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Engagement & Wedding Photography, eSession

beLoved | Bart & Nicki

Posted on by Tom Leuntjens

Bart & Nicki aren’t your average couple. Bart is a young entrepeneur who moved to Seattle, USA to pursue his dreams. That is also where he met (and I made promise not to say how & where) and fell in love with the lovely Nicki Ulloa. (I totally love that last name BTW). They are currently traveling around Europe and after visiting the lesser important parts of Europe (Barcelona, France, Antwerp, …), last week they visited the capital of Belgium:Ghent. Meeting with cool couples like this always makes my trigger finger itch and my camera eye twitch so I invited them for a quick neighborhood walk and shoot a beLoved session. I’m actually very glad they agreed because I couldn’t ask for a more playful and madly in love couple… and you never know how many potential USA bride & grooms are picking up my carefully placed tags *waves* 😉

Bart & Nicki, thanks for the fun , hope you enjoy the results, and a big American bear hug back at you!

Albums, Engagement & Wedding Photography, Wedding

Designing albums

Posted on by Tom Leuntjens

Designing albums is not my most favorite part of my job but it is something I take pride in doing that myself. I’m also very happy that I achieved to cut back my album design time tremendously. A huge help there were bookproofr.com and Photojunction.

I’ll let you in on my workflow…

  • Step 1: The couple helps me by rating the pictures from their slideshow via bookproofr.com. That way I get a good understanding of what kind of pictures they would like to see included in the album. I don’t have to wonder about my decisions. (how important is city hall, do they prefer to see more pictures of themselves or do they want more family pictures, do they prefer color over black & white, are detail shots important to them, etc..). All of my decision making is already done when I selected their slideshow pictures. There isn’t one picture in there I rather not see showing up in the finished product aka “The Album”.
  • Step 2: Photojunction My #1 album making tool. I like my spread designs clean. No image-in-image , no heavy collage. Each spread tells a story about a specific moment of their day. I like pictures to stand out on the page so I include lots of whitespace around them. Of course, a couple of full bleeds can’t be missing from the album … A typical album is around 22-25 spreads.
  • Step 3: Album proposal : Again I upload everything to bookproofr.com and I allow couples to give feedback and approve the album. It’s also a way to include your clients in the whole process. (FYI the most spreads I ever had to change was 3)
  • Step 4: Once everything is approved I upload the spreads to KISS (and wait for customs to clear my parcel)

And since I don’t tend to be secret about my designs: here is the full & final version of Sofie & Jeroen their wedding album. I’ll show you some pictures of the finished kick-ass “forbidden green” leather KISS next time. (cause the première should be for their eyes first)

And a word of thanks to David *pronounced dAAAvid and not dEEvied* for second shooting for me that day!

Personal, Random thoughts

Photo of the day : Tumblr

Posted on by Tom Leuntjens

I was fooling around with a lovely piece of open source css/html and created myself “a personal page”

After that I thought: wouldn’t it be cool to use this system for a quick “photo of the day” mini-site…. And instead of making that site I created a custom theme for tumblr.com. The theme still is a work in progress but already does what I wanted it to do….

So you can go check out my newly created photo of the day tumblr page right now!

My goal with this page is to share one picture a day with you. This won’t necessarily be a picture of that same day but more like: a picture from the archive, a preview, a teaser, something personal, any picture (that I made) that springs to mind that day. We’ll see how it goes from there…