Sara Michele Photography

Tony and Ella’s Wedding Photos!

Sara Michele — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:41:00 +0000

Tony and Ella got married July 11th at George George Park and had their reception at the Imperial House, both in Clinton Township. The day was not only their wedding day, but also Ella’s birthday! Here are just a few of the MANY photographs I took for them!

Tony and Ella are both from Albania, and they have some very cool traditions. Like for example, its customary to have the men in the grooms family shave the groom before the wedding. So I started my day hanging out with the guys for a bit.

After the groom was dressed and ready to go, then I moved on to the bride’s house where I was (literally) greeted with open arms!

At the bride’s house, lots of family hang out and eat, drink and be merry while everybody waits for the bride to get dressed. The groom also comes over with all of his family members. The groom greets the bride, some gifts and such are exchanged and then everybody heads back over to the grooms house where the bride and her family is greeted by the groom’s family. Lots of back and forth between the two houses, but I think this tradition is really nice. It gives everybody a change to hang out a little before the ceremony and party and I loved it because I was able to take lots of photos.

The dessert spread was AH-MAZING! Just going through the pictures has me craving sweets…

What better way to decorate the tables then with buckets of ice cold beer and bottles of Hennessy? I think this is excellent planning – pretty much guarantees that your party is going to be fun!

These folks sure loved to dance, I’m pretty sure that dance floor was never empty! The band sounded fantastic. I’d post a link to their website, but I actually forgot to get a card from them. If anybody is looking for a talented band that plays Albanian music, email me, I’d be happy to hunt down the contact info for them.

Congratulations Ella and Tony!! (and happy birthday Ella!)

Closing this post out with one of my favorite photos of the day. I happened to just be walking by and spotted these 2 children. Fired off a super quick frame just half a sec before they ran off chasing that balloon. Talk about a lucky shot!

Jessica and John Altan’s Wedding Photos!

Sara Michele — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:27:47 +0000

Before I get into posting a few images for this super awesome couple, a quick update regarding photographic watermarks. I seriously HATE the thought of stamping some ugly logo/photographer credit on all of my blog images. I feel strongly that they distract from the photo, and so I held off from doing this for a long time. ‘Till a few days ago when I saw some of the photos I took in some random photographer’s online portfolio. Dude basically stole the images off my site and posted them as his own work. Of course I immediately emailed him and he did remove them, but now I’m wondering how many others have my photos in their portfolios. So. To maybe try and prevent this a little, from now on, all blogged images will have my new watermark: Sara Michele Stills + Cinema. A little name change too (and a new blog design is in the works too!). I’m not happy about this change, but it looks like in this digital age we live in that its a necessary one. Don’t worry though – all of my actual clients will be receiving the images with no watermark on them.

And so, now we can move on to the fun stuff!

Jessica and John Altan! Amazing couple. Fun wedding! Jessica and John Altan went to school together their whole lives but they didn’t actually start dating until college. They had the awesome idea of stopping by all the schools they went to together for a quick photo session at each after their ceremony. Here is one from their middle school ->

My day with them started at the groom’s house with a feast of sloppy joe’s and a toy gun fight:

Some quick family photos there, then off to the bride’s house. Mad props to Jessica for a PERFECT wedding day schedule. We had plenty of time for pictures, and everything ran exactly on schedule (this is incredibly rare in the wedding world!).

Ceremony was held at Sacred Heart in Roseville.

The reception was held at the Sterling Inn. The first photo is a “tradition” among Jessica and her friends –>

Thanks to Brendan Pfaff who was the DJ for the evening and introduced me to Jessica and John Altan. Brendan is a total class act amongst DJs, one of the best out there for sure.

Congratulations John and Jessica!!!

josephine @ 2 months

Sara Michele — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:15:30 +0000

As much as I love photographing events, I’ve set a goal for myself to become a better portrait photographer. I’m gonna master those darn studio lights and get awesome at this. So thinking that babies would probably be easiest, I volunteered my services to my friend Robin who’s got a brand new baby in the family she claimed was very cute. Robin was right – baby Josephine is very cute. Sara was wrong – photographing babies is not as easy as it looks. But. I do like babies, and I do like making pictures, so now I just need a few more cute babies to practice on….

