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.

Peggy's Cove Wedding - Melissa and Mike

Our first wedding of the season! What can we say about this one? It felt great to be back into it, after the break from the last season. And we couldn't have asked for a better couple and location. Peggy's Cove is of course a natural beauty spot for photos. We love the way the classic dip in front of the lighthouse shots came out. We ended up simply taking a little tour down the road at the site, snapping photos at spots we found interesting, and we're quite happy with the results. A nice combination of candid and posed shots. Matt especially likes how the jumping umbrella shots came out.

And, of course, Melissa and Mike were amazing. Really laid back and fun, just our style. They weren't too worried about getting a lot of posed shots, but rather wanted to just take it easy and see what we could come up with. We're really big fans of this approach - not so much of taking off for hours and hammering the poses into the couple until they're exhausted and never want to be photographed again. So, a good combination all around.

We also tried out some different editing techniques with the photos. A couple of different styles, different colour grading on photos for which it seemed more appropriate. We are, after all, still getting our feet wet, so it's a nice time to experiment a bit and find our look.

Brian & Carla

Our very first wedding video!

Working with Brian & Carla was a blast. They are a wonderful, down-to-earth couple. One of our favourite parts was during the ride to Highland Village, where the shots of the slow-mo horseshoe game were taken. In the car, we were able to put our cameras away for a few minutes and just chat and get to know them better. They're funny and easy to get along with, and made our first wedding cinematography experience all the more exciting.

Everyone at the wedding was very receptive to our presence. We were a little worried about getting in the way, and weren't sure how our fly-on-the-wall documentary approach would work. But family and friends assured us that we did a great job of balancing these needs. In the future, because of the positive reaction we received, we'll probably attempt to provide some more direction, to get some more variety and action in our shots.

This was also our first trip to Cape Breton! The views and the hospitality were both breath-taking. And even though it was raining at points, it was a perfect moment of relief from the Halifax heat wave we'd been experiencing.

Music: "Bloom" by The Paper Kites.

Brian & Carla from Love & Anchor on Vimeo.