Paula And Ron Wed!

When Paula and Ron first got married, it was a small quiet ceremony. Last Sunday, they finally got to have the big, fun, and beautiful wedding that every bride dreams of! It was so much fun to see how in love they still were, as if this truly was the first day of their married life. I wish that for all my couples...that each day feel like the first wonderful, magical day of their married life together.

I have to say, I have never in my life seen so many little girls in one place. And they all LOVED Paula, and wanted to see her dress and hold her flowers and talk about when they will get married. And many of them hadn't even made it to Kindergarten yet! It was too sweet. :)

EDIT: Oh dear, I was so excited I forgot to put a link to the slideshow! Enjoy!






















All of the floral arrangements were created by Paula's friend and fabulous florist Regina of Blossoms in San Mateo!

Handsome groom:




















Their daughter was one of the four cutie pie flower girls! She needed just a little help down the aisle:



















Yay! Finally married!




















First dance:













Fun and bright table decor:



















I snuck the couple away for some romantic portraits at a nearby waterfall...(huge thanks to the maintenance guy who told me about it!!) What an incredible setting!! And how brave and adventurous are they for actually wading across the creek?!

































Thanks Paula and Ron, I had an incredible time!!

Mission Accomplished.

As of this morning, I completed my first month-long fitness bootcamp. Wow! Now I can't really say I love it, or that I'm in such better shape, or anything like that. This a long-haul kind of process, and I'm coming to grips with that.

But I can't help but be excited for myself. For 4 weeks straight, I worked out for an hour 3 days a week. At 6:30am. (Which implies that 12 times this month, I actually woke up before 7am...whoa!)

My whole goal is to go home from a 12 hour wedding without feeling dead! The adrenaline (and dancing) keeps me going during the day, I have no energy problems while the excitement is happening! But the next day.....dead. Can't move, don't want to do anything, and I wish someone would shoot me so I never have to walk again. I'd like to fix that. :)

I'm going to go ahead and sign up for next month and keep going with the exercise. My new goal for next month (I'm phasing in healthy habits) is to drink enough water and no more soda past noon! (I'm a diet coke fanatic...this could be tough!)

Wish me more luck & will-power and I'll keep you updated.

Stunning Wedding: Eric & Kye

On Sunday I had the immense pleasure of photographing Eric & Kylene's absolutely stunning Mill Valley wedding. I have never seen such detail, design, color, and style! Eric and Kylene are both amazing, friendly, down to earth people so I knew the wedding would be relaxed and fun, but I was not fully prepared for how absolutely perfect everything would be!!

Because of the technical difficulties (see last post), I'm a little behind on my editing. I couldn't wait to share, though, so I decided to go ahead and just pull a few of the photos that have only been through very basic editing....but a few turned into waaaaaaaaaay too many. I couldn't stop myself. I used the song they had for their first dance, and it's nice and long, so that worked well! Please be patient while the slide-show loads....it's worth every second!

SLIDESHOW


Here are a few ultimate favorites while you wait:

The jaw-dropping engagement ring:













Eyelash curlers aren't Kylene's idea of fun, so her youngest sister was very supportive and held her hand. :) Lisa did a really fabulous job on Kylene's hair & makeup!




















The floral arrangements by Natasha of Water Lily Pond were incredible...you'll have to watch the slideshow to see more of what I mean. Absolutely breathtaking and original! Here's the beautiful bouquet:




















They look so happy!!



















Then I snuck off with them for a few portraits...


























































I've never had anyone order a 4'x6' (yes, that's feet) print before! But I have to admit, it looked really awesome above the cake table...




















In addition to everything else a mother-of-the-bride does, Kylene's mom catered the entire affair. The food was absolutely to die for...the menu was impeccable and delicious! How on earth she was there for her daughter, coordinated, was a gourmet chef AND looked fabulous the whole time...it's beyond me.













Tess sang a really beautiful song for the couple. When I say "sang" I mean "blew everyone away with her incredible voice"!













The guests dance like there was no tomorrow! DJ Dave Tutton kept everyone on their feet (including me!)...

Technical Difficulties!

Last night I was hoping to get a lot of work done, but when I came home I found my laptop in a bad state! Blue screen of death!! I had a panic session for 10 minutes, called a couple of people who didn't know what to do, called a couple of data recovery companies who needed 5 days and $3K to get the data....yikes!

I finally calmed down enough to realize that all was not lost. Especially my client's photos! All of those are triple backed-up, and I don't keep them on the laptop anyway. The software can all be installed again. My business notes and spreadsheets are backed up (though maybe not fully up to date). The only big hole was email! I've had a lot of new emails & received several new contacts since the email was last backed up, and I didn't want to have to find everyone's address and beg for you to resend!

Luckily I received my brand new, super fast, custom built desktop about 4 days ago. It wasn't fully set up yet, and is missing a wireless card & a sound card (oops!), but I wasn't stopped dead! I was able to get on the internet and look up the solution....using an adapter to transfer files from my laptop hardrive to my new computer via USB.

So the day is saved...and I did it all by myself! Unfortunately, I lost a day of work, but I'll catch up tonight. :) If you sent an email that I haven't responded to....or think I should have sent you an email by now, please speak up! Email or call me to confirm that the email wasn't lost.

We'll be back to normal very soon, and I'm really glad for that. :)

Schuyler's Wilderness Adventure!

Schuyler and I have been friends for a few years now; we work at the same company, took the same leadership class together, and have had a lot of conversations about our respective passions...mine of course being photography...and his being his long pursuit of rockstar-dom!!

