The fall-like winter seemed to quietly turn into an early spring, but suddenly the weather changed to a real winter. Freezing cold. Snow. Frozen dew. The winter tyres are not just a luxury right now and I have to keep carrying buckets of water for the horses. It’s so cold that even the water inside the horse stables freezes. But it’s gorgeous! I took my horse Leska’s coat off for the photo and she loved it.

Marco and I love the part of the wedding day where we have the bride and groom for ourselves to do their photosession. It’s an important part of the day and it’s so much fun! We direct the bride and groom and capture them interacting in a beautiful setting. Next month, we will teach a few workshops on posing the bride and groom during their photosession.

Afther our workshops at De TopX networking event, a lot of wedding photographers came up to us wanting to know if we taught more extensive workshops. And next month that’s exactly what we do: we teach a workshop wedding photography catered to teaching the participants how to pose their brides and grooms (or brides and brides, or grooms and grooms). We’ll start of with some theoretic stuff – we promise not to be boring! And in the afternoon, everyone will have chance to photograph our models.

The workshop is catered to professional wedding photographers, but studio photographers and lifestyle photographers are welcome as well. Our workshop on March 6 has meanwhile been fully booked, but we have a few more seats available on February 28. Don’t miss out – we promise to do everything we can to inspire everyone and to give loads of practical tips and tricks for the photosession with your brides and grooms!

Please visit our website for more information on our posing workshop. You’ll also find information about the other workshop we teach in March: the photographer as entrepeneur, writing a solid business plan.

Have a great weekend!

Apparantly, today is ‘Blue Monday’ – some very smart scientist have done research and they found out that on average most people are unhappy on this monday. Well, I happen to like the color blue and the sun is shining, so this Blue Monday ain’t too bad.

And this day just got a whole lot better still: another Sassen and Verstraaten photograph has been nominated for the Brides Photo Award! Last year was the first time we entered a photograph, and we immediately we won the ‘Bride in the Spotlight’ category. And this year we’ve been nominated with this photograph, in the ‘Open Category’.

Petra and Jan Albert got wed in Rotterdam – on New Year’s Eve! Their wedding reception was held in the beautiful Inntel at the base of the Erasmusbrug. And Inntel is a gorgeous venue on any day, but it’s totally awesome on New Year’s Eve. And Jan Albert doesn’t really like heights, but we managed to convince him to go outside for at least one wedding photograph with the Rotterdam fireworks in the background. And I’m so happy he and his gorgeous bride did go out on the balcony for us at midnight!

And now you all want to go and vote for this awesome photograph, right? Well, you can! Go to the ‘BruidsFotoAward’ website and pick your favorite three images. The Open Category is the last of six categories (oh, and if you’re not getting married this year, just fill in today’s date as your wedding date).

The winners will be announced in June, so we’ll keep you posted.

Happy Blue Monday!

Everything is relative. Right? Seventy or eighty people in a large department store on a Saturday afternoon is not much. But seventy or eighty people seated in tidy rows of eight in a room with no airconditioning and all eyes focused on two clowns up front is quite many. Especially if you are one of those two clowns and the room is filled with colleagues. Just a tad different from intimitate workshops in your own studio.

But it was absolutely amazing! Yesterday the TOPx networking event for wedding photographers was held in Maarssen and it was busy in the Meetinc. Jamy (De Top) and Jonathan (PicturePresent) had done a great job organizing the event and everyone attending was having a grand ol’ time. The people attending our two workshops were great and I hope everyone came away with at least a little bit of extra enthusiasm for posing wedding couples!

We received quite a few questions after both of our workshops, so I’m going to answer some of those in this post. Should you have any more questions after reading these, please leave a comment on this blog post!

How much time do you usually get for the photoshoot with the bride and groom on their wedding day?
Ideally, we would like at least 1.5 hours of photography time, but that is not always possible on a wedding day. We can create some great poses in 20 minutes if we really have to.

Can you tell us some more about the little light you showed?
We love using our little video light during the photoshoot with the bride and groom. Ours is a ‘Ledzilla’ by Dedolight, but there are many lights to choose from. Lowel has their ID light, to name but one, and there are many LED panels for sale as well.

What music did you use for your slideshow? It rocked!Wat voor muziek hadden jullie bij de slideshow?
It’s obvious that we used licensed music that we purchased especially for use with this slideshow. It’s the song ‘Pretty Girls’ by Tim Halperin, that we found at The Music Bed. Another great source for music for photographers is Triple Scoop Music, where photographers (and others) can easily license music to use legally.

(and don’t you all go and get ‘Pretty Girls’ now!)

How did you create your slideshow?
Marco is our slideshow guy and he uses Final Cut Express.

Do you teach workshops in smaller groups?
Yes – we teach workshops in our studio for groups of 6 – 8 photographers. If you’d like to receive more information, shoot me an email with ‘workshop’ as your subject, and I’ll make sure you’ll receive our newsletter on workshops.

And the best question was asked by one of our attendees yesterday:

Have you ever thought about doing stand up comedy?
Uhmmm, no, but I’m glad we didn’t lull you to sleep with our talk!

Here’s two totally crappy iPhone photos. If you sat in on one of our workshops and you have any images for me to add to this post, please send me an email!

And remember: don’t wait for the perfect pose – create it!

A few months ago, Jamy from De Top and Jonathan from PicturePresent asked us to teach a workshop on posing wedding couples.

Right after we had agreed, I was a little nervous. A workshop by Marco and me – would anyone want to come see us speak? What if there’s no one there!
The workshop is tomorrow. And I’m a little nervous again. Our workshop was sold out first. Twice. So we’ll be speaking in front of a lot of people.

And of course we are still dotting our ‘Is’ and crossing our ‘Ts’ on the night before the workshop. That’s how we roll. But we survived Friday the 13th unscathed and I’m sure we’ll do fine on Saturday the 14th. We prepared well and we mostly know what we will talk about. But I’ll admit it’s a bit exciting. And then there’s the real important issues yet to solve. Like: black heels or silver heels? Blue nail polish or orange?

We are going to do our stinking best and hopefully there will be a few photographers in our class tomorrow who will briefly think back to us during the next wedding they’ll photograph. And who will then pose their bride and groom with lots of confidence. And lots of fun.