Special thanks to Josephine’s Mom, Christine, for letting me photograph her daughter. Here are a few of the results:

Fire Trucks + A Good Ole’ Fashioned Cake Fight // Megan and Chris’s Wedding

Sara Michele — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:39:02 +0000

I’ll start out with one of my faves I snapped of Megan when she wasn’t paying attention

And one of Chris when he was paying attention:

Chris and Megan had their ceremony at St. George Lutheran Church in Brighton, Michigan and their reception was only a few miles away at Crystal Gardens in Howell. I got there a few hours before their ceremony to start the pictures:

St. George’s was great about letting me roam about during the ceremony! The priest is a shutterbug himself so he was totally cool with whatever it took to get a solid shot (except flash – but hey, who needs flash anymore anyways?)

Chris is a fireman so they thought it would be cool to go to the fire station for photos. Awesome! I had lots of ideas planned for this, but we ran out of time with the limo so this had to turn into the QUICKEST photo session of all time: 8 minutes. That’s the hardest thing about wedding photography (for me at least). 8 minutes to pick a scene, figure out a pose, get a bridal party into position, and adjust exposure. And that’s just for 1 photo…..

The cake cutting started out innocently enough:

But then an all out battle erupted!!!

No telling who won this fight…but I will say that I think Chris was covered in a little more cake. President Tuxedo called Megan 15 minutes before her ceremony to see if she wanted to rent tuxes. They were a little late with that call but little do they know they were probably better off, unless of course they enjoy scrubbing frosting off tux jackets!

The parents:

This next one is the very last photo I took that day and it turned out to be one of my favorites. Megan’s idea. Although, I have a feeling I didn’t get anywhere near the photo that she had envisioned, but I hope she likes this one too!

Great day it was! Congrats Chris and Megan!

Fishin’, Kissin’ and Rock n’ Roll

Sara Michele — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:33:14 +0000

So I’ve been trying this new thing where I pick a Sunday and a location and then schedule as many portrait sessions as possible. I think this will be more convenient for many of my clients who are located all over the place. So Sunday April 11th I was in Downtown Chicago. This past Sunday, April 18th, I was far east-side Metro Detroit (Shelby Township/Chesterfield/Etc). Seems to be working well so far.

This past Sunday, started out with some fishing with Brandi and Sean at Stoney Creek Metro Park. Sean is an avid fisherman, Brandi likes to hang out by the lake. It works well for them. We actually hadn’t planned to fish during the photo session, Sean just wanted to sneak in some fishing before I showed up to take pictures. But I really like to try and incorporate my clients hobbies and interests into their photos. I feel like it personalizes them alot more than the basic “look over here and smile” stuff (BORING!). So. They broke out the tackle box and I proceeded to click away…

Sean even caught a fish!

I’ve always wanted to do one of these photo animations. Here is my first try at one. You have to click on it to make it work:

[click on image]

A few more from Brandi and Sean’s engagement photo session ->

Next comes the Rock n’ Roll part. I switched locations to a bar called New York New York in Chesterfield Township, Michigan where I met Nichole and Jason. Jason is a bass player in a band called Dirty Whiskey. I stalked him on Myspace after their session so I could check out their music – good hardcore rock stuff! Jason proposed to Nichole on stage during a gig here, so it made for the perfect spot for their photo session. Following is a few of the resulting photographs. As a side note, this is my first time working with a video light for pictures. I couldn’t really use a traditional flash in this location because it was wicked dark, and there wasn’t really anything to bounce my flash off of and I totally forgot to bring some kind of diffuser or something. Plus, I kinda wanted to experiment with using the video light. After viewing the photos, I think this is going to be amazing if I take the video light OFF the camera and have an assistant hold it or something, but it did work to get the job done.

We played around on the stage for a bit, but then moved to the neighboring bowling alley to get a couple in a little better lit area:

chris + katie engagement photo session!

Sara Michele — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:02:47 +0000

Chris and Katie are getting married in Troy, Michigan but they live in Chicago. I work in both the Chicago and Detroit areas so it worked out perfect for me to set them up with a local e-session. We headed out to a dog-friendly park just north of Belmont Harbor to get a few quick photographs:

Lola was a feisty little thing. I tried hard to get a good picture of her, but she moved around too quick for me. I think I need to work on my pet photography skills…

look at all the pretty pictures…

Sara Michele — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:04:23 +0000

I dig the blog method of displaying my work, but truthfully I get a little jealous when I see other photogs super flashy portfolio sites. So I decided I needed one too. I still need to actually work on the home page, and whatever other pages, but I did get three portfolios put together for people interested in viewing a variety of my work. The hardest part was narrowing down the images to include. Initially I had over 1,000 wedding favorites, getting that down to a favorite 75 was challenging. Choose one of the links below to view my new portfolios!

