Before I get flamed, all of this is just my opinion and it’s based on my experience. Your milage may vary.

You need to define “high-end.” Do you mean $50,000 weddings or $500,000 weddings or $5,000,000 weddings? Who is your target market, because you need to shape your business to that goal. Don’t just say you want people who are spending more money than the ones you currently serve–that’s not a very concrete goal.

Bridal shows are good to get started, because they get you some gigs and you can work on your craft. Until you’re very comfortable, selling to high-end brides won’t be happening. Do not continue them after you get your start because the mediocrity of the mass of photographers at such events will pull your brand down to their level. The brides leave feeling overwhelmed and frustrated and you just become “another photographer.” All the high-end clients I’ve shot have found me through referral or through a high-end event planner. I doubt you will ever see a high-end bride trolling a bridal show (again, this will depend on your description, but I’m talking about brides who are spending at least $100,000 on their event and around $20k on photographer). Their time is more valuable than that–that’s why they hire planners to recommend them 1 or 2 of the best options, rather than sifting through 30 photographers at a show.

You should consider things like packages and how you word your pricing. Do wealthy people really want to know nitty gritty details, or are they used to someone just taking care of their needs? When you buy an Aston Maritn, do you go in because you heard about a sale going on? Not likely. Do you have the work to support a high-end clientele? Do you have references in their circles? Who plans their weddings; have you taken them to lunch or bought them a nice book?

Consider your focus (or lack of it). On your site you basically say, “I specialize in shooting everything,” which is to say, you’re not specializing in anything. That looks desperate. High-end people prefer specialists. In fact, everyone prefers specialists.

On your site, why do you separate “philosophy” from “about me?” Just to have another tab? You are your business; don’t make people have to click around more than is necessary.

Consider how you “speak” on your site. High-end folks like to get to the point. You say, “What I have found that I love with photography is the ability to showcase the power and beauty of life as it is without bias.” That’s the long way around of saying, “I love photography because it shows the power and beauty of life.” (Of course photography is biased, by the way… what you chose to shoot and not shoot an an event, how you crop something out or leave it in, the angle you select–they are all formed from your bias and perspective of the event.)

You say, “I began my artistic career nearly 10 years ago as an Interactive Designer and Art Director which transitioned into a passion for photography as my career.” You shouldn’t use the same word twice (career) in a sentence. This is also the long way of saying, “Over the last decade my passion for visual art has brought me to photography as the perfect career.”

If you want to appeal to high-end folks, you need show that you can hang with them. Wealthy people are generally smarter, more efficient, better educated, and more perceptive than the average people. If your materials, your dress, your speech, etc. don’t match up, they will notice.

Ultimately, I think the most important thing (and this is true for any level of customer) is do they trust you? Do they feel you could hang at an event that may have famous people attending and you won’t act like a star-struck little girl? Do you have the proper etiquette for their class and their event? They want to know you’ll dress and act the part if they’re putting on a million-dollar, black-tie wedding. They want to feel you understand them, that you can hang with them, and, at some level, bond with them. If you’re nervous about getting the gig, and show it, they’ll suspect you’ll be nervous shooting it as well.

You should also consider that the fewer weddings you do, even at a higher price, means you’re in front of planners and other vendors less often. The less you are seen by influential vendors, the less likely you are to be referred. The genius Jim Kennedy has made more than probably 99.9% of the photographers in the US by going after the upper-middle market bride. His company is shooting multiple events every weekend. He has wedding planners asking HIM to be put on HIS referral list. He realized early on that there is MUCH more money to be made in the mid-level market than the high-end market. So, again, define what you’re going after.

So, those are some thoughts, in no particular order. You should probably grab Mike Colon’s “marketing to the high-end bride” DVD if you’re interested in pursuing this more. He’s a master at it, as his work and client list will attest.

I’m just an Indiana bumpkin.

$.02

Let’s start with the hardware of the phone, itself. Rebel Fish got white, because it’s different and beautiful. It does scratch, but so does black. The basic feel of the phone is a little sexier, due to the slight bevel Apple has introduced to the back of the phone. The overall dimensions are roughly the same.

The bevel, while feeling nice in the hand, is a bad idea when on the table. Rebel Fish loves the rock-solid feel of the 1.0 phone when using it as a calculator, texting, or whatever she happens to do. With the new bevel, the phone rocks and slips when you hit the edges of the screen. Bad.

The audio quality of the speakers and microphone are both improved. It’s much easier to hear and people seem to enjoy better microphone pick-up. The metal buttons are pretty, but otherwise unchanged from the original.

The battery doesn’t last as long as the 1.0 phone, but Rebel Fish suspects that’s more due to the addition of the 3G capability, which she’s glad to sacrifice some battery life for. The 3G requires more power! And, while it doesn’t last as long as iPhone 1.0, it still lasts longer than any other 3G capable phone on the market.

The addition of the GPS is fantabulous! Rebel Fish frequently turns on the Google Map program, activates the GPS-follow mode, and turns on the satellite image. When you’re driving, you can zoom in and see the buildings you’re zooming by in real-life mirrored on the phone. Your little, pulsing, blue dot moving on the road you’re on–even showing it on the correct _side_ of the road. It’s so fun!

But really, the heart of the upgrade has been the software. Rebel Fish has downloaded many of the available applications, and she’s screenshotted the ones she’s decided make the cut–just for you! Click the thumbnail to see them all.

Rebel Fish loves Loopt, a little application that auto-detects your location, allows you to take a photograph, and post a little note. It then updates Facebook, Twitter, and more!

