Happy 4th Birthday to Us!

It’s Valentine’s Day, which means it marks one more year that Next to Me Studios has been in business. We now have a four-year-old company, huzzah! To celebrate, Chris changed up all the main photos on our website home page to showcase some of our new favorites, so go check it out and see if you’re up there!

Wedding Crasher

This little guy wandered into the middle of Taylor and Buck's ceremony yesterday, and I mean literally in the middle of it. They were standing up in front of everyone when this little guy waltzed in and stole the show. I was seriously contemplating how I could store him in my car for the rest of the day and take him home with us! Jack and Sawyer would totally love a new little brother, right?

#hothusband

On one of our recent engagement shoots, we started a new thing of handing off our cameras to our couple and letting them take pictures of us–sort of a payback of sorts. We found after two hours of them, them, them, smile here, look over here, look at him, don't look at her, this was a welcome break. Taylor and Buck (whom we love love love!) were the first ones to get to try out this new experiment, and I am so pleased to get such an awesome picture out of it! Look at how hot my husband is! And my hair is being perfect, even for just a millisecond. (I've seen the next picture in this sequence–it definitely went back to ruffled and tangly real quick.) Thank you, Buck, for capturing this wonderful photo, and to my wonderful husband who has amazing editing skillz (that's right, with a z)!

Sneak peak

Oh, baby!

Tilted photo courtesy of Instagram's inability to correction crop post-photo taking.

A glimpse of our shoot with the Santone twins. I just love his little face, his expression, and his clasped hands!

Photography blog and branding update!

The latest blog post for our little photography studio is up tonight. This one was the most adorable family shoot, where I walked away in love with three little boys. True story. They were so adorable. Check them out, along with the rest of the fam, at our photography blog. 

In other news, we're making progress to getting our new website and brand down! Cody sent us our first sneak peeks last night (right in the middle of our watching Monday night's How I Met Your Mother- I saw the tweet and then had to keep my mouth shut for the last ten minutes so we could get through the rest of the episode!) We are so excited about the looks Cody's got going for us. I can't wait for us to get our brand spanking new, professional and design-y website and blog going!

We discussed branding with Ben & Jerry, of course.

And this is us (and Sawyer, who wanted to be in on the snugglefest) being so stinking excited about the new look!

February the eighteenth: Trinity's newborn shoot

One of my favorite types of shoots is newborns when the newborns belong to our friends. I don't know why, I just feel much more comfortable squishing our friends' babies into cute poses than I do with stranger's newborns. Weird, huh? 

Trinity was splendid all afternoon. She slept soundly almost the entire time and let us dress and undress and headband and re-headband her the whole time. And did I mention she's so little and squishy? I want to go back and do a whole second shoot with her because she was so darn cute!

Re-Brand.

Exciting things are going on over here at the Trementozzi house. Chris and I are moving forward in year number two of our business by rebranding. Although, I suppose rebranding isn't really the proper terminology, since we never technically branded in the first place. (And as I just studied prefixes with my seventh grade ELL tutoring kiddo, I am now very aware of the impact of the beginnings of words.) Next to Me Studio's current look is really just a blend of a great photo Chris took in a field by his parent's house in Redlands and a cool font he found sometime later.

But it has served us well in our first year of being real live photographer peoples. Chris added up the photo gigs from last year, and the total came in at a surprising number of 29 family and couples shoots and 7 weddings. Not too shabby for a free website and first year.

It's year number dos, though, and like I said, we're getting serious about our look now. Our wonderful and amazing designer friend Cody (of Caava Design) has begun the enormous task of figuring out our new style and feel; we seriously can not wait to see what he's got cooking. Cody did our wedding invitations and save the dates, and his work is just overall amazing sauce, so you can see why we're anxious to catch a peek of what he's got in mind for us.

