Steph's new adventure!

We have some exciting news! I (Steph here!) will be working with Glow Maternity Studio as their photographer! The photos above I took the other day of our beautiful friend Andrea in the Glow studio using natural light. We played with a fake baby bump for fun and I think they turned out great!

This brand new branch of Peterborough's beautiful community is an exciting venture for both myself and Glow as they continue to grow and expand their services. If you haven't been, you have to check them out. Just walking in their Hunter St. studio space in downtown Peterborough makes you feel warm and calm and very supported in your parenting journey. I'll be offering a life-style approach to my photography, capturing quiet and beautiful moments with your choice of in-studio, in-home or a cool alleyway, coffee shop or quiet park. Wherever you feel comfortable and a space that represents you on this adventure!

This weekend we're having a maternity mini-session. An amazing value - please check it out if you want photos of this beautiful stage in your life.

So what does this mean for Love and Anchor?

Don't you worry! I'm not leaving Matt all alone! I'm just partnering with a really amazing business with an established, excellent reputation with families to explore one of my passions, photographing women during pivotal moments in their lives! I love weddings, but when I became a mother - two years ago tomorrow- something clicked. I found my voice and the confidence to be myself and it grew and continues to flourish from the insane and empowering experience of giving birth and raising a baby. Now that I have two babies and a natural home birth under my belt, I'm inspired all the more to share and give this voice to other women through the documentation of their journey into motherhood. I'm so excited to capture those moments from the belly bump, through birth and the sleepless newborn phase to the first taste of independence when your baby turns 1.  Although I'll be focusing on this new photography venture, I'll still be running the behind the scenes of Love and Anchor. I'll be returning your emails, running our social media, and all that fun stuff alongside Matt. We will have another announcement about our bookings for next year soon, so stick around if you're looking to book us next summer.

Now, it seems to be a trend that most of our clients get pregnant on or shortly after their wedding night (ah-wink-wink!) so now you can continue documenting your beautiful life events with me through Glow! I really look forward to working with you! No, seriously, I'm pumped! LET'S DO THIS! Someone book me for their birth because I'm super duper excited for that!

Our First Wedding Show

Our first wedding show had us standing on ice. Literally. 

our booth space with our neighbours and all of our gear piled on our table

starts off pretty bare!

OUR BOOTH! tada! A little DIY magic and a blanketponcho to keep me warm.

Our winter boots look authentic next to the winter birch bark trees in our background, non? 

Our entire booth was handmade or repurposed objects straight from our home. We spent hours putting together our business cards which literally tied a knot, painting those birch trees and scrubbing our kitchen table of the baby food remnants. The bunting flags hang in our home now and the picture frames were ripped off the walls and repurposed for the show. We contemplated bringing our desktop mac like other vendors had, but were content for our first show with our trusty 7 year old mac book that I'm writing this post on now. Good old lappy! 

We set-up camp in a hockey arena. Yep! That's how we do in Ontario. We felt like we were literally standing on the ice. We were fucking freezing for hours, I'm not gonna lie. It was pretty bad. Especially at 6.5 months with hours of standing. That's ok though! Once the doors opened, we were happy campers. No complaints from us! It was amazing to chat with brides, grooms and their families about what we love to do.

We made a very conscious effort not to be all up in your face, soliciting and pushing pamphlets. Instead, we politely said hi to those who looked interested and started chatting if the moment was right. I think that approach suits us, although maybe it's not forward enough. We're still working on selling ourselves. I guess you have to do that if you own your own company, eh? 

We received many compliments on our tie-the-knot business cards and received some great feedback on our brand which is equally as important to us as booking. It's very validating to know we're on to something here and the fact that we put so much of ourselves into our work and into our booth, feels good when others get it. 

Now that we've got a show under our belt, I think there's a lot we would do differently and a lot we would do exactly the same. We're already thinking of other shows in our radius we could hit up that would have larger number of attendees (this show had less than 1000 for sure, which was hard for us as a small business owner who rented the booth space expecting more). 

Overall, we were just happy to be there and showcase our work. We put a lot into our handmade booth and even though it didn't quite fit in the booth space, and it was very DIY, and although no one took us up on our show special of booking that day and receiving $500 off, a lot of people entered our contest and a lot of people started to think about wedding video. We're new in town and although we're ready for the business and we'd love to go after it fast and hard, we know that sometimes these things take time. 

We will draw the winner on Sunday. I'm very excited for the future. We made some great connections with local photographers and others in the industry and we can't wait to see how the rest of the year pans out.

Celebrating 10 years: Local Film Festival Trailer

Here's another project we've been working on, this one for the ReFrame Peterborough International Film Festival here in our new/old home, Peterborough, ON! ReFrame happens every January, during the coldest weekend of the year, and it was our pleasure to create a video for them for their 10th anniversary next weekend January 24th-January 26th, 2014. Very cool stuff. We interviewed a number of people who have been with the festival since the start, and some who have only recently become involved, but all of whom love the festival and have had great experiences attending it. The video itself will be premiered at their opening gala, so here's the trailer for now. We'll release the full video online once the festival's over, so look out for it!

Long Winter Days

WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO: The Off Season

Being that it's the off season for weddings, you might think we've been sitting idle. But that is far from the case! There has been plenty of filmmaking going on, even if it hasn't been of the wedding variety. Matt's been working steadily on several projects, which he'll write about in the next several posts. The first one, and one of the most exciting, is his new short film, Argus. It's a 7 minute horror documentary about the Halifax grain elevator, in which four individuals tell of the dread felt while growing up and living in its shadow.

He shot it all in Halifax, and is currently submitting it to festivals. You can watch the trailer below, but you'll have to wait for the full film! We'll see how well it does on the festival circuit, and then release it online in the near future. Matt also ran a successful Indiegogo campaign to fund the festival run, the video for which you can watch below as well. Let us know what you think!