The language learning applications are fantastic. From flash-cards to native speakers, it’s becoming much more practical to learn a language.

The games are great, of course. In the iPhone, we’ve got the world’s best gaming platform–and you can expect folks to start developing some awesome titles for it. Texas Hold’em, by Apple, is perfect. You can play against other folks on your wifi network, or in single mode. It’s a blast to sit around a table with 4 or 5 friends, still chatting, tossing insults, and playing a great game of poker–without the cards or chips!

Rebel Fish also enjoys Twitterific, a simple app to keep tabs on her friends that Twitter and Tweet.

There is, of course, a down-side to all this joy. The push applications (which, Apple has admitted, aren’t exactly push applications) seem to take more of the battery life out of the phone. Syncing and backing up the phone takes longer, as there is now more to sync. Essentially, we have been enjoying the iPhone’s speed because we’ve had way more processing power than was required to run the basics of the phone. Now, with hundreds of third-party applications arriving, the little processor is feeling it’s limits.

Rebel Fish heartily suggests that anyone with an iPhone who hasn’t (is there anyone?) upgraded, dive in; the water’s great!

Go go gadget Apple!
RF

Never fear! Alsoft is here! (trumpets)

Rebel Fish was in a bind and quickly ran out to the web to download Alsoft’s amazing Disk Warrior 4. After paying the pathetic $100 for the “Download and CD” option, she quickly slurped down the software, launched it, and the silly thing immediately discovered the drive that couldn’t mount with a little message that said, “This disk’s directory structure needs to be rebuilt.” Rebel Fish clicked “rebuild,” and about 10 minutes later, the drive was purring along, no data lost.

Click here for more info on this fantastic, simple, and powerful disk saver. Thanks, Alsoft!

If you’re still using Bridge or (gasp) Photoshop to edit your images, step out of the stone age and into the future with Adobe Lightroom. Kevin Swan walks you through the basics to get you up and running by the time you’ve finished the video.

Kevin can edit a full wedding from 2000 images to 600 in less than 2 hours. That includes all sorting, final effects, crops, file naming, everything! This video shows you how it’s done.

The video is 45 minutes long and covers the following:

Go checkout Lightroom, free trials available!

Order Now: Click HERE!

Click here

It’s called Logosauce. You put up a description of what you need a logo for, you commit some cash (minimum $200) to the winner, and then it’s open season. Whoever wants to invest the time to design can, and the submissions are all voted on. You can give feedback and the designers can respond. You award the winner with the cash you proposed.

It’s smart, and you get some pretty savvy designers jumping on your brand, which can be a good thing.

Check it out!

This week, Intuit announced the iPhone interface for Rebel Fish’s data, and she couldn’t be happier! You know it’s just a matter of time before we’re able to enter transactions via our favorite little gadget. It’s so sweet! Check it out:

The main interface:

Who owes Rebel Fish:

Look at a transaction detail:

Client details are fully clickable: phones dial, addresses send it to google maps on the phone.

There’s much more, but it’s an exciting step forward!

Swim on!

A Lightroom video from Kevin Swan is on its way… Stay tuned!

Rebel Fish, of course, has an iPhone. She’s taken to storing much of her needed information in her address book entry. E.g., credit card numbers, passwords for frequently used sites, social security numbers of her friends and their credit card info. hahahah.

So, seeing his distress, Rebel Fish worried what would happen if she lost hers.

That’s why Rebel Fish now locks her phone with a passcode. You can find out more about it HERE. She highly recommends doing it, and despite the fact that you have to enter the code when you turn on the phone, every time she does it, she’s reassured that her personal info is safe. Besides, it makes her feel like a secret agent.

Swim on!
RF

The same is true in any business you might have, but _especially_ wedding photography.

A bride doesn’t want a photographer who “specializes” in parties, architecture, portraits, children, weddings, corporate, models, and animals. She wants a wedding pro. She wants the specialist who eats, breathes, and sleeps weddings.

What’s your branding look like?
Are you a specialist or a generalist?

Are you worried about turning work away? Statistics show that, by specializing, you will attract more business than you do by generalizing. Sure, you’ll scare the persnickety pet owner looking for that perfect portrait with her beloved beagle, but you’ll attract more than enough blushing brides to make up for the lost cash.

Trust Rebel Fish. Or, read the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Either way, Rebel Fish don’t lie.

It creates a nice slideshow that publishes directly to your website, no muss, no fuss.

The real deal
SlideShowPro for Lightroom contains the same software as our Flash component, but in a compiled form that’s editable from within Lightroom.

No Flash required
No Flash (or Flash experience for that matter) required. Everything is self-contained and ready to export locally or upload to your web site.

Real-time live preview
Change any of SlideShowPro’s 60+ parameters and preview your changes inside a real, working preview of SlideShowPro before you publish.

Savable templates
Publishing more than one slideshow with different settings? Save them as templates you can retrieve anytime to update with new content.

Build your own captions
EXIF, IPTC and file metadata available to build your own custom image titles and captions to display inline or as an image overlay in SlideShowPro.

Integrated FTP upload
Upload your slideshow directly to your web server from within Lightroom without a separate FTP client, and bookmark it for updating anytime you need to.

Quality photo publishing
Built on the industry standard backbone of Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom publishes top-quality, web optimized imagery for your slideshow automatically.

Always up to date
Because the engine uses SlideShowPro, it will always be kept up to date with the very latest version available to users of the Flash component.

