Brand SPANKING New!

Rebekah Tozer Photography

I LOOOOOVVEEE our new everything!  New blog, new logo, new website, and for me (JennyP) new baby!

This is my first official post to our new blog and I’m just feeling beyond blessed these days!  This gorgeous new style and these beautiful new sites are the work of our amazingly talented staff at shoot.send.breathe:  Brooke, Melissa, and Erica.  I am not someone who is artistically inclined at all so it just amazes me how they took words I used like, “clean” and “stuff with gray” and “something I would like” and created all this!  I couldn’t be happier and I feel very excited to have this new look which I feel reflects our style and vibe so perfectly.  In case I didn’t thank them privately enough, here’s a giant thank you to Brooke, Melissa, and Erica publicly: you’re GENIUSES!  Check out our new website below to see more of their handiwork:

Concierges Website

So, besides making all of these style changes and new sites, I was also busy making the world’s most beautiful baby (in my very unbiased opinion)!  We were lucky enough to have one of my first clients, and now dearest friends, the amazing Rebekah Tozer come to our home and do her newborn pictures, so if you’d like to check out the littlest Concierges family member, here is our darling Piper Jane!

Newborn Photos with Rebekah Tozer 

So in short, I think 2013 is our best year yet!

xoxoxo

Jenny

Server Crash, New Look, New Team Members, and New Babies!

2013 = New Look!

Ok I am not solely to blame for the lack of blogging for the last couple months!  We had a HUGE server crash here at The Concierges, and everything on our blog back to February of 2012 was lost, so our blog got stunted and the recent posts all disappeared somewhere in blog heaven.   So my apologies, but it’s all better now!  Moving to new server, current server fixed, upward and onward!

Let’s talk about 2013!

We are getting a few new looks over here at The Concierges, both personally and professionally!

1.  Babies!

I (Jenny) am pregnant (along with about half of our client roster having/or about to have new babies)!  Since I last posted I had a wedding and two baby showers and in April there will be a little bitty girl named Piper Jane that I hope has red hair, but that I more than hope sleeps as well as her daddy:) So my body has taken on a new shape, mostly bulbous and leading to moving slowly as I enter my 8th month in a week.   We are THRILLED to be having this little girl, and we have been busy bees in my house getting her nursery ready and putting away her mountain of clothing (she has more than a Kardashian at this point, and is more spoiled than Veruca Salt, from gifts being sent to us from so many fabulous friends, colleagues, and family members).   Exciting!!

Check out our 7 months maternity session with Erica Velasco HERE!

2.  New Branding, Logo, and Site!

Let me give you a brief history on our business and site:  We opened in 12 days.  Literally.  From idea to application, we opened in 12 days.  In those 12 days, my two AMAZING friends and colleagues, Kim B. and Laura E., got this blog up and made everything you see now, it was incredible.  Laura helped me design a logo I liked and get this blog up, as Kim Bee set it up on her server and helped with the web work.  IN TWELVE DAYS!  We decided a blog would be enough, initially, to see if people liked the idea and if I got any clients.  Well, it DID work and I got lots of clients!

……then because of the lots of clients, I haven’t had one spare moment to do anything else!  I’ve wanted to do a style and branding makeover with some more thought and time put into it, and I’ve wanted a real website in addition to the blog for as long as we were open, but again, when you’re blessed with lots of work, my clients come first. This project could wait.

That’s all changing and we will have a legitimate website up and running with shiny new logos soon!  YAY!  We have our amazing shoot.send.breathe staff, the amazing Brooke on logo/branding and the fabulous Erica on web, working on it now and we’re so eager!

3.  New Team Members!

Oh I can’t describe the love I have for the two women who joined our Concierges family and my adoration list, and who have made having a baby and having any time possible: Tiffany and Erica!

I cannot say enough nice things about Tiffany, she’s honestly a God-sent blessing to my life and has been an incredible asset to us professionally and personally.  To be frank, she does my job better than I do.  She worked as an intern for a few months and made my life so wonderful that I wished I never had to promote her, but of course, when someone is that great, they deserve a million promotions!  She started taking her own clients in December and they’re incredibly lucky people!

Erica has just joined our staff as an intern this month, readying herself to take on her own clients in April (and help me take some maternity leave!) and so far she’s been prompt, resourceful, quick to learn, and incredibly likable! I am so thankful she came our way, and had the gumption to send me an email one day with a referral from Laura, and tell me I needed her.  She was very right!

