Ben Berndt Photography

Busy Busy Busy

I have been pretty awful this year at updating my blog and webpage.  Previous years, I was really good at getting a slideshow up for most of my wedding shoots and  had a fair amount of teaser shots up as well.   I know this is just an excuse…. but oh well.  This year I have been able to meet with a lot of awesome couples and that has kept me editing/shooting/meeting just about every day of the week.    In a real effort to hit my 3 week turn around time for all shoots… blog and webpage updates have been demoted to the back of the back burner.  I don’t foresee this changing in the near future since I know everyone loves getting their photos edited out fast and that’s a huge priority for me.

So a huge thank you goes out to my clients for being so incredibly fun to work with and being great about the lack updates.

~Ben

The “sort” folder

I have this very bad habit of not editing out my fun photos after I shoot them.  This isn’t a new habit either, I have been doing this for at least 5 years now. The result is a 500 GB hard drive nearly full with images that I sorta forgot about.  Since I shoot in raw file format almost 100% of the time, it is not as simple as viewing them in thumbnail and doing a quick sort.  I literally have no clue what they are. They just carry a date and sometimes a folder name.  Sometimes I may not even go as far as that. I bet I have at least 40 folders in there that have a “new folder” in the title and I just dumped the photos in there.

Most of my editing time in the warmer months is spent editing out wedding/engagement photos.  This means I am sorting/editing/backing up around 4,000 client related photos a week.  To give myself a little break from those photos, I have been searching for some hidden treasure by randomly importing photos into Lightroom. Some of these date back to 2005 and it’s pretty interesting to see how my style and eye has drifted since then.

Here are a couple from 2007. Nothing mind blowing, but I figured it was fitting for the time of year we are coming up on. I am going to eventually expand out my webpage to feature more of my fun photos that I do in my off time.

~Ben

The time has finally come

Many of you already know this, but starting October 16th . . . . .  I will be a full time photographer!!!!!!

I have been working hard towards this goal for the past two years and had intended on doing this at the end of next summer. Well, a couple weeks ago, I was sat down at my dayjob at Ameriprise and told that my job was going to be eliminated as of 10/15/2009. There was a good opportunity to do another job that was being created, but I never really felt called to do thats as it was.  So I figured I’d explore the severance package as another option. I will give it to them, they are doing right by me on the severance side of things.  I called Rachel up and asked her if she was okay with going back to teaching this fall(which as the following week) and she said she’d look around. What she found was a fantastic job just 3 miles up the road from us. She interviewed on a Monday, was hired that night and then started the next day. 

So here we stood:

Ben: severance package [Check]

Ben: Lots of fun weddings and other shoots planned for the next 2 years [BIG check]

Rachel: Awesome new job [Check]

2 little girls that need someone to watch them: [ oh boy.....   ]

Thankfully, both My mom and Rachel’s mom are great grandma’s and are pretty flexible with their weeks.  So a few calls were made and they signed up for full time Grandma Duty for the following 7 weeks.

We are nearly 2 weeks into the 7 week period and things are going about as well as you can expect…(really good).   I am incredibly excited to focus purely on what I love to do and not be distracted by a 2 hour commute and corporate b.s everyday. The icing on the cake is being able to spend the days with Hannah and Grace.  I can’t wait to be Mr. Mom and go on all sorts of adventures with them.  One of my biggest fears was to get too busy with work that I miss out on being their dad.  Thankfully we don’t have to worry about that now. 

~Ben