Living with the Kitty or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Apple’s Leopard

So, of course, I waited in line to buy Leopard, the next version of Apple’s OSX operating system; just one of many hopeful geeks.

Over the years, I’ve come to have high expectations of Apple. The iPhone continues to exceeded most of my expectations. Their computers are simply a joy to use. The ever-changing line of iPods is ever-getting-cooler. So Leopard was bound to make the experience of the 4 Macs I own even that much sweeter.

I was disappointed. And then I wasn’t. But still I am, but not really.

Before I launch into this, here’s a link to many of the new features I’m reviewing: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/

The installation was easy, as you’d expect, but I ran into problems nearly immediately. I have several external hard drives that serve various purposes. One is my active client data, one is a large backup drive that supports several computers, one is my music and movies, etc. When I plugged my client data and backup drives into my newly Leopardized laptop, I received an exciting message that Leopard wasn’t able to repair the drives and that I was being given access to them on a very limited basis. It recommended I back them up immediately.

Not good.

So, I pulled the drives, stuck them on one of my OSX 10.4 computers that hadn’t been updated yet, and ran my repair utilities on them to see if there were any problems. None showed. The drives purred along and all the data was accessible. Hmm.

Put them back on my laptop: now the Active Data drive could be read but not written to and the backup drive wouldn’t even mount. So, I tried connecting them to another computer with Leopard: same deal–it wouldn’t mount and I couldn’t repair it.

I actually almost decided to take the drives and my laptop in to Apple for help. You know things were bad if I was considering such a drastic step. I went another route, though…

I formatted the large backup drive in Leopard, since it contained just duplicates of information already on other drives. Then, I copied all of the Active Data to the freshly formatted backup drive. It took a while! My plan was to then reformat the Active Data drive by Leopard, and copy everything BACK to it. However, suddenly, the Active Data drive has no problems. I can verify it, repair it, mount it, write to it, read from it, etc. Nothing changed. It just started working. It’s humming along just fine now, so I never reformatted…

Not good.

One of the things I’ve been looking forward to in Leopard is the Time Machine application. I’ve been having a frustrating time trying to back up all my computers lately. I’d bought the new Airport that allows you to serve multiple hard drives over your wireless network. Perfect! I thought I could hook up some big drives and have Apple’s Backup program back all the computers up on a nightly routine. It was swell in theory, but the Airport kept dropping connections to the backup drives. It’s new technology that hasn’t been fully bugged out yet. That’s what I get for early adoption. So, I’ve been manually moving drives around, getting backups of machines, etc. I was very hopeful that Time Machine would allow me to back all the computers up more efficiently. Then I discovered that Time Machine doesn’t support disks served over the wireless network on Airport.

Not good.

After some experimentation, however, I discovered I could attach a few drives to my old Powerbook G4 12″, which has been working as my print server in the “back office,” and connect to them over the wireless network, and with some tweaking in the sharing settings–get all the machines to see those drives through Time Machine and the auto backups seem to be working great! It’s a little slow over the wireless (the first backup of my work laptop and the active data drive is over 450gigs. It took about 15 hours!), but once the big backups are done, the incremental hourly ones shouldn’t even be noticeable. This was a BIG improvement for me, and a big relief that all my systems are backing up hourly.

Good.
Very good.

The entire operating system seems to be running MUCH faster. Safari launches immediately. Websites snap into existence. The new Finder is sharp and snappy, even the new Coverflow view is fast. Quick Look is super-cool, allowing you to look inside documents without having to open them up–you get addicted to this quickly.

Good.

The parental controls are much improved. You get complete reports of every application the kids launched, of every site visited (and every site they TRIED to visit), every email, every IM. It’s sweet! You can also take over other computers on your network VERY simply, which makes for management of multiple computers pretty fun and simple.

Good.

Most of my applications (including the important ones like CS3 and Lightroom) seem to be working just fine. I’ve had to update a few (like Journeler) that didn’t work right off the bat. I’m still having a problem with RapidWeaver being able to publish to my blog, but I’m sure these minor things will be worked out.

Good.

As a GTDer, I was very excited about the new To Do and Notes system that is incorporated into nearly every application. The implementation is, sadly, horrible. The only cool thing is that you can select text from just about anywhere and right-click on it to select the new “New To Do” option.

The To Do list in email doesn’t even allow you to filter so that completed items don’t show up. It’s crude and rudimentary at best. The way it “syncs” with the iPhone is, it turns your To Dos into emails that are all stuffed in an IMAP folder on the mail server. You can’t DO anything to the To Do, you can just read it (sort of) on the phone. You can’t sort them, you can’t complete them, nothing. For those of us with lots of To Dos that we’re used to formating and sorting in useful ways–this is an unacceptable. It’s unusable. It’s un-American. This feels like such an add-on, last-minute thing that I’m embarrassed for Apple.

Not good.
Very not good.

The notes are only slightly better. You’re supposed to be able to sync them online as well, but on my computers you can either sync the To Dos or the Notes, not both. Not sure why. But it’s lame. You’d think that the Notes in Mail sync with the Notes program on the iPhone. You’d be wrong.

Not good.

Mail has been beefed and cleaned up in satisfactory ways. Much of the preference panes are smarter, simpler, and otherwise improved. One of the things I love is that any date or address or phone number are auto-detected and you get a quick little drop-down that allows you to add these things to a contact, go to it on a map, etc. Very slick. Mail supports sexy templates that I can see being a big improvement as you get used to them and customize them.

iCal no longer has an inspector tab, you have to double-click on an item to see/edit its details. I can live with that, but it’s a little extra work that I didn’t think helped anything. I do like that you can now schedule default alarms. So, in those departments, small but enjoyable upgrades.

