Instax 365 Challenge Week 1

Hey Guys,

It has been 1 week since we started this 1 instant film picture a day challenge we are calling our Instax 365 Challenge. The first week has come with a couple upload challenges, as we were on a cruise for the first half of the week, but hopefully those of you that are following my (Miguel’s) instagram (@miguel.mejias.florabloom) have seen that I’m posting each day’s picture there first. If you want to see the pictures on the day they are taken, check out the Instagram, but if you want to read more about each picture, the adventure behind it, and the inspiration, you’ll want to read the weekly recaps I’ll be putting out.

Without further ado, below are the pictures from the week (plus 1 bonus picture).

Day 0 (1/1/19 @ 12:00AM)

Boy, this picture really took the wind out of my sails. As you saw in the announcement blog, we have been taking some pictures with the camera for our own albums, and I think they had come out pretty good. No real hiccups or blunders, and I was really starting to think that this “challenge” wouldn’t pose much of one other than staying committed. Then this picture processed, and I remembered every camera is different and has its nuances. I wanted to get this picture as kind of a “kick-off” picture to celebrate the new year. This was taken at exactly midnight on 1/1/19. We were outdoors in the middle of the ocean, and it is a picture of a large screen from many yards away.

Day 1 (1/1/19)

I LOVE this picture. I’m an outdoorsy person, and while touring on Jamaica, we came across these rafts and beautiful blue river. I was captivated by the moment and was extremely excited to capture that moment. I fawned over that image for the rest of the day. The wind that had been blown out of my sails at the turn of the new year was definitely back in.

Day 2 (1/2/19)

This was a shop sign on the ship. I liked the message and wanted to see if we could capture the details of the bokeh. While converting the image to digital, I think we lost a small bit of the detail, but it is mostly still there. Amanda is actually the one who snapped this picture. We were confused when the image first processed because we swore that the image was framed perfectly, but mistakes can happen right? More about that below.

Day 3 (1/3/19)

We had finally arrived back home and unpacked. It was late in the day and we had lost a lot of light. That was okay though because I had been wanting to capture a picture of my Panama hat. Again, the low light got me a little bit more than I would have liked. It’s nothing we couldn’t fix with a small edit, but as promised we aren’t editing any of these pictures. I still think the image came out looking really cool. I wanted this picture because I feel like every picture that comes out of this camera has a neat vintage look to it, and I thought this hat has a vintage look too. This picture really concerned me after it developed. I KNOW my hat was centered in the frame, but it came out quite off centered. I started to worry that the camera was defective or that the viewfinder was not properly aligned. I looked into the issue and had to slap myself in the forehead. The viewfinder on the Instax Neo 90 Classic is located in the top left of the camera (from the back), while the lens is located directly in the middle. There is going to be a natural slight difference. I read that and felt do dumb for having overlooked something that I could have easily figured out if I didn’t just jump to being worried. That is why Amanda’s medium format film camera looks so funny with the different shape due to having to fit the viewfinder directly above the lens!

Day 4 (1/4/19)

I saw this sign above a drink station. I loved the vintage tin sign look, and despite the wall behind the sign being painted, it even looks like old metal paneling. I snapped the picture and I think it came out looking really neat! It has that vintage polaroid look I mentioned above. I was quite pleased.

Day 5 (1/5/19)

I think I just realized that I took pictures of signs two days in a row. Whoops. This is the sign for a local microbrewery that I visited while my brother was in town. We went to a couple different breweries along what is called the Central Florida Ale trail. It sounds like it would be a bar crawl, but it is far from it. It is a partnership of 26 microbreweries located in Central Florida. They work together to promote the local craft beer. There is a map that you can grab at any of the locations and stamps to collect to keep track of which ones you’ve visited. I snapped this picture to remember the night.

Day 6 (1/6/19)

We went out to grab breakfast the morning of the 6th. Just outside was this awesome tree. In Florida we don’t get much of an autumn or winter season, so the trees are always green. Finding leaves that have turned to the classic autumn colors, or (in the case of this tree) finding trees that just have naturally reddish-brown leaves is a pretty rare sighting here. I had the camera in “macro” mode for this shot. I love the color pop. The shadows really bring out the highlights of the pictures, and the flat blue sky is a perfect backdrop.

