I known Olya now for about 9 years and Brian for about 4 years, and over that time they have made each other very happy. That happines continues this weekend with their wedding. As a favor, they asked us to Video their wedding, but being the photographers that we are, we also took a lot of pictures… You can find those here. The ceremony was beautiful and the reception was a lot of fun. We got to spend time with some other friends that we have not seen in a long time now. Overall, fun was had by all.

On the more technical side, Cindy and I found that we were having trouble getting good lighting in the low light situations. This is something that we know that we have problems with, but we were not able to over come them. It is a good thing that we were not the hire photographer, else I would have felt bad about missing some images, but doing this for fun gave us a chance to work on our skills. I am sure that you will see more than a few good pictures that we took that we were very happy with. Who knows, maybe one day, we will be the ones that people hire to photograph their wedding, till then we just need to get better…

On the way home, we decided to swing by Virginia Beach, since we were so close. We took some good pictures. Look for those here. We only posted a few pictures from this, but we were running with a low batter and our hard drive batter was dead, so we thought that we needed to conserve memory to take pictures of the leaves on the way home, but we did not find any good pictures of that…

-Matt

Shutterfly: This is the service that I used before. The book came out fairly nicely, some of the images did not turn out as well as I expected. In the photo book layouts, they have lots of options, but they do not offer a full page image (so I can design a full page in photoshop and then upload that). Overall fairly happy with this service…

York Photo: I have not tried this provider, but they seem to get lots of good reviews for print quality. They also do not have a full page layout option, options are quite limited for page layouts. They do have poster prints, 20×30 for $13.99.

Photoworks: I have not tried printing from this service. They do have a lot of layouts in the photo book, including a full page image. They do not have a lot of options for cover style and such, but most places do not either. Price is in-line with other places.

Snapfish: This is odd, but this seems to be the exact same store as york photo, the pages all have the same sample images and such. I am guessing that either this site or the other one got bought out by the other one and they are running the exact same service off of both sites.

Imagestation: This is a service prvided by Sony… the interface for creating a photo book is slow, but it is the most feature rich that I have seen. I am leaning towards using this service for my next book project…

I found a good site that does a lot of reviews of these type services, part of TopTenReviews.com. Their reviews can be found here.

-Matt

Today, Cindy, Rosie, Mook, and I went to the Virginia Tech game against Marshall. Big suprise, we kicked their butt all over the field (the defense even scored on them). For me, it was just more fun and exciting because it was the first game this season that I brough my camera and my new lens. Go take a look at the pictures, one of which is a good picture of the new addition to the statium, the new press boxes.

The picture can be found here.

-Matt

Today, Tracy and Mike introducted there two children into the world.
Eli Nathan Barrett-Learn

• Born October 7th, 8.27am CST
• 6lb. 14oz
• 20.5″
• aka Thumper

Augusten Jacob Barrett-Learn

• Born October 7th, 8:26am CST
• 7lb 3oz
• 19.5″
• aka Bumble Bee

As you might guess, they are also the newest additions to my list of subjects for pictures. Until I can get down to take a few snap shots, we have all their other pictures posted on their new site: http://www.Barrett-Learn.com (mirrored at http://babies.learnfamily.com). Look for pictures from the newborn’s parents and other relatives…

Look forward to many more pictures of the new ones…

-Matt