Good.

Some of the eye candy is fun, like Spaces, but I don’t find I have much use for it. I’m trying to force myself to get into it and see if I find a good use for it–it’s nothing as revolutionary as expose was, though. The new dock is cute, but otherwise just a dock. I really like the new Web Clippings feature in Safari. It’s so simple to use, it’s fun. I can see a LOT of uses for this functionality. The new PDF controls are very swank, too.

Good.

Spotlight is MUCH MUCH improved. It’s lightning-quick, and much smarter. I’ve actually ditched Quicksilver and gone back to Spotlight because it’s so much better than the first version. I wasn’t using all the very clever, but slightly complicated, features of Quicksilver, so as a launcher and document finder–Spotlight is once again my favorite.

Good.

iChat has some fun new toys, but more important is the ability to remote control the computer of the person you’re chatting with. It means you have a quick and easy way to help support someone’s technical question, or a quick way to show them something on your machine. You can also do presentations of slideshows, documents, movies, whatever across iChat, which makes it a very useful business tool. This stuff rocks!

Good.

All in all, I’m having fun with the kitty now. It’s not the giant leap forward I was hoping for, but it is an improvement, and I expect the little things that are irritating me will be gone in future updates. I’m sure there’s more, but I wanted to get you a quick feel for where things were at! March on!

Kevin

Getting The Picture
By Matt Mendelsohn
Sunday, September 2, 2007; W20

When he was a photo-journalist, “wedding photographer” sounded like the punch line of a joke. Then he went soft and discovered that taking photographs of the most important moment in people’s lives actually is funny. Also moving, sad, scary and profound.

IT WAS 10:15 P.M., AND THE BAND WAS HALFWAY THROUGH GLORIA GAYNOR’S “I WILL SURVIVE,” a song I’ve heard so many hundreds of times in the past nine years that I think I should start earning some sort of secret ASCAP royalty, when the tiny phone in my pocket began to vibrate.

My cellphone, like any good wedding photographer will tell you, is always on vibrate, even when I’m not at a wedding. Just one of those silly things, really, but I don’t take any chances. I never trust traffic on the Beltway, even on a weekend. I don’t eat strange foods on Friday, lest I become sick on Saturday. And I absolutely cringe at the thought of my phone going off during a wedding.

I cringe because it’s my job as the photographer to document the nuptial events unfolding in front of me — from the hushed nave of St. Matthew’s Cathedral downtown to the Potomac overlook at George Washington’s River Farm — not become part of them. I’m hired, of course, to chronicle, but after nine years and some 400 weddings — think Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” but with a lot more salmon — one can’t help just plain observing. And so, here is observation Number One: On average these days, one and a half guests will receive a phone call during a wedding, often smack during the vows, the inevitable tinny strains of Beethoven’s Ninth emanating, just as I’m sure Beethoven himself would have wanted, from the circuit board of a Motorola RAZR.

One and a half guests. Welcome to my world. This is what I’ve become after all these years, a deranged comic book character: mild-mannered wedding photographer by night, captive observer of the human condition by day. Who could pretend not to notice, after all, when a mother’s very first words upon seeing her daughter in a wedding dress are: “Your earring is crooked.” And who could look the other way when a priest tosses the couple he’s married only three minutes earlier out of a warm and dry church and into the pouring rain because he has a confessional schedule to maintain? (Though not Christian myself, I’ve heard Paul’s letter to the Corinthians about charity — the one with the noisy gongs and clanging cymbals — enough to appreciate the rich irony.) Or when an orthopedic surgeon, minutes away from his own marriage, takes time to treat the leg of one of the waitstaff who, while setting up tables, has slipped on a wet floor and happens to speak not a word of English.

I witness acts of incredible tenderness — a bride quietly pinning a photo of her mother who died of breast cancer into her dress; acts of incredible joy — just about any father dancing with his daughter; and acts of questionable sanity — a group of adult groomsmen allowing an 8-year-old to pilot a golf cart into a lake comes to mind. And each Sunday morning around 2 o’clock, as I collapse into bed after another wedding, I’m convinced that I must be part of some kind of clinical trial, with no end date in sight.

And so, on this particular June night, it wasn’t until a few more songs had whizzed by — I can’t be sure if it was “Mustang Sally,” “Shout” and then “Love Shack” or, more likely, “Love Shack,” “Shout” and, finally, “Mustang Sally” — that I had a chance to look at the flashing display on my phone, a strange number with a strange area code. I put down my cameras, walked outside to the patio of Vienna’s Meadowlark Botanical Gardens and dialed in the dark.

“Hi, this is Matt Mendelsohn. Did someone call this number?”

WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER.

What is it about those two words together that seems to evoke so much pity? No one thinks twice if you say that you’re an architectural photographer, or a photographer who shoots nudes, or a globe-trotting photojournalist. Friends will feign interest, at least, on the architectural front; be really excited about the nudes; and ask you again and again if you’ve ever been shot at as a news photographer. In fact, for years when I was a photojournalist, I went to parties where I was the only non-attorney out of 30 guests — attorneys making a jillion dollars a year more than I — only to be told that I had the coolest job. You’ve shot Michael Jordan?!?!

What was Nicole Kidman like?

How long were you in the Gulf War? Have you ever been shot at?

