com (get that here)
3. You must have Contact Form 7 Plugin installed.
4. OPTIONAL: if you only want to use the form for one job type ex:Wedding and not for any other job type you need this additional plugin to hide the jobtype field, get that here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7-modules/

Setting it up:

1 & 2 can be found here: https://www.tave.com/Manager.app/#/Settings/NewLeadAPI

3. On our site I use this to prevent the data in our second contact form from being put into Táve. It can also be used to prevent other info you only want to be given in the email but not in the Táve database, for example you have a field to test if they are human you dont need that info put into their entry in Táve.

Creating your form in Contact Form 7

1. Just to get you started, here is something you can copy and paste into the form text area, overwrite what is already there (unless you want to keep it):

Your First Name (required)
[text* FirstName akismet:author tabindex:01]

Your Last Name (required)
[text* LastName tabindex:02]

Your Email (required)
[email* Email tabindex:03 akismet:author_email]

Your Phone Number
[text MobilePhone tabindex:04]

Your Event Date
[text EventDate tabindex:05]

Service Type:
[select* JobType tabindex:06 "Wedding" "Family Portrait"]

Referrer:
[select Source tabindex:07 "Friend" "Another Vendor" "Facebook"]

Your Message:
[textarea* Message tabindex:08]

[submit tabindex:10 "Send"]
[response]

1b. OPTIONAL: Replace “Service Type: [select* JobType tabindex:06 "Wedding" "Family Portrait"]” with  [hidden JobType id:JobType "Wedding"] this will create a hidden field for JobType that is always set as Wedding. This is only going to work with Contact Form 7 Modules installed.

2. Fill this information out the way you want it to look when it arrives in your email inbox. We have in the from line: “[FirstName] [LastName] <[Email]>” and in the subject line: “[EventDate] – [JobType]” . You can figure things out.

3. Here is another sample you can just copy and paste into the message body to start things off.

First Name: [FirstName]
Last Name: [LastName]
Email: [Email]
Phone: [MobilePhone]
Found us here: [Source]
Event Date: [EventDate]
Type of Photography: [JobType]

Their Message:
[Message]

Reference for more information

Contact Form 7 Documentation

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7-modules/

Táve Blog

If you have made it to the end of this post I want to thank you for reading and I hope that understood everything, If there is anything else I can better clarify I would love to know, just send me off an email so I can keep this information up to date for everyone.

Cheers

Ryan

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Email us for more details at email hidden; JavaScript is required We look forward to photographing you!

Erika & Ryan

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   Táve Contact Form 7 Plugin
2. 

   The Robbins Family – Barrie, ON
3. 

   Wedding & Honeymoon Location Wish List 2012

Each full day session comes with lunch and a model to photograph. Last week we worked with Emily.

If you are interested in our One on One Mentoring sessions feel free to email us at email hidden; JavaScript is required we would love to hear from you and all your ideas for your session. All sessions take place at our home studio in Barrie, Ontario.

We look forward to meeting you.

E & R

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Thank You Junebug Weddings!

You may be interested in:

1. 

   Lindsay & Angela at The Abbey for the Arts – Glen Nevis, ON
2. 

   The Inn at Christies Mill Wedding – Port Severn, ON
3. 

   Jody & Greg at The Westwind, Buckhorn, ON

Check out these images of our albums. Most of them are printed on metallic paper, which gives the prints that extra pop! Its a personal favorite of ours.

Our favorite wedding album choice is 10×10 (square shape) 32 thick pages, and either the red or the light blue, that’s the one below.

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   Not Your Mothers Wedding Album
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   New York, I love you
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   The Inn at Christies Mill Wedding – Port Severn, ON

Ryan is excelling at teaching, he is patient, and knows so much about lighting, and the science behind photography. Ryan taught me everything I know about photography, from shooting to editing to the history of the craft.

Never in a million did we think that our little One on One Teaching Sessions would take off like they have. We have had the chance, in just one month to really get to know some great people who are doing really interesting work. The photographers who book sessions with us are already great photographers (even though most of them don’t know it before they come) they are very skilled, and even though some are new to the biz they bring with them a lot of great ideas and enthusiasm.

Last week we met with Shiri of Focus Studios in Toronto we spent the day chatting about business, talking about goals,  the future and breaking down images, and lighting set ups. We spent a few hours in the afternoon photographing one of our favorite models Juliette, who I am sure you have seen on this blog a few times here and here.  We covered natural light shooting, shooting indoors with flash and natural light, some off camera flash and how to control it.

Thank you Juliette for being so patient and for taking part, and thanks to Shiri for spending the day with us. We cannot wait to see what you will do this 2010 year!

Check out a few pics from our day!
If you are a full or part time photographer and are looking to improve your business, or your craft. Feel free to contact us for prices and to chat about your goals.

We would love to spend the day with you.
email hidden; JavaScript is required

Cheers

Erika & Ryan

You may be interested in:

The One On One session give us the chance to structure the lessons to what the photographer wants to learn specifically.

