It was just before 5PM when the doorbell finally rang. I nearly fell down the stairs in my excitement to get to the door. I knew it could be only one man….Bob, our trusty UPS delivery man. I’d been waiting for Bob all day. In his big brown truck, driving around his Cape Cod route, Bob carried with him my much-anticipated new camera…Nikon’s super fly D3S digital SLR.

Sensing my excitement, Bob asked if the box he was delivering was a new camera. To which I immediately replied, “Yes! I’ve been so excited all day for it to arrive.” “I thought so, since you had to sign for it,” he said. Bob is so cool.

After signing, my hands a little shaky from all the excitement…or perhaps from my sprint down the stairs…I bid farewell to Bob and dashed back up to the office to tear open my treasure box. Taaaa Daaaaa!

Andy is one of those people who likes to take his time opening presents. He slowly removes each piece of tape, one at a time, careful not to rip the wrapping paper. Then, ever so slowly, he unfolds the creases to reveal the contents. Sometimes I wonder if he does this just because he knows it drives me crazy. You see, I am a shredder. I’ve always been one of those people who tackles a present with wild abandon, ripping off paper, popping off bows, and throwing the scraps over my shoulder to see what’s inside.

But, this was different. I found myself taking Andy’s slow approach. I was quick to find a pair of scissors, but that’s where the quick ended. Slowly and precisely, I sliced the brown B&H packaging tape from each side of the box, then cut along the top center. I sat there for a few seconds, wanting to savor the moment before I peeled the box flaps back. Once opened, all I could see was a pile of white packing popcorn.

“It’s in there,” I thought to myself. My innate tendencies were to dump everything out into the middle of the office floor, until my treasure tumbled out. But, I held back. Instead, I moved a few of the popcorn pieces around, revealing what I thought was the top of the camera box…turns out it was the bottom. There on the golden box, in big black letters, I caught my first glimpse.

The excitement was now growing to a fever pitch, so I dug my hands in and found the bottom of the box, pulling it out, popcorn spilling out all over the couch. But, I didn’t care. My new toy was really here. I opened the box and had to step back to take in the view. So much to go through…

But a lover of instructions I am not. I would rather get right to it. Pressing buttons. Turning dials. I would rather do than read. So, I quickly moved the top layer of stuff to the side.

And, then I found her…quietly waiting for me in the bottom of the box, beckoning me to touch her rugged, yet, precisely constructed, sexy magnesium alloy body. Isn’t she beautiful?

And check out that backside? Wooooo hoooo!

Like my D300, the D3S has a gorgeous 3-inch super-density 921,000-dot LCD monitor. I admit, I was a bit hesitant to move up to this camera model because it’s so big! With the built in vertical grip, the camera is about 6″wx6″hx3.5″d and weighs nearly 3lbs. That may not sound like much, but once you add some of the lenses we use on this puppy, the weight and size add up fast. I was considering getting the new D700 instead. But, as it turned out the weight difference between the two cameras was minimal. And, as soon as I picked her up in the store, I knew this was it. It just felt right. She fit…..we fit. And, so it was meant to be.

But, what really drew me to the D3S is it’s amazing ISO capabilities. The D3S’s standard ISO sensitivity ranges from 100 to a stunning 12,800. As if that wasn’t enough, the D3S has three expanded ISO options that can take the ISO up to a shocking 102,400.

For the non-photographers out there, this basically means I can shoot in very little ambient light without using flash. Yes, it’s super grainy at those mega high levels. But, right now, I rarely take my D300 above 1000 ISO because the noise is too much. Knowing, I can easily shoot at 6400 ISO with less noise than the D300 produces at 1000 ISO makes me giddy. This summer I will find myself with boundless new creative options and I am super stoked!

Like the camera itself, the battery for the D3S is on the large size. But, sometimes bigger is better. This puppy has a battery life of approximately 4,200 shots per charge. Thank you Nikon!

It doesn’t have the pop up flash my D300 has, which was good to use as a trigger for off camera flash set ups. I’m not sure why Nikon eliminated that cool feature in it’s pro level cameras.

That said, there are so many other features that more than make up for the lack of built in flash. Did I mention the dual card slots or the super high flash sync speed? What about the full frame sensor, which now brings all of my lenses back to the 1:1 ratio? That could take some getting used to, but I’m ready. Oh, and the piece de re’sistance of the D3S is the new video feature! And, it produces freaking gorgeous video! I did, however, find a few features in my new camera that I couldn’t figure out by merely pressing buttons, so it appears I will need to go read the instructions after all.

Ohhh, the places we will go! Are you ready to join me on my adventure???….. stay tuned …..

Chris xo

I can still remember my first crush. I was in the third grade and his name was Mark P., an identical twin with lovely curly orangey-red hair, a face full of freckles and kind eyes. Mark’s brother, Michael, was the more outgoing of the two. A class clown prone to pranks, Michael would often convince his brother to take his seat in the other third grade class until the teachers finally noticed the switch a roo. Mark was quiet and shy and I never understood why the teachers couldn’t instantly tell them apart.

My crush on Mark never went anywhere and by the end of coed baseball later that summer, I had a new crush. I think it’s safe to assume that most childhood crushes don’t last very long. But, sometimes they do….Sometimes they go the distance, as is the case with our super cuties Rachel & Paul, whose third grade crush eventually led them to want to say, “I do!”

Paul told us that despite his affections for Rachel, it took her a while to notice him. “She didn’t have time for me back then,” he said. “We didn’t really become friends until the late high school years.”