 

So, all in all, we are so happy over here!

Continually blessed and awed by the amazing people who come to us to work with us,the amazing work we get to do, and as we approach our two year mark, I am beyond proud and thankful of how far we’ve come.

Proud and in constant surprise:  if you’d have told me two years ago I’d be writing a post about our new logo, new employees, and new baby on the way, I’d have laughed at you and told you I drive a Beetle, no room for carseats.

(Man I miss that car) Â

xoxoxo

shoot.send.breathe is LIVE! New photographers Welcome!

Oh my goodness I am so excited….and a bit nervous!

Today we launched our sister company, all devoted to post-production and design needs for photographers and businesses! I am so proud of the work our designers and editors have done, and so in awe of their skill, that is makes me extremely excited to offer it up to more and more people!

shoot.send.breathe is a concept we’ve been forming for awhile, all about custom editing services, design services, and everything else you could need once your images are done, or your company is forming it’s look.  Please check out the site and it’s services, and we hope to hear from you soon!

shoot.send.breathe site

info@shootsendbreathe.com

Services include:

  • Sorting/Culling
  • Color-correction
  • Editing for flaws (flyaway hairs, blemishes, object removal, etc)
  • Wedding album design
  • Portrait album design
  • Logo creation and design
  • Company branding
  • Marketing materials (pricing guides, form emails, what to wear guides, etc)
  • Blog design
  • Web design

Also…Concierges clients get perks for using both companies!  Inquire for more info!  So very proud and excited today!

xoxoxo

 

 

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I Heart Chick Photographers

“You are running a discriminatory business!  It’s all WOMEN!”– a very good (male) friend of mine.

“Well…yes….but not on purpose!!” — me.

DISCLAIMER:  I would love to have male clients, I just don’t have any male clients yet!  So since I have none, please view the following post as pulled from my experience….of all women!!  I’d love to make a post just like this about male photographers….but alas, I work with none!

Dude, I think women photographers are just about the greatest thing on earth.  I really do.  Here’s my little *hat’s off post* to the amazing ladies I work with, to remind them that I think they are just phenoms.

5 Reasons Women Make Amazing Photogaphers

1.  Women can get gushy without feeling self-conscious, and how do you photograph a newborn baby without gush?? How do you catch those sweet, romantic, we’re-all-teary moments at weddings without the gush??  How do you not ooh and ahh and get giddy over those little things that make a photograph so wonderful?

2.  A woman is used to juggling.  No woman in the world, be her married/single/mom/childless, who doesn’t juggle and wear a hundred thousand hats a day.  In a week a woman is usually all of these Supermom, Career Woman, Sexy Hot Thing, Polite Lady, Angry Cat Fighter, Eye Batting Girl, House Project Manager, Disciplinarian Iron Fist, Chef of Many Meals, Best Girlfriend Shoulder to Cry On, Kitchen Table Comedian, and the list goes on and on and on.  So when it comes to organizing a family outdoors, coaxing a child to be happy, helping a couple get more romantic, or just the person who has to get all that gear set up while simultaneously organizing the bride’s family while also reminding your second shooter to go get details….it comes natural.  We are born with many roles in us, so the dancing act that goes into photography is just another day.

3.  We love pretty things.  No little girl in the world doesn’t want a pretty room, pretty hair, a pretty baby doll, a pretty dress.  No teenage girl isn’t striving to be pretty through clothes/makeup/magic hair products.  No grown woman doesn’t want the prettiest house possible.  I mean, it’s the reason Pinterest is thriving!  So of course, when photographing anything, a women is  seeking the pretty. Oh, and we know pretty when we see it, we’re pulling from decades of pretty hunting and creating. We can see when your face is at it’s prettiest angle, we can see what that light does to your hair, and we can catch the moment he’s looking at you as if you’re the prettiest girl in the world.

4.  We are emotional.  Some actually would say we’re insane, as a mass society, because we are so emotional.  But I know from experience of being photographed many times, you want an emotional being behind the lens. A woman is going to shoot with real feeling.  It’s never going to be a rational look at composition and scale and grids in her mind, it’s going to be the feeling she’s getting while looking at you, and directing that emotion behind the lens.  Your baby looks loved in those images because she know how to love a baby, your new husband looks hot in those pictures because she can capture the emotion a hot guy gives, and your family looks like they’re happy because she know what a happy family feels like.  We may drive our loved ones nuts with out emotional range, but it only helps in this profession!