A few weeks ago we did our first full day One on One session here in Barrie with Ingrid of Image 126 Photography. We had an awesome day, photographed an amazing model in the back allies of Barrie and McLaren Art Center. We experimented with off camera flash, editing, talked about work flow solutions, did a website/portfolio critique, and had an awesome lunch at our favorite Barrie restaurant Oscar’s.

Check out a few pics from our day!
If you are a full or part time photographer and are looking to improve your business, or your craft. Feel free to contact us for prices and to chat about your goals.

We would love to spend the day with you.
email hidden; JavaScript is required

Cheers

Erika & Ryan

Ryan is a very passionate teacher, he is a perfectionist.  He is also very animated and entertaining to watch. I get a good chuckle out of him.

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Its one thing to photograph product shots, and have a photographer shoot rounds of shots of your product just sitting on a table but what we are offering is the chance to work with you on a concept that best suits your business. We are so excited to get this plan in motion. Our first client Lori Hutchinson Cakes called on us to photograph a cake that she was really proud of, something very creative and original. A cake her and the bride designed together. The concept was a whimsical garden with fairies and mushrooms. The first thing that came to mind was the scene at the top of Blue Mountain (where Lori is from) the cake perched up high with a backdrop of only sea and sky.

The morning of the wedding we headed up the mountain on a very beautiful perfect morning and photographed these beauties for Lori’s portfolio she is building with us.

If you are a vendor and you need new photos for your website, or if you are putting together something you are really excited about contact us! We want to be there capturing what you do, when you do it. Our sessions are called Profiles and are $500.00. Give us a shout for more details.

Cheers

Erika & Ryan

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So if you are a photographer, and wanna know what its like for an hour to be in front of the camera, give me a call and we’ll get together to take some fun shots.

Now here are some of my faves from Gail’s shoot. Enjoy.

-e

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Almost a year ago we posted some photos on the blog of our trade show booth from February 2008 (see here), and we had an amazing response about it. We have been still receiving emails asking us how we did it.
Ryan put this video time lapse of the production of the booth the day before our trade show. The entire thing took us 4 hours to put together, (as it was our very first time putting the entire thing together) and the take down only 1 hour and 30 mins. back into the truck.

Here is the video:

Wedding Expo Setup – Feb ’08 from Rowell Photography on Vimeo.

If anyone has any questions about the materials and building of our rockin’ trade show booth, feel free to leave your questions and comments in the comments box below.

Happy Trade Show Season!!
Erika & Ryan

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Logan has been with us for a month now and we went out and did a photo shoot of her this past Friday. So if you see us out and about, being followed by a little blonde with 2 or 3 camera bags in her hands taking photos, and answering phones, say hello to her.

Logan has actually been with us for much longer, she helped out on a trash the dress shoot in August of last year and was also a contestant in Barrie’s Next Top Model.

So here are a few of my fave Logan shots from this Fridays shoot downtown Barrie and in the Ferndale Marsh near our house.

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EDIT: We have posted a video of this booth being built albeit almost a year later.

We are back from spending the weekend in Toronto at Canada’s Wedding Expo held at the Toronto Congress Centre as one of the many photography vendors. We had an amazing time, we met some really great people, and some spectacular vendors.

We want to thank everyone who helped us prepare for this show, we believe it was a complete success for us, and we hope to be a part of the show next year.

For those of you who couldn’t make it down to visit us at our booth here are a few photos of our set up.

Our couch was a huge success, and for anyone curious about where we bought it, it came from Home Furniture. It was nice to just sit down and chat with couples, now that we have had the couch in the booth we couldn’t imagine a trade show without one. Honestly who wants to stand for 10 hours a day when they can sit!

We thought it would be fun to put one of our waterproof wedding albums into a fish bowl of water to show they are waterproof, and to top it off we even bought a fish, who now lives in our studio, to swim around in the bowl at the wedding expo.

Thanks again to everyone who stopped by the Rowell Photography booth this past weekend.

Erika & Ryan

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So if your like me you may have been following Lightroom and have noticed an SDK for modules has become available recently. I am not brave enough to try my hand at programming anymore, but this was good news because some one would be. Timothy Armes was brave enough and brought out a great module that uses ImageMagick to do some post processing on the fly. I will leave it up to Tim to better explain about the module through his website: http://www.timothyarmes.com/lrmogrify.php.

What has me so impressed with this module is its ability to do all the things I used Photoshop for, but without all the overhead use of the computer. I can actually use Photoshop now to do editing and have Lightroom exporting in the background. Before with the use of droplets I would wait for the entire batch to be exported from LR and then that same batch processed through PS in two completely different stages. Using this module each time LR exports an image it is passed through ImageMagick all while it is exporting the next image and so on being completed in one complete stage.

So now our blog images can have their borders applied, then the watermark at the bottom, quickly and without interrupting any work that is being done in Photoshop.

here is a simple comparison of the old vs. the new:

Old way: (notice the drop shadow around the photo, I am going to miss that)

New way: (at least I was able to keep the sharpening close)

So aside from the difference in the shadows and the loss of the drop shadow I am sure this nice time saver will be a great asset to us.

Any comments or questions on how the heck I managed to get this module running, feel free to ask.

Ryan out.

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