A high school trip to Italy firmly established their friendship. But, still no romance. Rachel had a boyfriend. The friendship continued to grow after graduation, even when Paul moved to New York. After college, Rachel began visiting Paul in the big city. “We even took a trip to Iceland together..but no real romance yet,” Paul said.

Rachel moved to New York and soon their relationship also moved to the next level. Still, things didn’t immediately stick in the ‘I’m stuck on you!’ kind of way. As is often the case in life, the timing just wasn’t right. So our love birds separated for a while.

It didn’t take very long to realize they were better together than they were apart. “And we never want to be apart again,” they told us.

We had the pleasure of spending the day with Paul & Rachel recently when we got together for their Bello love session. We still find it hard to believe anyone follows this blog with regularity, but for the one or two of you who do, we’re sure you’ve been anxiously awaiting more photos after a long winter of album designing & production and not much image-making. So, without further ado…it is with great pleasure that we invite you to meet Rachel & Paul:

As is sometimes the case, our love session was the first time we met Rachel & Paul in person. We’d had several wonderful conversation over the phone, but because they live in NYC and Paul travels a lot for work, we didn’t get to meet before they decided they wanted us to be a part of their Cape Cod wedding.

In our early conversations, we learned that one of the things Rachel & Paul share a passion for is traveling, something for which Andy & I also have a great deal of passion. So, we took them to a little airfield to play amid the brightly colored biplanes. Right away, we knew we were going to have fun spending time with these two sweeties!

It’s always a little nerve-wracking for our couples when they first get in front of our cameras. I mean, how often in life do you have two people running around watching your every move, sticking cameras in your face and asking you to snuggle up with your honey? It can be intimidating, but these two seemed completely comfortable with each other and with us. And, that’s when the magic happens…

Awww….

Getting cozy…

Normally, my favorite photos are when our couples are smiling and enjoying themselves in a way that is easy to see. When we’re editing and I see moments we capture of our couples in the middle of huge grins, I can’t help but smile myself. But, sometimes those quiet moments, where you can see that a couple is so comfortable in each others presence that there’s nowhere else they’d rather be, can just take my breath away, like this next photo. (Paul, I knew as soon as we met you that you were full of crap when you said you don’t take a good picture….now we have proof…seriously, Calvin wants his model back!!!)

Here’s a perfect example of my favorite kind of photo…..come on, how can you not smile looking at these two?

Thankfully, we had the perfect April day for photos when we got together. Spring carries a crispness to the light that I just love…

Love this one…

A different perspective…

Another smile-inducing moment…

Paul+Rachel=love

We decided to hit a couple of other locations to mix things up and I love the classic clapboard background for these next few…

I’m a big fan of this kind of perspective…

Poor Rachel was getting chilly toward the end of our session as the sun was heading down for the day. But, sometimes the cold makes our couples snuggle even more tightly, and the results….lovely!

Getting really chilly now….but ooooh, how I love the way Rachel is holding her hands in this next one. It’s so perfectly feminine. Love it!

The Sandwich boardwalk is a great place for a walk on a crisp April day…

I thought I’d try something different with this next image. The first is enhanced using our classic bello look. But, with all of the old brown beach grass not yet having given way to the green lush beach grass that the next month will bring, I thought the image called for a more vintage worn sort of look. Which do you prefer?

This…

Or this…

This post is the first of many soon to come. We thank you our faithful blog readers & comment leavers (Candice…we love you!) for bearing with us as we got our ducks in a row this winter and took a little break from blogging. Rest assured, we’re back now and this season promises to be a fabulous one. We hope you stay with us on this journey…and as always, please leave us some love. It makes us sooo happy!

Big thanks to Rachel and Paul for trusting us to document this incredible time in your lives. Thank you for a wonderful afternoon, for all the great chats in between and for opening your hearts to us. We look forward to getting to know you both even better over the coming year and to being there with you when you, after years of waiting, finally say, “I do!” With love & hugs, Chris & Andy xoxo

I freely admit that we have been a tad neglectful of our blog these past few weeks…okay, month and a half. But, we’ve had good reason. In addition to taking a much-needed three-week vacation, (Yes, that’s right, three weeks of doing a whole lotta nothing…hallelujah!) we’ve been working our butts off to get all of the albums for this year’s clients done and out the door before our first wedding of the season in May.

It sounds like it wouldn’t be such a hard thing to do. But, we’re persnickety. Very persnickety. We want our albums to be perfect for our wonderful couples and perfect requires a heavy investment of time. We do enhancements and apply minor, and sometimes major, retouching to every image that goes into our albums to give them our signature look. And, with 35+ albums, each album having 20-42 pages with 20 -100 images and each image edit taking anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes, that adds up to A LOT of time spent in front of the computer.

So, with lots of busy work to do and little time for photographing, we haven’t been very good about our regular blog posts. We were reminded of that today with a very funny e-mail from one of our grooms, Sean, whose wedding we photographed four years ago and with whom we’ve kept in regular contact.

Here’s one of our favorite photos/moments from Sean & Whitney’s wedding at The Dennis Inn. It’s a photo of Sean as he watches Whitney walk down the aisle to become his wife. The excitement on his face in that moment was contagious!

We enjoyed Sean’s message so much, we thought it the perfect post to kick off a series of posts we’re working on uploading very soon…including some photos from our fabulous 3-week Panamanian vacation. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, here’s Sean’s e-mail:

Big thanks to Sean and all of our “faithful followers” who have been patiently awaiting a new post. More to follow soon…we promise! Love & hugs, Christine & Andy