On a sad note, Schuyler will be taking off to the east coast soon to pursue a career opportunity there, so we decided we needed to take the time we had left to do the promo shots we keep talking about. Couldn't be better timing, as we shot on Friday...and then on Saturday he went into the studio to begin recording his first single! So the shots will come in handy for the forthcoming album. ;)


Good luck with everything Schuyler...thanks for hanging out on Friday!

(this slideshow is a big one...)












































































PS - I have now fixed the errors in the paragraphs above. My computer keeps trying to help me with my "creative" writing...by spontaneously putting portions ofwhat I type in totally random spots. Not sure why, but I normally catch it. Now the paragraph should read better!

equestrian-sourcing

In my final semester of grad school, I'm taking a course in managing outsourced development; and of course lately, my photography business has been a top priority. I'm just not sure where the horses came from.

I just woke up from a dream about equestrian-sourcing: outsourcing portions of my photo business to horses.

Seriously. in my dream, I felt i needed to get the equestrian community involved somehow, and promised them that at the very least I'd blog about it. It was an extremely sensitive issue, because you don't want to offend the horse community. Of course, in my dream "blog about it" equaled "not get up and walk across the room to turn off the alarm." Oversleeping for half an hour is the least I could do for a community that has done so much for my business.

I thought I'd honor that just a bit and blog about it. But now I need to go to bootcamp, and exercise. ;)


Edit: Now that I'm back from bootcamp, I just have to say that the funniest part has to be that when I first woke up enough to turn off the alarm, I actually said aloud "dude, i can't blog through the radio, it isn't hooked up to the internet." about 30 second later I realized the radio wasn't an input device.

after another couple minutes, I finally realized (sadly) that there were no horses, and if there were, they couldn't read.

My Mother! (And her FABULOUS cards!)

Well any of my clients know that I LOVE to send these beautiful handmade cards that my mom makes. I've got baskets and baskets and baskets of them. :)

Well, my sister also has baskets and baskets, so she decided to start an Etsy store just for Mom's cards so that we can share them with the world! She'll be posting up new ones every so often, so definitely add her to your favorites and keep checking in!!

Here's her store!

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY!! LOVE YOU!

This Is What Photographers Do For Fun

Photographers are such nerds. :) When we decide to get together and have fun, guess what we choose to do? Group trash the dress sessions!! One of my friends, Nichanh, organized yesterday's fun. She convinced a friend and former bride, Stephanie, to be our lovely model, got the dress, did her hair, and even made her bouquet! Nichanh is multi-talented!

About ten photographers showed up in downtown San Jose, and we didnt have to go very far to find really fun locations to shoot. Even though this was a "trash the dress" session, we didn't get all that dirty, and didn't even get in any water!

But at one point, we were behind a building with a really cool staircase, and a guy came out and offered to let us use his restaurant! It was sooooo cool! So I haven't eaten here, but please check out Eulipia, which looks like a really nice & delicious restaurant in downtown San Jose, across from the California Theatre (where they do the operas).

(PS - Stephanie isn't a model...but she should be! Thanks so much for coming out, you were awesome!)



Slideshows R Fun!

A Bootcamp Update

So a couple entries back I mentioned that I joined a 4wk women's fitness bootcamp....3 days a week from 6:30am to 7:30am. Ouch!

Well, today marked the end of the second week and I'm excited to report that I've actually made it to all classes, and I'm not dead!! Sure, six classes aren't going to make a big difference physically, but mentally it was a huge i-cant-do-this obstacle to get over. :) I've been getting over a lot of those lately.

So I'm at the half-way point of bootcamp #1. Ideally, I'll keep signing up for bootcamp each month, so "half-way" is a misnomer, but it makes it sound like I'm accomplishing something so I am going keep calling it that!

This past week I've been working on all kinds of little catch-up things. Wedding season starts in full blast mode next week, so be on the lookout for more photos and stories!

Slow Email

Hi Everyone!

I just got word from my web host that email today is going to be very slow (or non-existent) while they upgrade their servers and restore information from a failed disk. No worries, any email you send I will eventually get, it just might not be today.

Bottom line is if you need to contact me today, phone is the way. :) 408-206-8684. Please leave a message and I'll return your call when I can.

This past and coming weekends have been deemed "Jillian catches up on normal life" weekends, which means no scheduled photoshoots. I've been doing chores (yay, clothes to wear!) finishing projects (yay, painted furniture!) and catching up on personal photos that I've been needing to edit!

I've also been working on Steve & Chrissie's beautiful album with my wonderful album designer, Katie, putting the finishing touches on last weekend's shoots, and ordering a very special canvas print for Eric and Kylene!

Expect to see photos of Eric & Kylene's wedding and Paula and Ron's wedding in the next month, as I am very much looking forward to being a part of their amazing days. I love weddings!!!

Cheers,
Jillian

Kandice's Headshots!

Kandice's company (a wonderful child wellness center) is working on new website, and Kandice wanted some natural, beautiful headshots to go along! To give it a more "personal" feel, she also wanted to include her cute doggies & adorable husband, Scott! (Well, we thought of the doggies first, but don't tell Scott that!)

Here's the colorful slideshow!

And a few of my favorite shots before I go to bed!



I've been up for nearly 24 hours now...my body still isn't used to getting up early on work-out days, and I just can't seem to stop doing stuff until the wee hours of the morning! Oh well, it's good for me. ;)