Wedding photographers, needless to say, have never inspired such levels of envy. Instead, they reside in a category usually reserved for car salesmen and stamp enthusiasts, a little bit of Willy Loman with a pinch of Charlie Brown. Adam Sandler already made the movie about the wedding singer. Is there any doubt that the movie about the wedding photographer would star anyone but Albert Brooks? It’s the reason that, even today, when the guy sitting next to me on the Delta Shuttle asks what kind of photography I do, I have a tendency to say, “Well, I worked for USA Today for 10 years, and now I have my own business.” Move along; nothing to see here.

Then again, maybe I’m just missing something. In the past few years, a whole new breed of wedding photographers has emerged, particularly on the West Coast, determined to give the musty reputation a makeover. They share ideas on message boards (”Show us your cake pictures!!”), pat one another on the back (”You’re a rock star of photography!!”) and spend much of their time hawking seminars as if they’re selling Herbalife products. They also conveniently sidestep the fact that shooting a wedding is a bit like taking an SAT in which you’ve been given all the answers in advance. I feel certain James Nachtwey, the legendary war photographer, would find life much easier if he knew where the bad guys were going to start shooting week in and week out.

This is why none of this was supposed to happen. Like all good young photojournalists, I was raised to mock wedding photography and all that it represented. I wanted to be a photojournalist, not some dork schmoozing up Aunt Alice. “I don’t shoot weddings,” the standard response of any self-respecting White House news photographer, was always more mantra than simple statement of fact. And in the late 1980s, when I was establishing myself here in Washington as a photographer, first at United Press International, with its constant going-out-of-business sales (”No, Pat Robertson was last week’s buyer; this week it’s the Saudis”), and then at USA Today, it was a badge of honor not to shoot weddings, and, by golly, I wasn’t about to let the side down.

All of this was understood those many years ago. My photographic dreams lay in the desert, as in Kuwait, not in dessert, as in chocolate-covered strawberries. And I was well on my way to fulfilling them. I was five feet from Rodney King when he stammered, “Can’t we all get along?”; 150 feet from President Bill Clinton as Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands; and 27,000 feet above Earth, lying on my belly in a flying gas tank, photographing one stealth fighter after another as they refueled en route to the Persian Gulf. I was shooting cool things and loving every minute of it.

By the mid-’90s, I had crawled around newly discovered tombs in Egypt, photographed huge celebrities in tiny hotel rooms and been splattered with blood — curiously, something that is a badge of honor in photojournalistic circles — while covering boxing title fights in Las Vegas. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, though as the years went by, little by little, I began to feel pangs of ambivalence.

Where you once asked a band for permission to photograph a concert, now you navigated a phalanx of lawyers. A one-on-one shoot with Jennifer Aniston in a hotel room had become a one-on-eight shoot, if I were to include all the publicists, with their little black dresses and walkie-talkies, breathing down my neck (and repeating the words “Three minutes, three minutes!” within the first 33 seconds). And, lastly, and perhaps most important, I began to grow tired of chasing people.

Chasing people is a staple of a news photographer’s diet — you can’t claim conscientious objector status and elect to shoot the pet of the week instead. I spent a lot time chasing people (though “chase” is a misnomer because the actual act involves mostly walking backward, throwing elbows and focusing at the same time) at courthouses around the country: U.S. District Court (Marion Barry, Ollie North); the U.S. Supreme Court (pick an abortion case); Simi Valley (the LAPD/Rodney King trial); Los Angeles (O.J. Simpson); and, though she had no court to call her own, the chase of all chases, Monica Lewinsky.

For weeks and weeks in 1998, as that scandal broke, I chased Lewinsky for USA Today, with limited success, if one can even use that word. Though tame by Hollywood paparazzi standards, my Lewinsky chases became increasingly fraught with doubt and regret. Then, one Sunday morning, while walking with my wife and my dog in Georgetown, I found myself, sans camera, holding the door for Lewinsky at Starbucks on M Street — like a hunter accidentally bumping into the stag he’s been stalking for days. As she brushed by me, balancing a couple of lattes, she smiled and said, “Thanks so much!” and I said, “Soy-tinly!” — for some odd reason playfully playing up my New York accent. And I thought to myself, What am I doing chasing this poor woman?

Perhaps it was coincidence, or maybe kismet, but the more the journalism ennui began to set in, the more it seemed people were asking me to shoot their weddings. Like a parent who is asked by his 9-year-old “Are we there yet?” 900 times, I couldn’t seem to shake this damn question. And none of these people were looking for a dork in a tux: They wanted me to cover their weddings no differently than if I were covering a White House event or a rally on the Mall. With each wedding I photographed, I realized that there actually existed events in which people wanted you to take their pictures, where there was no yellow police tape and where the only lawyers present were the ones getting married.

And that’s when I did it. There came a day several years back when, with reckless abandon, I decided to leave the noble pursuit of journalism, with its Page One budget meetings filled with smart people discussing Saddam Hussein or the latest North Korean standoff, not to mention the not-so-noble pursuit of, well, pursuits. I was ready to throw myself down a most unusual rabbit hole, reemerging into the bizarro world of Weddings, where family relationships can often be broken into the in-laws and the outlaws, where self-absorption can be raised to an art form, where a Jewish guy can recite the entire Catholic Mass by heart, as well as reel off, like an idiot savant, the date of every Saturday for the next year and a half.

