January 5, 2017

2016: a year of traveling and learning

Two of us walking to the car just the other day (while still in 2016) after a short trip to town, and Martina suddenly says something strange: “Ohhh, I’m not happy with how much we traveled this year. Look at this last trip, only 12 days…” (we went to Zanzibar in December after we did all of our shootings, to have a bit of summer btw). I stopped for a second and tried to remember our 2016. OK, our Botswana trip was in 2016 actually. And Philippines too.

We started counting: 12 trips to 10 countries, the longest one being a month, the shortest being a week, all happened during 2016. So lets go back to Martina’s sentence and make a different conclusion: time flies so fast and living this life of ours means that some things feel as if they happened much earlier, cause it’s just too much to process all together.

And what trips those were. Majority combination of business and pleasure, combination of Europe and rest of the world, combination of exploring and relaxing. I still can’t believe about our Botswana wedding, about weddings in LondonItaly, Germany, Vienna (all of them coming to our blog in next few weeks).

Talking about weddings, we played a little bit with our main focus this year. While previous years we were trying to be everything: good photographers, good marketers of our business, good friends, good daughter and son to our parents, good brother and sister to our siblings, hang around a lot with people we love, we arranged our time differently in 2016. The decision was made early in the year: lets put all of that on pause and lets stop trying to be everything at once. So our season from May till late in December was mainly about our clients and their weddings. No social life at all and no work on our marketing, almost no blog posts and social networks. We had one another, our trips, our photography and our clients. The goal was to produce the best memories we can for them, to devote completely, work on our skills wedding after wedding, shoot after shoot, explore new techniques, improve editing, stay in contact with our clients every step of the way. They were the most important part of the whole process.

To say the result was good is an understatement. We managed to deliver all weddings even ahead of deadline, all of our clients were so very happy with their photos and so thankful for their memories, so now we have so many of them as our dear friends which is indescribable feeling. On business side (where we didn’t put almost any effort, except to our clients and our photography), we ended up having more than a half of our bookings for this year coming directly from weddings in 2016. That is the best result we’ve had so far.

Since 8 months of our 2016 looked like one giant continuos wedding day with so many incredible moments, people and places, Martina went a bit creative (and crazy if you ask me) in November and made a little presentation of our year 2016 combining different photos from our 2016 weddings in a single wedding story, on our studio’s Facebook page. People loved it so much that we decided we’d put a bit expanded version as our year review.
So here it is finally after editing and delivering all of our weddings: 120 photos, all from last year’s weddings sorted in a single wedding story. Hope you’ll enjoy it.