You’ve just finished a photo shoot and you get home and download the cards. It was the Jones family. So you create a folder and cleverly title it:

“Jones Family Portrait”

But after a few months go by the Jones’ give you a call and ask if they can get a large canvas.

Exciting!

You go to get the image they requested… and your heart sinks.

Where is it?

Some of your folders have dates. Some of them are names. Some have names first, others have dates first. Some utilize an odd looking system of numbers and letters that seemed like a clever idea at the time; but you forgot about it and now it no longer makes any sense.

Aha! Jones Family.

You’ve found it.

…But wait, there’s only a copy of a contract in this folder and some RAW files. Where did the finished files go?

Time out.

We’ve been there.

Between weddings and portraits, we have photographed literally hundreds of sessions. All of those have resulted in millions of files.

Millions. Of. Files.

How on earth do we keep track of all of that? How does any wedding or portrait photographer keep track of all that?  How about keeping our computers running smoothly? What about hard drive space filling up?

I’m going to share the ins and outs of our file management system that can solve all of these problems for you.

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Someone asked me the other day if I had any advice for photographing their very first wedding. When you’ve been shooting weddings for 12+ years, a lot of things become second nature, but when you’re just starting, those same things might catch you by surprise.

So I sat down and thought it through: what are the things I naturally do on a wedding day that a first-timer might not think of?

Here are my top 10 tips:

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Melissa and Reg didn’t want a lot of posed wedding photos. They weren’t concerned with details or having everything be just so. They designed their wedding to focus solely on celebrating their love with family and friends and they wanted their wedding photos to reflect that without pausing to take them away from the celebration.

When we shoot together, Sean falls most naturally into a photojournalistic style, keeping a close eye out for emotion and for friends and family to interact with each other–so we knew this wedding would be a perfect fit for him. It’s a rare break in routine for one of us to photograph a wedding without the other, but he did such beautiful work that I might hire him out solo more often! ;)

Here’s a little snippet of some of my favorites from their day…

I love this one of Melissa and her dad right before they walked down the aisle.

The wedding took place at Events at 1418 in downtown Nashville. It was the perfect cozy venue for this casual and intimate event. They started off the wedding with a cocktail hour, and at the end of that, the DJ told everyone to take their seats and the ceremony happened right then–in the middle of the reception venue.  Such a fun idea and the guests loved it!

Absolutely love the emotion in this one; one of my favorites this year

I can tell from the hundreds of crazy dancing photos that this group is too much fun! The evening was everything a great wedding should be. :)

Congratulations, Melissa and Reg!