“MATT, IT’S MISSY LANGERT, YOUR NEIGHBOR JOEL’S DAUGHTER, CALLING FROM DALLAS. Mom’s had a massive heart attack while attending a wedding here, and Dad is home all alone. He didn’t come out for the wedding. Is there any way you can go over and sit with him? He’s all by himself.”

Taken by surprise, I tried to process all of this information in a room filled with happy people having a wonderful time. She was at a wedding in Texas. I was at a wedding in Virginia. And Joel was all by himself.

My 85-year-old neighbor Joel Langert is one of my favorite people, a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon with a soft spot he guards fiercely. One minute he’s grumbling about how movies used to be two for a nickel, and the next he’s leaving a beautiful orchid — a phalaenopsis or perhaps a paphiopedilum, a lady-slipper, grown lovingly in his backyard greenhouse — on my kitchen counter. He just walks in, puts down the flower and berates me later for leaving the front door of my house unlocked. Without asking, he once planted a fig tree on my front lawn, a tree that now yields succulent fruit by the hundreds and a tree that I adore. And he’ll often ask me to buy him packs — he doesn’t drive anymore — of his favorite Dutch cigarillos, Schimmelpenninck, even though he knows he shouldn’t be smoking them. When I took him to his first Nationals game, Joel didn’t stop complaining about the noise — the constant stream of musical snippets aimed at inciting the crowd — for the first eight innings (we didn’t make it to the ninth). I asked him when was the last time he was at a baseball game, and he replied, “Lou Gehrig was playing at Yankee Stadium.”

Joel and his wife, Eileen, had been married for 55 years, 11 longer than I’ve been alive, and enjoyed a beautiful relationship. “It was love at first sight,” he remembered of their meeting at the Gertz department store on Long Island where they both worked. “I wrote up a petition that she should marry me, and I took it to everyone in the store to sign.” After their wedding in New York, on January 29, 1950 — “I remember the church was candlelit” — the newlyweds drove with another couple down to Fort Lauderdale. Joel laughed as he recalled the two songs that played on the car radio nonstop that trip: “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” a cowboy’s lament, and “Sixteen Tons,” a depressing number about the perils of coal mining. Not exactly the most romantic driving music. (I laughed, of course, because Gloria Gaynor was only 4 months old at the time, and it could have been much worse.)

But it was a fitting start, as driving and travel would play a huge part in their lives, on trips over the years from Finland to Singapore, and in cars such as their 1956 pink T-Bird, the 1957 Jaguar Mark VII Saloon (”It looked like a Bentley,” Joel says), the 1972 E-Type Jaguar (”Eileen was never into the shifting thing”) and, finally, the S-Type he bought Eileen for Christmas in 2002, parked in the driveway with a big red bow tied to the front.

After decades in advertising with the Hecht Co., Joel now spends much of his retirement tending to his beloved plants. Eileen, on the other hand, was always abuzz with activity, always off, it seemed, on one of the many trips for senior citizens she organized and chaperoned for Arlington County. When a mutual neighbor on our block gave birth to triplets, several of us chipped in for a night nurse for a couple of evenings. We felt rather proud of our gift, not realizing that, for months and months, Eileen was baking the family fully prepared dinners with no fanfare.

Despite Joel’s faux crankiness, his most endearing trait, it was easy to see how much he loved Eileen, and how proud he was of her. I asked him recently what made his love for Eileen so special, and without even a second to ponder, he replied, “She was two-thirds of me.” Two-thirds of me. I tried to soak that one up. “We never once said no to each other,” and then, reverting back to prime Joel form, “except the time I wanted to pull up the grass and replace it with those small paving pebbles.”

So now, as I stood in the darkness, the band’s music coming through the windows in that muffled way, where you only hear the bass, I knew I had to act quickly. I collected my cameras, two Canon EOS1 Mark IIs, my bag filled with lenses and my very sweaty suit coat, and headed for the parking lot. I would have left in half an hour anyway, and I had already taken more than 1,500 images that day, starting with the “getting ready,” as it’s referred to in wedding speak — the ceremony, the family pictures, the dancing, the cake-cutting. I tucked my little pouch filled with identical, neatly stacked 2-gigabyte memory cards — memory cards, how apt, I always think — into the bag and headed back to Arlington.

MY OWN BEST MAN DIDN’T SHOW UP FOR MY WEDDING.

Nine years ago, my younger brother, Eric, was directing his best friend and unknown actress, Edie Falco, in a tiny independent film he wrote specifically for her. Filming was scheduled for the day of my wedding, and Eric bowed out. I was devastated, having shared a room with him for 16 years while growing up on Long Island. My older brother Daniel, an esteemed critic and classics scholar, came to the rescue, with a lengthy toast about the differences between ancient Greek — my wife, Maya, is Greek — and ancient Jewish traditions. Given that I had rarely been inside a synagogue, except for weddings, since I was 13 and am decidedly non-religious, the toast struck me as wonderfully intellectual and, not surprisingly, impersonal.

Eric went on to win best director at Sundance the next year, and Edie went on to become the most famous mob wife in television history as Carmela Soprano, and all was long forgotten years ago. Truth be told, we don’t really discuss it very much, and that seems to work pretty well. We all serve some kind of penance, and maybe mine is having to listen to touching best man speeches every week of my life. Ironically, it would be Daniel, with whom I was never close growing up — he, spending much of our childhood reading about pharaohs and Greek gods; me, worrying how the Mets could possibly survive without Tom Seaver — with whom I would, years later, travel all over the world, tracking down Holocaust survivors for a memoir he was writing. The emptiness that I felt during his stand-in toast — I kept hoping for some funny little anecdote about me, until I realized that my own brother didn’t know me well enough to have any funny little anecdotes — would be replaced by the camaraderie of many, many long trips together, from Australia to Ukraine, just me and Daniel on very long plane rides.