5.  We are trendy-aware.  It’s just a fact.  We read the popular magazines and books, buy the household goods, watch the shows on E!, and scope out other women’s clothes/houses/shoes/hair all the time.  Unconsciously, we’re always forming a picture of what’s “in” right now.  What looks good, what is on the way out, and so on.  Well, this helps with photography because it means a woman’s eye is always being shaped and changed with the times.  You’re less likely to have dated images when you are working with a woman, as she is always shaping her style and aware, even if she’s just wearing old jeans to shoot you, she knows what’s up in the world!

So there you have it, from my fascist, women only regime (but not on purpose!) to you, the reasons I think in this field, women are killing it.

Bottom line: Ansel Adams can shoot a mean mountain scene, but as I’m not a mountain, I would pick Annie Leibovitz.

xoxoxo

 

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New Year New Everything!

Oh my goodness I am the worst blogger ever! I fully, 100% intended to always blog because my background is in writing and I love to write, so of course I would be an amazing blogger that never slacked off!

And then I got busy. Sigh. So unoriginal.

Anyway, 2012 is here….which is completely insane!  Is everyone else looking around in shock like I am???  I cannot believe 2011 is gone and we’re in a new year already, I feel like I need a moment to catch my breath! There are so many exciting things on the horizon that I will definitely NOT be getting that breath-catching moment, but that is not a complaint, it’s a blessing (as I remind myself at 3am while I’m answering emails).

Here are some things 2012 is bringing our way at The Concierges:

#1 The Branch Off

I am so excited and terrified of this event that I have sort of been ignoring the fact that it’s happening….but as I activated new email addresses today, I had to sort of accept the event. The Concierges is opening a branch off side business for all of our outsourced post-production projects (album design, logos and branding, color correction, artistic photo editing) because we’ve just gotten too many to manage without a new structure to manage it all.  It’s going to be live and unveiled by the end of this month and as majorly exciting as that is it’s also so overwhelming to think in two years we’ll have opened two businesses!  Thankfully, I have no time to be overwhelmed, so I won’t think about that, I’ll think about that tomorrow (Scarlett O’Hara was brilliant in my opinion).

More info to come on that later…

#2 The Staff

With the increase of business and the branch off I am finally going to need to hire and train more people, or I am going to be bald and cross-eyed from stress, unless we find a way to grow me a couple more hands in a month. This makes me so happy and so nervous all at once!  I am a bit of a control freak (I hate agreeing with my boyfriend on such points, but it’s true) and the thought of handing things over to people I don’t know personally makes me a little bit aprehensive, but I know there are people out there who can probably do this job better than me, and I hope I find them!

#3 The Travel Site

The top secret travel site I have been staffing with writers and sales people is going to launching in the next month or so and it’s going to be huge and potentially life-changing and once again, whenever I think about it, I do something like clean my closet or paint my bedroom, anything to ignore the fact that IT’S COMING! I will be so excited, though, when I can finally promote it publicly and get to work on all the exciting facets it will delve into! Even if it does make me bite my nails down into nubs…

#4 The Convention

I have been forced and dragged into WPPI in Vegas by Brooke Rainey and Kim Bee and I am terrified of attending!!  I am terrified because while I am so confident in the (two!) businesses now, there are a LOT of photographers at WPPI and I am worried that putting our name out there takes us from an underground-word-of-mouth-best-kept-secret organization to a flooded email inbox that makes me sob at night in fear.  But.  I’m doing it, I’m going, I have my MGM room and my badge all ready so, here goes nothing in February! Yikes!

So with all of these things happening at what feels like the exact same time, my New Year’s Resolutions are:

  • Get the branch off up and running with minimal effort on my part (aka hand it over for management by someone else)
  • Enjoy WPPI
  • Expand our client base and our staff
  • Do all I can for the travel site to be a hit
  • Meet every single one of my photographers from this past year and thank them personally for their support and faith in year 1!

Happy New Year everyone, and I hope your resolutions and goals all get met this year! Set your sights HIGH!

xoxoxo

 

 

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