stephanie and john wedding at the rocky hill ct mariott hotel

Well HELLOOOO 2009!!!!!

Mike and I are coming into this new season with a BANG, and we couldn't be more excited if we tried! We have so many little tricks up our sleeves that are going to let us do what we love to do even better- we have some new team members!!! Which I am super excited about, watch for their intro blog post coming soon- and we are in general just so excited to keep pushing ourselves right smack out of our comfort zones.

Exhibit A:

Rocking the flash! And not just any old flash! We welcomed a brand new addition to our gear family the other day, the Nikon SB900 flashes. Now, to be honest I was a little skeptical. What exactly is THIS going to do that my SB800 didn't? Well. Silly me! This thing is SO DOPE. Nikon really has an outstanding remote flash- master-commander set up going on that we have dabbled in but never truly mastered to the point of reckless abandon. Until last night! Watch YO SELF people we are going to be tackling the off camera flash like we tackled available light and the video light- until it is our bee-YOTCH!! It' so much fun to challenge yourself to try new things and new technologies, at least we sure think it is and we just about exploded with excitement last night!

On a technical side note for anyone on the fence about buying an SB900- get this- the command dials are SO freaking easy to dig into from the master flash- and switching from master to remote to solo are crazy easy- also it now has a dial on it that makes jumping up and down in power or channel or between flashes super easy to do. The only downside is that even if you use it on manual power super low like Mike and I do, it chugs through batteries. But we are investigating our quantum battery options / rechargeable etc. Any input, leave it in a comment so we can investigate it more!!

OK. onward and upward- on to the images!!!!
I started off simple- shooting the cake with my SB800 backlighting it and my 900 bounced off the side wall to my left, on super duper low, like 1/64 power. Pure lighting deliciousness

During Stephanie's walk down the aisle I shot her future sister in law Becky, tearing up- all available light, no flash here

We only had a few minutes to do their formals before the reception started so Mike and I dragged down two cool chairs to the right in front of a window aka cleanish backdrop for us to try some fun backlighting. We put an SB800 behind them and both pulled from it. The benefit to doing this instead of using our video light is that there was really no way to quickly hide the video light, but since our flash has a little mini stand it comes with we just set it right down on the floor and viola! This is a typical Mike Romano type shot- he loves the darker more dramatic look-we kind of traded places so to speak for the day and each shot like the other, it was pretty funny

I am McLOVIN the lighting in Stephanie's father daughter dance... just enough light in the front and a nice crisp rim light

John's Mom was so expressive and fun to shoot!

John and Stephanie were very open to ducking out of their reception to do some more shots...which Mike and I were so excited about because it was snowing like crazy out! We did some recon and found this awesome little nook right outside of the doors to the ballroom! Complete with snow covered tree and brown walls... uh, we were in shooting heaven!!!!
To freeze the snow in mid air we backlit them with an SB800 on a stand that we both pulled from and then each utilized our 900's as we so chose to. I bounced mine off the side left wall at a super low power so as to not overpower them



We let them duck into this little nook that was protected from the snow fall for a moment and we shot some more! This was just available light here


This one may be my favorite. Yeah. It is!! I love it. Love it. Love it.

We were covered in snow, and so was our gear- good thing our D3's are so weatherproof!! Here is Mike working it

Once we were done with Stephanie she couldn't get inside fast enough, she was such a good sport! I caught her literally saying 'PEACE I'm OUT!!'


Well to say Mike and I are chomping at the bit to shoot our next wedding - Feb 21 with Kevin and Kerri!! Is a bit of an understatement!!

Special super thanks to Steph and John for letting us do our thing!! Congratulations!!

Check out Mike's shots HERE, or on Facebook!