This is why we all love weddings so much — decades of family history rushing to the surface, like a submarine after nine months under the ocean. Of course, it’s usually just minutes after that spectacular arrival that you want to run for cover yelling, “Dive! Dive! Dive!” A tug of war between a bride and her mom over something as simple as where to place the headpiece can get to Defcon 1 remarkably quickly, as this exchange I recall hearing at a Georgetown church illustrates:

“Mom, it should go here.”

“Well, I just think it should be back a bit.”

“Mom, please let the hairdresser do her job. She knows best.”

“I know. It’s just that I think it should it go back a little.”

“Mom, please! You’re making me really stressed out. Please don’t say another word, and let the hairdresser do her job!”

(Dead silence in the room. Now, count to 10.)

“Fine. It’s just that I thought it should go back a little.”

These are the things I witness weekly. No catastrophes, no disasters, just little glimpses into family life, 2007. Without a doubt, the question I’m asked most often is, “What’s the worst thing that ever happened at a wedding?” It’s also the one that always makes me laugh, because it precludes the obvious converse, that is, what’s the best thing that’s ever happened at a wedding? In all these years, no one ever has asked me that one, despite the fact that, last I checked, and with the possible exception of a handful of dour church ladies I’ve come across, weddings are tremendously happy events. But let’s face it: We watch NASCAR for the crashes, despite our protestations to the contrary, and we follow celebrity romances so that we can get to the celebrity breakups.

And, of course, it would be overly simplistic to single out mothers and daughters as the source of all wedding drama, my favorite fake Freud quotation notwithstanding: “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.” More often than not, the drama that we all expect to see played out at weddings is just a byproduct of the bridal-industrial complex, a perfectly evocative moniker bequeathed to me by a bride many years ago.

Weddings long ago migrated from traditional daytime affairs — where the men looked dashing in their morning coats, the women had dresses with (gasp!) straps, and the nonstop giggling of flower girls could be heard wafting though the air — into lavish evening extravaganzas, where children are not even invited. They’ve gone from the simplicity (and, to be fair, dullness) of the “chicken or the beef?” into menus that boast medallions of veal with a port peppercorn reduction. Today’s weddings have price tags the size of a small mortgage (something for which I clearly share responsibility), time schedules that would make a railroad proud, golf outings, spa retreats and 19-seat minibuses taking bridal parties on magical mystery tours around Washington. Things have gotten so bloated that I was actually taken aback when a bride once said to me, “I’m so excited to be marrying Derek today.”

Between the countless reality shows with names such as “The Real Wedding Crashers” and “Bridezillas,” (Episode 10: When Kristina’s sisters show up late for a nail appointment, the bride is furious!), it’s no wonder people focus on the negative — or bizarre, or just irritating — aspects of weddings. The myriad wedding magazines on the newsstands, and the thousands of wedding blogs, don’t help much. Consider this easy-to-follow advice from aboutWeddings.com: “Transition of color in the wedding is ‘hot.’ The color and theme of a wedding is first seen with the save-the-date card. At the ceremony, the colors are different than what was seen in the save-the-date card/invitation. At the cocktail reception, the colors are different from the ceremony. At the dinner reception, the colors are a combination of all colors previously seen. More than just two colors and no matchy-matchy!”

See? Simple.

Luckily, that kind of silliness isn’t ever enough to trump the genuine moments of love and the celebrations of great happiness I’m often privileged to witness: I cried like a baby when a 5-year-old flower girl, blinded by the brain tumor growing inside her head, was led down the aisle by the little ring bearer at St. Aloysius years ago. But I must admit that the moment is annoyingly linked in my memory with the posting, around that same time, on theknot.com, a wedding message board (”Driving Brides Crazy Since 1996!”), by a bride who sought advice on what to do about one of her bridesmaids who, as a result of a worsening muscular disease, was now in a wheelchair, something that would potentially ruin her wedding photos.

(The Knot can be a great source of amusement. My sister, Jennifer, a “Knottie” herself, once related to me an e-mail exchange she had with a woman who had been told, as a Jew, not to use Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” because the composer had famously converted from Judaism. She had instead settled on Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” When Jennifer, with tongue in cheek, suggested that perhaps — just perhaps — that one wasn’t exactly kosher either, the woman responded, “Why? It’s about Jesu, not Jesus!”)

At first I was afraid I was petrified/
Kept thinkin’ I could never live without you by my side.

As I sat across from Joel on that June night, I realized the song I had come to hate so much, the song that, perhaps more than any other, constantly reminds me that I have become a wedding photographer, shooting the same thing week in and week out, was now racing through my groggy brain. This time, though, it was reminding me of why I am a wedding photographer. My years of downplaying what I did for a living seemed silly as I sat on Joel’s sofa. How bad could it be to be around people who are desperately in love, all the while surrounded by friends and family who love them desperately. Yeah, big deal, they all go crazy when “I Will Survive” or “YMCA” starts playing, but they haven’t heard those songs thousands of times; I have. And when I think that I could be tallying billable hours, or working in a cubicle in E Ring, or selling widgets, I think my life is pretty darn okay.