A few of my wedding photo favorites

Faves from engagement sessions

A collection of other stuff I like to shoot. Mostly models and cars. A few from the Final Four events I did too that bring back fond memories for me

1 late photographer + 1 broken finger = Erica + Charles Engagement Photo Session!

Sara Michele — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:01:58 +0000

I’ve been looking forward to photographing Erica and Charles since I met with them a few months back to talk about their wedding. They had so many great ideas, not too mention just seemed like they were going to be a really fun couple. An email sent late at night (my fault), and a wrong phone number (my fault again) resulted in me being 1 hour late for the photo shoot. I felt soooo bad, I’m seriously never late, and I felt worse given that Erica and Charles wanted to go to two locations for their photos. With the late start, we only had time for one. (Sorry Charles and Erica!! I’ll fit you in another day if you’re up for it!). Once we did get started with the photos, the very creative groom-to-be Charles, had the awesome idea of climbing on a rock for a quick photo. Got the photo, but on the way down, Charles landed on some ice and did some painful damage to his finger (ouch!). Not sure if he dislocated it, sprained it or broke it, but either way, Charles was in some serious pain. I thought that was it. Game over. But nope, Charles insisted he was fine and wanted to finish the photos. Now most people would have been cranky and pretty annoyed at this point but Charles and Erica are so easy-going and cool, that I had a blast taking their photos. They laughed, joked around, and came up with some great ideas. It was truly a pleasure to photograph them. Here are a few from their session:

Beer is good, God is great, Melcher’s (and Spencer’s) are crazy! :)

Sara Michele — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:53:15 +0000

The hardest part about doing this blogging thing is deciding on just 20-30 photos from each wedding. Especially from such a fantastic wedding as Elaine and PJ’s. The Melcher’s and Spencer’s are NOT crazy as the title of this post suggests, they are incredibly kind, generous, and FUN people and were a pleasure to work for. Elaine and Paul (a/k/a PJ) and their amazing bridal party were down for whatever, even freezing their butts off outside in January Michigan weather, so I was able to get tons of photos. Here are a few of my favorites —>>

The title of this post is inspired by a CD I spotted laying on top of the stereo at the bride’s parents house:

Elaine’s “something blue” was the blue sharpie that her bridesmaids signed the bottom of her red (!) shoes with.

I haven’t even started going through all the ceremony and reception photos yet, but here are a couple from inside the church:

We had 2.5 hours before everybody needed to be at the reception so that left lots of time for photos! We started by going back to Elaine’s parents house with the bridal party:

Yes folks, these next photos are from the Rec Bowl! Personally, I think going bowling on your wedding day is the most fantastic idea ever. I was so excited about getting to climb in the gutter to get this next photo:

The introductions at the reception was awesome. Blues Brothers for the bridesmaids and groomsmen and then they made a human tunnel for the bride and groom to run through. I photographed everybody making their entrance and than ran to the end of the tunnel just in time to get this snap:

Coming soon….the video highlights! I can’t wait to go through all the video footage!

Congratulations Elaine and Paul!!

nicole and rich’s wedding photos!

Sara Michele — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:20:54 +0000

Just in time for Christmas, here is a preview for Nicole and Rich of their wedding images!

I started the day at their home in Shelby Township with the guys. I didn’t get a whole lot of photos because the groom had taken off to go help out a bridesmaid who had gotten in a little fender bender just a few miles from the house (no worries…she’s okay!). The rest of the groomsmen were already dressed, ready, and just sitting around playing wii and hanging out. I spotted their calendar hanging in the kitchen and thought that the entry on the “12th” represented this couple soooo well. =>

I haven’t gone through all the preparation photos yet, but I knew I loved this photo of Nicole the second I snapped it:

Both the Ceremony and Reception were held at Descent of The Holy Ghost church in Warren, Michigan.

Nicole’s dress had the longest train I’ve ever seen!

One thing I’m trying to work on is ring photos. I took quite a few for Nicole and Rich, below is one of them. I think I need a macro lens for these types of photos which I don’t have, but that’s for sure going on my shopping list.

There were ALOT of cute children at this wedding, including Nicole’s son. I had a blast photographing them:

Santa even made an appearance to pass out toys to the kids and take photos with everyone:

A couple more candids for fun:

Congratulations Nicole and Rich!!