Day 7 (1/7/19)

The Instax Neo 90 Classic has a mode called a double exposure. You are able to take two images and expose them on the same piece of film. This is a totally new concept to me that I have never tried. We decided to give it a shot on this photo. We took a picture of a beautifully clouded sky and of a young oak tree. The shadows of one image should show through with bright parts of the other image.

Favorite image of the week: It’s a tie between.... Day 1 and Day 7. I love the colors in both pictures and couldn’t have been happier with how they turned out!

Comment below and tell us what your favorite image of the week is. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Instax 365 Challenge

Hey Everyone,

So Amanda and I are embarking on an exciting and new challenge for 2019. As many of you know, we are hybrid photographers. This means that we shoot digital and film. We love film because it inspires our digital photography a ton. Because film is finite and you can’t usually see the result right away, film forces us to slow down and really thing about every picture, which in turn makes us better photographers. We wanted to really challenge ourselves in 2019 with our art and skills, so we have invested in an Instax Neo 90, which is an instant film camera. Instant film cameras are essentially what you think of when you think of a “polaroid.” You snap a picture and out pops out a white paper with a black film. In a couple minutes, that black film turns into the picture you just captured! You’ve probably seen these cameras around as they have gotten really popular thanks to the Instax Mini 9 series. These cameras come in really bright colors, and the bodies are a bit bulkier. They are easier to hold and harder to break, making them perfect for little kids’ hands.

Now, on towards explaining this challenge. Amanda and I will take 1 picture every day using our new camera. At the end of every week, we will post our pictures and the adventures that inspired them in a blog post. We will also post the images as we go on my Instagram. The rules are that we will only take 1 photo. No retakes, no edits, no fibbing. If we take a photo and it is blurry, well, it’s called a challenge for a reason. We know it is going to be difficult to take a perfect picture every time, but we will do our best and learn from our mistakes.

We are taking this challenge because because of just that, the challenge. It will challenge our composition, it will challenge our lighting, it will challenge our writing, it will challenge our creativity, it will challenge our commitment, it will challenge our photography. It will challenge us, and ultimately make us better photographers. Our goal is to use what we learn to better serve our brides and grooms with everything we learn. Throughout that, we want to share our journey with you. We believe that this will let you guys see a bit more of the behind the scenes in our lives and our creative process, and we want to share that with you. We hope that it inspires you and brings you to getting to know us just a little bit more.

Please follow along with us on this journey. Be sure to check out my instagram, as I will be posting the photos on there, and check back to our blog regularly to see our weekly (that’s our tentative plan as of now) updates to what I’m calling our #Instax365Challenge.

On Tuesday, we’ll post our first weekly roundup, but for now, please check out the photos we took before the ball dropped on January 1st!

If you like our photography and want to reach out to us please do so here. We would love to discuss how we can help capture your special day either on film or digital :)

Lake Runnymede Engagement Session - Joe & Becky

We’ve known Joe and Becky since before they were “Joe and Becky.” Joe and I have been friends for around 7 years. We met through our church and a regular board game night. Then, years later, we met Becky. Becky was good friends with another friend of ours and was always helping us with our two boys whenever we were all hanging out together.

When Joe and Becky started dating, we couldn’t be happier. Our fingers were crossed that we would get the privilege to do their photos. They are the cutest couple and really easy to be around. When the time came for them to think about photos, they immediately came to us, and we were honored to capture their commitment to each other. They gave us a lot of creative freedom for their photos and only requested that the photos take place outdoors (our favorite!)

We scheduled an early morning photo session at Lake Runnymede. We’ve done several sessions here before, and it is always a beautiful spot! We all arrived early in the morning just after sunrise, and Joe brought his mother and aunts who were in town for their engagement party. We were all so excited to celebrate Joe and Becky. Joe and Becky couldn’t stop smiling the entire time. They were up for anything, and we got some really fun photos of Joe twirling Becky (we asked for a couple re-dos just for fun too).

We have photographed at Lake Runnymeade before, but we found a new spot that day that we hadn’t seen before. It was a beautiful open area filled with tall grasses, and with the sun breaking through the trees in the morning, it looked like a golden field. We had to jump in there and snap some pictures with them.

This is that golden field!

The whole time we would show a sneak peak from the back of our camera to Joe’s mom and aunts, and they would burst into tears. We love being to work with our couples and create memories that will last for generations! We are so excited and honored to photograph Joe and Becky’s wedding at Isola Farms THIS Saturday!

Wedding MBA

Hey Guys!

A couple of weeks ago, we headed out to Las Vegas for a big wedding industry convention called Wedding MBA. This was actually the first time we have gotten to go to it despite being in business for 5 years! Amanda and I were super excited to go on this trip because Wedding MBA started just 3 days after our 5 year wedding anniversary so we figured we would make it into a business trip/anniversary trip. The only downside was that we had to leave our two boys behind :’(

The Grand Canyon from the airplane

Here in Central Florida, we have a lot of beautiful parks with some amazing trees, but it is pretty flat. Amanda and I have been working on building our destination wedding portfolio, and since we didn’t have enough to do in Las Vegas already between our professional development and celebrating our anniversary we decided to also schedule a photoshoot in the desert (keep your eyes out for that blog post coming soon). I love nature in general (both Amanda and I support conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy), and I find Central Florida to be absolutely beautiful (when you escape the tourism and make it out into the forests), but it is incredibly flat. Las Vegas (or at least the area surrounding it) presented itself to be completely different than what Amanda and I are used to shooting, but my goodness was it awe-inspiring. We’ve already dropped some sneak peaks of the session on our Instagram and Facebook pages, but I can’t wait for you to see the final images. Needless to say, without spoiling too much of the next blog post, we had an amazing time photographing out there!

Anyways, back to Wedding MBA. It was a like being in school all over again. There are different “tracks” you can take depending on your specialty: from photography, videography, and wedding planning to officiants, venues, and photobooths. Now, you did not have to follow your track exactly. You could skip one of the guest speakers in your track and go to the videography track (which I did do) for example. Plus, it is impossible to attend all of the lectures in your field anyways because there were anywhere from 3-6 speakers in your field all speaking at the same time. Thank goodness Amanda and I traveled together. We were able to split up for most of our day and attend different talks. Then at the end of the day (the convention ended each day at 6pm) we would meet and discuss what we learned. It kind of felt like being back in high school. Have I mentioned this was all going on at the Las Vegas Convention Center? The space was huge and boy was it needed.

Aside from all of the different rooms that were set up for each guest speaker, there was a convention floor where vendors had booths set up to showcase their products and services! It was here that we had a really cool opportunity. We met with the owners of a product called Unity Cross. There is a wedding tradition to symbolize the bride and groom coming together as one. I’ve seen it done as a three strand rope being tied together, two different colors of sand being poured into one vessel, and two smaller candles being used to light one larger candle. Unity Cross is a version of that, but that also serves as a decoration for your home. Amanda and I actually used one for our wedding 5 years ago when Unity Cross was just starting out! Back to that opportunity I was talking about, we were able to become an affiliate with Unity Cross. You can follow this link here to go to their website to check out their products.

Wow, I’m sure you are tired of reading by now, but I haven’t even gotten into the details yet. I’ll end it here for now and keep your eyes out for the next blog post coming soon. This will be a multipart series I guess so we can talk about what Amanda and I learned from Wedding MBA, and what we will be doing in response to that, as well as just talking about our trip a bit more, and of course the engagement session (spoiler: it was at Red Rock Canyon!).

Alfond Inn Wedding - Winter Park, Florida - Ala & Tareq

Surrounded by family, Ala and Tareq had the perfect intimate wedding at Alfond Inn. Miguel and I did not get as much lead time before this wedding as we usually do with our couples. We didn’t have time for an engagement session or any of the usual pre-wedding things because Ala and Tareq found us TWO DAYS before their romantic Alfond Inn celebration! But none of that mattered, because they were naturals in front of the camera. Of course, it would be hard for them not to be. I mean look at them, they’re stunning!

Few venues do luxury weddings in Orlando as well as the Alfond Inn in Winter Park. Even on a smaller scale, like this gorgeous intimate wedding, Alfond Inn is unparalleled. The scenery, service, and atmosphere were all the perfect setting for this sweet and romantic wedding party.