Just the other day, I received an e-mail from a photographer looking for an internship. His short note almost brought me to tears: “I come from Sarajevo, Bosnia, and my life has put me though many challenges. I am saying this because I have had the chance to see the worst in humans and was lucky enough to survive it. Since then, I have made it my goal to help people record their happiest moments, because those moments are rare and precious, and one never has too many of them.”

I kept Joel company for hours, long into the next morning, information coming in very slowly, and me, still in my sweaty wedding clothes, nodding off occasionally. Around 4:30 a.m., the phone rang, and I could hear the voice through the receiver telling my neighbor and friend that the woman he had been married to for 55 years didn’t make it.

I felt so out of place, so not the person who should have been there at that terrible moment. But looking back, two years later, it almost seems as if Eileen was just being her usual giving self, not just allowing me to see how much she was adored, but allowing me to see marriage in its barest and most naked form. For nine hours that day — nine years, really — I had watched a marriage begin, and, now, for nine hours, I would watch one end. I wanted to turn away as Joel shook uncontrollably. I tried so hard to soothe him, but I knew there was nothing I could really say. Though I was in the presence of profound loss, all I could feel was love. This wasn’t about linens and party favors, or caviar stations and big bands. There were no toasts and no blessings, no Bible readings, no clanging gongs or blaring trumpets. At long last, I was seeing the embodiment of marriage itself, the very reason man and woman have been wed from the beginning of time. True love.

Something else floated through my brain, this time decidedly more literary than Gloria Gaynor. In my days as an English major, some 20 years ago, the book that had the most profound effect on me was Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, a tattered paperback edition of which is never far from my grasp. Now I could hear my favorite line, the book’s second sentence, coming through: “Each of us is all the sums he has not counted. Subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”

It was 8 a.m. when the little cellphone in my pocket began to vibrate. My wife was calling, and I told her the news. I gave Joel a hug, grabbed my jacket and my cameras, and walked across the street and into my house, where, unable to sleep, I went downstairs and began to download, with newfound respect, memory cards from the previous night’s wedding.

Matt Mendelsohn is a photographer based in Arlington. He can be reached at matt@mattmendelsohn.com.

Purging info-poor entries from Address Book
You may share my Address Book pollution problem — having too many orphaned names that got scribbled on a PDA or were manually added but never fleshed out (like: 10 years ago!).

Here’s a really stupidly useful Smart Group for Address Book that helps identify entries without any real information attached to them.

Seem too obvious? Maybe. But it helped me kill eighty-two entries yesterday that might have sat around for another ten years if I hadn’t made it. Yay, obviousness.

The opposite

The opposite of up is down.
The opposite of in is out.

Those two are easy. They are one-dimensional.

The opposite of Steve Jobs is Bill Gates.

Sort of. That’s because Bill and Steve have a lot in common (outsize personalities, many Google matches, successful tech companies). But it’s useful to consider them as opposites because we learn a lot about their approaches, personalities, and yes, brands, by looking at the inverse.

The opposite of Starbucks is Dunkin Donuts.

Not an independent coffee shop, and not coffee at home.

On the other hand, the opposite of Dunkin Donuts is not Starbucks. The opposite is ‘not having coffee out.’

That’s because when someone considers getting their morning coffee, the choice is usually home or Dunkin. That person doesn’t have Starbucks as part of their choice set. Defining your brand in this way makes it easier to ignore the irrelevant competition and easier to figure out what you are (and aren’t).

Bill Clinton and John Edwards aren’t the opposite of Rush Limbaugh. Al Franken is.

The Blackberry isn’t the opposite of the iPhone. A plain jane Motorola phone is. Apple understands this. Blackberry doesn’t seem to.

The opposite of the Food Network is hours spent poring over cookbooks at a local independent bookstore. Or perhaps it’s Good Housekeeping magazine. Or Gourmet…

One of the hardest things to do is invent a brand with no opposite. You don’t have an anchor to play against.

Does your team agree on who your opposite is?

Try it. It’s super fun.

RF

If you want to work with LR on two computers, the only thing you need to sync is the Lightroom Library. The raw files are irrelevant, since they aren’t actually edited.

So…

Import the photos into your library on your desktop.
Copy your LR library (wherever you have it) to your laptop.
Copy the raw images you want to work on from your desktop to your laptop.
Launch the LR library on your laptop.
Go to the library view
Because the raw images you are wanting to work on are in a different location than what the library remembers, the folder they were in (and all the other folders) will be red.
Double click on the folder that contains the images you want to work in.
It will ask where the photos are, point it to the new folder.
Make your edits as usual.
After you’re done editing, you copy ONLY the LR library back to your desktop (replacing the old one)
Launch LR on the desktop.
Because the library thinks the photos are in whatever location they were on your laptop, the folder will again be red.
Double click the red folder, point it to the location where the original raw files are.
Everything will then be synced up.

It sounds complicated, but it’s not once you’ve done it a few times.

When I used to have a desktop machine I:

Import all the shots into LR and download the raw to a folder on the desktop.
Make my edits to my favorites.
Run my slideshow.
Get home.
Copy my LR library file over the old one on the desktop.
Copy the raw folder from my laptop to whatever location i want on the desktop.
Launch LR and repoint the folder to the new source.
Done.

Easy as cake.
Piece of pie.

Take a photo.
Make it black and white or sepia.
Find a cool textured background (search for ‘old paper’ or ‘old photo’ on google).
Place the background texture above your image on a new layer in PS.
Choose “hard light” as the form of blending for the layer.
Adjust opacity to suit taste.

Here’s a quick example that took about 15 seconds: