#3

At the end of April, I took my son Cade to Justin Haers modified stock car garage in Phelps. Justin runs at Canandaigua Speedway on Saturday nights along with a multitude of other tracks throughout the season. I photographed Justin and Melanie's wedding last spring and since then my business name has been on the car as one of the sponsors. Justin won the feature race at Canandaigua a few weeks ago. I wish I could have been there to see it.

I wanted to photograph the car in the garage to try doing a technique called HDR (High Dynamic Range), blending different exposures of the same photo to get a huge range of detail from highlight to shadow. I don't have the software yet to do it well, so I played with several different software plug-ins to get some cool effects that simulate HDR. Here are some of the results.

Did You Know?

With so many new people coming to our blog and Facebook pages, it seems like the right time to reintroduce some of the things we do that people might not know about. Every few days I'm going to post a "Did You Know?" item as my status update to feature a different aspect of the photography business. I don't want to do it everyday to avoid spamming people.

The first one I'm going to do is Destination Weddings. I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me since local weddings are our bread and butter. Keep in mind though that many of our local weddings are in fact destination weddings for the bride and groom, lured to the area by the beauty of the Finger Lakes. However, we are more than willing to travel where ever your heart desires. I've had the pleasure of photographing weddings in Mexico City, Key West, the Jersey Shore, Philly and Boston, as well as all over New York State from New York City to the Thousand Islands and across to Niagara Falls. We've also done Trash the Dress shoots in Vegas, Sedona, AZ, Boca Raton, New York City and later this summer in New Orleans.

We have two websites for our destination weddings. The first is a subheading on our parent website at http://www.cheslerphoto.com/destinations.htm and the second is our destination exclusive website at http://www.destinationsbycheslerphotography.com/.

As with most of our business, word of mouth is king, however destination weddings rely on it way more than the rest since we are going to new places and don't have the venue as a referral source initially. We know how valuable your kind words are as a referral and we reward you for it.

Meghan and Damon

Hot...Sticky...Sultry...Humid...Pea Soup...Muggy...If there was an adjective to describe how uncomfortably hot it was today, it would be all of those combined in to one. Jocelyn and I photographed Meghan and Damon's wedding today at Bristol Harbour Resort. They were praying the rain would hold off and it did for the most part. It rained an hour before the ceremony creating one of the most humid weddings I've ever photographed. Damon was begging me to go inside, not as much in words, but in his look of agony. He was withering away like a stick of butter in a frying pan. I felt bad so I set him free and did a few more photos of just Meghan. They were really good sports to even last as long as they did in the conditions. Meghan even braved the bugs going up her dress to get some shots in the tall grass and wildflowers. It was worth it though. Their photos came out really cool, especially when we went outside later in the evening to photograph them against the backdrop of some blossoming thunderstorms.

The photos below are some of Jocelyns. She's one of our new wedding photographers and did a great job today.

Wenches and Warlocks

I walked past the old farm house down the one lane grass road. It was a warm, late spring afternoon. Storm clouds loomed in the distance. The lane way narrowed as it twisted and turned between fields of tall grass and young saplings. The once fertile farmland was being reclaimed by the wild. The road seemed to go on forever. Did this legendary village of Thornhill I'd heard of actually exist? As I made my way around the next bend, I began to hear voices of a strange and ancient dialect. Tales of Knights and dragons danced through my imagination. I came upon two men where the grass lane split in two. They appeared to have been delivered straight from the middle ages. As if they knew my destination, they pointed the direction I should follow without a single word spoken. A few hundred feet later, I came upon Thornhill, a village of makeshift structures and gardens well off the beaten path. If I didn't know better, I would have thought I stepped through a portal to 12th century England.

But alas, I did know better. I was on the property of Monroe Payne, the Vice President of the Finger Lakes section of the Professional Photographer's Society of New York, as well as an avid member of a role playing group reenacting a bygone era. For the last 18 years, Monroe has transformed his property from farmland to a mythical village called Thornhill, not too far from Ithaca. We had our monthly FLPPSNY meeting there yesterday, along with about a dozen of Monroe's role playing friends who brought us on an adventure through the woods surrounding the village. Along the way we came across all types of characters who would interact with our tour guides as we photographed the story as it unfolded. When we were done, we had a feast of foul and swine, and store bought apple pie.

Vincent and Tonya

I was back at Belhurst Castle this weekend for Tonya and Vincent's wedding. With families from Rockland County downstate and Michigan, Belhurst was their destination wedding. The ceremony was at St. Stephen's church in Geneva. Vincent and Tonya planned a lot of time between the ceremony and reception so we could go to several locations and get some really cool photos. They were so much fun and so cooperative that getting awesome shots of the two of them was easy. We went to several cool urban looking places in downtown Geneva, including Parker's Bar. We also went up to White Springs Manor, which is owned and operated by Belhurst. The slideshow we ran at the reception was a huge hit, so hopefully we'll have the opportunity to photograph some of their friends weddings in Michigan and down near New York City.