A glimpse of our wedding invites:

We also met with the amazing Kelsey of blogging fame (happyolks.com) who is going to be the awesome talent behind the verbiage of our new website. Let me tell you, I'm a little relieved we're going with someone else to write about us. Chris and I wrote our current website last year, and geez, those were some dark days of frustration. And in the end, neither of us were really satisfied with the way our words sounded. We have such different voices, it was extremely hard to compromise on how to word everything. And since we're both generally super compromising in all other aspects of life, this endless frustration led us to the idea that maybe, just maybe, it would be much better for our marriage and individual sanities to have an outsider do the dirty work for us.

Big sigh of relief that we don't have to do all that over again. We just get to do the fun stuff, like ooh and ahh over how awesome we sound in someone else's words. ;)

Stay tuned for more on the progress of spiffifying (<-- newly made up and awesome word) our brand. And, of course, the continuation of Picture of the Day: 2012.

January the twenty-third

Picking out preliminary design ideas for our new business look. You may have heard that 2012 is the year of the dragon, but it is actually the year of Next to Me Studios. Oh, yes.

Cuties.

We've been doing a lot of kid shoots lately until our "wedding season" starts in September. And for a long time, we only had families with boys coming to us for photos. These boys were generally in the 2-3 year old range, and while completely adorable, they were a little hard to get to sit still for some modeling. Sigh. 

So I was excited when a friend of Sarah and Kristen's (and I think she used to work with Chris back in his Long's college days?) asked us to photograph her two girls! Older sister was completely up for a little modeling session, and baby sister, while a little cantankerous throughout the shoot, did break through with a few grand smiles everyone once in a while. We also did an entire family session with the girls, their parents, favorite aunt, and grandparents, and I absolutely love the color scheme mom picked out for the whole group- purples, pinks, and blues look amazing for a family shoot!

We actually just did a second shoot for them, to celebrate big sister's fifth birthday, and I've been working on those edits for the past week or so- part of the reason I wanted to go back and look at these first shots. I'm logging off to finish those edits now, and then tomorrow Chris and I are off to Redlands again for another big family shoot with the Cowens!

Next to Me Studios

So this evening (as my husband and I sit on the couches with our laptops, watching Netflixed shows, in our previously mentioned date night in), I did some research and used some of my internet skillz to figure out the whole blog button conundrum. The result? Two brand spanking new blog buttons, right over there on that sidebar. They link to our main website and to our blog (which ain't nothing fancy yet, but soon). So if you're a reader of this blog and didn't know that my hot husband and I have a photography business, well today's your lucky day. Please check us out, and if you want, you can even leave us a comment about how much you love us. You know, if you want. ;)

And if anyone's wondering where we got our name from, Next to Me was derived, after many months of not coming up with anything good, when I told Chris to listen to his vast collection of music for some inspiration. Check out Sleeping at Last, I told him. We played a lot of their stuff at our wedding, and they're quite poetic and romantic and whimsical. So he did. And the next thing I knew, he was leaning in and whispering in my ear, "Next to Me," and I heard the line sung right at that moment. It was love at first listen.

Next to Me means a couple of things to us. It's symbolic of the photos we take, the bride and groom who are standing next to each other in front of their friends and family, and the families standing next to each other making funny faces and loving on their kids. And it's pretty specific to us, as we are pretty much always next to each other, on our laptops usually, working on editing or homework or researching or just being creative in some way. So it fit in all these ways that we realized right away.

Our business has really taken off in the last couple of months. We've begun booking weddings frequently. We've got two engagement sessions this weekend alone. We generally have 2-3 photo sessions on our editing list at any given time. It's great fun, something we both love doing together, and we're excited to see what the coming year will bring us with our little studio.

So please check us out if you haven't already. And like I said, don't be shy about leaving us a little love note!

It's Launch Day!

Chris and I are proud to present our little business baby, Next to Me Studios! We are super excited about getting our photography business going, and it's been a busy few months of photo shoots, credential program and student teaching (me), real work stuff (him), and trying to get our business up and running in the in-between times, but we're finally there. Whoo!


Check out our website: nexttomestudios.com
And our official photography blog: nexttomestudios.wordpress.com