On Sunday, we met up with Melissa & Bryan at their home in downtown Tempe to shoot some portraits of their super cute family.  They will be getting married in Maui this coming April and we’ll be shooting their reception here in Phoenix.  Rather than do a traditional engagement session, they wanted to include their adorable boys Michael & David.  They’ve been living in the same building on Mill Ave since before the boys were born so they choose the surrounding area as the setting of their photo shoot.  We super love that!  Its one thing for us to chose a cool location for a photo shoot, but it really means so much more when it’s all about who YOU are as a couple or as a family.  I totally love the fun interactions between the whole family as they walk down Mill Ave in the first photo.  Here are some more favorites from their session:

David brought along his friend Elmo to keep him company so throughout the course of our time together, Ryan and I traded off on “Elmo Duty” to keep David entertained :-)  He did make a guest appearance in a few shots though, like this next one . . .

Love this one!  It’s probably my favorite from the whole day :-)  How cute are they? SERIOUSLY!

These two make me smile :-)  Love the silliness!

A couple of portraits of the boys

They love to play softball as a family so towards the end of the session we decided it was play time.  Hit it out of the park Michael!

I don’t know what exactly prompted this next shot, but Ryan was watching David play and all of a sudden he put on this AWESOME little “tough guy” scowl and started walking slowly towards him like “hey man, what do you think you’re doing?”  He had been pretty shy the whole rest of the shoot so it was totally out of nowhere and completely hilarious!  Melissa and I were watching them and I swear we both got a little concerned that Ryan was going to have to make a break for it before he received a plastic bat beating.  But he kept his cool and just kept shooting.  And of course David ended up with a big silly grin over our reaction to his little display.

And of course, we had to take some cute shots of the bride & groom to be :-)

When we were shooting this next one, the kids were playing in the grass nearby and Michael yelled out “It looks like you guys are at our wedding!” which we thought was so cute and hilarious :-)  It got a good laugh out of Melissa & Bryan too!

Thanks guys for the lovely afternoon!  We had so much fun getting to know you and can’t wait to celebrate with you at your reception :-)

Making our customers happy is really important to us.  Whether it’s out shooting together, working with us on an album design or even ordering prints of your wedding photos, we want you to walk away feeling like you had a great experience!  In an effort to make the proof gallery side of our service even better, we’ve decided to make the switch to a new proofing company called Pictage.  Pictage is an awesome company that offers tons of great products and has the very best customer proofing interface on the market today.  Here are some of the ways that Pictage will make viewing and ordering your photos easier and better!

- You can create your own gallery of favorites to share with family and friends.

- Your wedding day will be categorized into different sections (ex: getting ready, ceremony, formal portraits, etc.) to make it fast and easy to get to the exact photo you want.

- You’ll have tons of great options to choose from every time you order a print.  The Pictage interface allows you to crop images to your liking, convert an image to black and white and even apply cool borders, all the while being able to view a preview of exactly what your print will look like.

- You’ll be offered great new products like canvas prints and photo cards that can be ordered directly from your gallery.

We’re very excited to make this change, but we also want to make the transition as easy as possible for our clients.  If you’re an existing client whose wedding date or portrait session has already been published in an online gallery, your gallery will remain as is until the expiration date 90 days after it was posted.  If you’re event or session has not yet been published to an online gallery, you’ll receive an email from us as soon as your photos are available using the new Pictage interface.

If you have any questions about our proof galleries or any of our other services please feel free to send us an email at info@simplyknotphotography.com.  Have a great week!

Back in December, we shot an awesome engagement session with Lauren & Chris in downtown Scottsdale.  They were such a fun couple to work with and we can’t wait for their wedding in March!  We just finished designing their engagement album which they plan to display at their wedding reception so their family and friends can check out their super fun photos!

CLICK HERE to check out a slideshow of the entire design.  Keep in mind, the album will be printed as a 10 inch by 10 inch coffee table book so all the photos will be A LOT bigger!