Thursday

Yesterday I did more research for Sara on some new blogs that she gave me the names of and added to my vendor list. Also I went back through and organized my vendor list because the spacing and indentations were not all the same, which made it harder to follow. Also I checked the blogs to see if there was anything new and interesting to show Sara as well as an event or website link that could be helpful to her. On one blog called The Green Wedding Shoe Wedding Blog, which is based out of California, (and usually has great stuff on it) had a wedding shoot that was horrible. The photographs were not bad, but the color corrections they did on the photographs were extremely yellow. I showed them to Sara because when we were working on the color corrections for one of her weddings we were having trouble with the images being too yellow. The wedding shoot online proved that it was smart for us to take the yellow out of the photographs.

Wednesday

Today Sara showed me how to prepare and make  a blog post. She showed me how to resize, group, put her logo on the pictures, create a border, upload to a blog, rename, and post to the blog. She showed me each step first and then I did it on my own and finished the blog post. I did it on my own, so she trusted me to filter out the pictures that were not as good and also pair the pictures together that I thought would compliment eachother. It was very helpful to do it on my own because now I actually learned the process of posting photographs on a blog and making sure that they look right.

Tuesday

Yesterday Sara and I looked at different wedding blogs to decide which one would be the best fit to enter a wedding that she photographed. The wedding had a 80's theme and all of the guests had to wear clothes from the 80's. The tables had pictures of eighties icons on them with the bride and grooms faces super-imposed infron of the famous person's face. The bride wore a short dress with knee high boots and was a comedian in NYC. Based on the theme of the wedding we were looking for a untraditional blog. Once we chose the blog we went through the images from the wedding and had to pick ten images to send to the blog. We went through and gave our opinions on what images best told the story of the wedding, as well as being aesthetically and technically good. Once we chose the images we resized them to the criteria set  by the blog andemailed them to the blog with a little message about the wedding.

Monday

Today I continued my research on vendors is PA. Also Sara introduce me to another wedding blog that is based out of CA. It had a lot of really interesting photographers and weddings on it. Also she showed me an annual competition that is through a blog called junebug. The competition picks the best wedding photographs. Sara's friend was one of the winners and told Sara about it. Sara had me do some research on other competitions that would be run through blogs that she could enter in.

Sunday

Today I worked on the vendor list for Sara. Looking into all the different vendors is really teaching me a lot about the wedding industry and how the people work. Many of the sites for caterers, venues, event planners, and photographers will have a vendor list on them. This is a great way to get your name out and so for Sara to be able to contact these people and make a relationship with would be very helpful. Also I attempted to find another wedding expo like lovesick, but have not been able to find one in the area. I found one is Chicago and there are some in California. When looking through the blogs I have found that a lot of the featured weddings are from California. They seem to have the most whismical and down to earth weddings. I believe that the east coast is definetely following their example.

Saturday

Today I  looked through recent blog posts to find featured weddings that I find interesting. Later We are going to comment on these posts so that brides to be who like the posts will see that Sara at Growing Tree Photography likes the same things as them and that she wants to do weddings like the blog posts. It is a way to market herself as a photographer that wants a certain clientel. Also I worked on my vendor list, which is getting really long and will be really helpful for Sara when she moves.

Friday

Today I have been working on the vendor list and I finally found a good amount of vendors in Baltimore! It is like a puzzle to do the research because one thing always leads you to another. I will start on one site and then end up somewhere totally different and it is interesting to see where my path of research will take me.
Sara also showed me the wedding expo that is going to happen in January that sounds really interesting. It is really exclusive and there are not very many vendors that are able to take part in it. All of the vendors are not traditional wedding vendors. One of the photographers that is going to be part of the expo specializes in weddings with brides and grooms that have tattoos and "rockstar"personalities. It is interesting to see all the different approaches to one industry. People can really personalize what they do because there are so many different types of people that are all looking for something different.
Another thing we did today was blog the wedding that we edited and it was great to see it from the starting point to the end and how wonderful it came out. We are going to maybe try to get this wedding submitted to a wedding blog.
This week I got a lot of work done and learned a lot about photoshop and different actions that can be done using the program. Knowing those actions will be very helpful when I edit my own photographs. Also I was introduced to new programs such as alien skin and lightroom, which I will also be able to use when I go away to school and it is just helpful to have exposure to different programs.