John and I are getting ready and packed up for what is going to be an amazing wedding this weekend. I cannot wait to share with you some of the photos+video we are going to be getting! In addition to our regular C+W crew we’ll also have guest shooters Jason Groupp and Jennifer Boyle with us.

In the mean time I wanted to leave you with 12 interesting tidbits about your favorite wedding studio:
1. We get lots of compliments about the yellow+gray color combination, but funny enough Alisha had to twist my arm into this color scheme. We work with a branding agency who we love (Elevation) and they pitched us the yellow+gray color scheme. I came from a red+gray color scheme in my previous business and I wanted to stay with that look, but the Elevation guys and Alisha successfully beat me into submission and forced the yellow on me. They were 210% right of course.
2. When we first dove into the digital photography medium, the best high end digital camera was about 3 megapixels. We knew the technology wasn’t quite there yet, but it would be soon. 5 years later our cameras are all well over 20 megapixels with sensors almost twice the size. Of course we used to shoot on 256 MB cards too :) Now we shoot with 16 GB cards.
3. Believe it or not, we actually talked one of our brides OUT of having her wedding filmed on the TV show Platinum Weddings. I knew when I was doing it I should be classified as insane, but honestly I knew it wasn’t going to fit her vision for the wedding and everything she wanted out of it. She wasn’t going to be happy with a TV crew following her around her entire wedding and telling everyone how much she paid for everything. So I told her I thought she should tell them no, not to film her wedding. It was one of the hardest conversations I’ve had…. all that amazing PR down the drain! I knew it was the right decision for her though.
4. Alisha and I were actually competitors before the merger of Clark+Walker Studio. Most husband and wife teams form after they get married and then decide they want to start a photography business. Not us though, Ali had her own business and I had mine too when we met at a conference in Los Angeles. We dated for a number of years as competitors before we finally married and merged. It was funny when brides would try to pin us against each other while we’d respond to their emails sitting next to each other on the couch watching TV at night :)

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5. The amount of hard drive space and overall storage is a hurdle we are always facing. We always have at least 12 terabytes of data in use in the studio workflow at all times. We obviously have even more than this backed up off site too, but even just creating enough space to work on photos and video is a massive challenge.
6. Last year we spent about one thousand four hundred man hours at weddings. That’s about 3 straight months of 40 hours at weddings to put it in perspective.
7. We are currently shooting around three hundred thousand photos in a calender year. The number grows every year!
8. Not many people may know this, but weddings are take A LOT out of us physically and mentally. Back to back weddings aren’t very common for us anymore, in fact usually we require a full day or two to recover after shooting a long wedding. Alisha has proposed that we start taking Mondays off this summer on weekends where we shoot weddings and I think that might actually happen. Holding those massive cameras and lenses, while being on your feet all day, and mentally and creatively giving everything you have for 10-12 straight hours… most of us are like zombies the next day.
9. We shoot all of the NYC runway for The Knot, and I actually got my start in fashion photography. I know way more about wedding dresses than any straight man should.
10. Indian weddings make up a decent size of our business, and we have a special place in our heart for them. 5 years ago (maybe more) I shot my first South Asian wedding and I instantly fell in love. I knew absolutely nothing about the cultural differences in weddings when I first started, and looking back I have some hilarious stories. The one that made me laugh the most was the time we did the baraat outside in the parking lot of a country club, and I’ll never forget the face of the man who was about to tee off when the live drumming started about 15 feet from where he was about to swing. I’m still laughing as I type this. It was like something out of candid camera. My other favorite story was the first time people started giving us the money at the end of the baraat. Guests and family often times throw money at the people dancing, and once in a while the family will actually give us the money. So people were picking it up off the ground and reaching into my pockets and putting in there as I was shooting. Of course at first I couldn’t figure out why and I’m trying to shoot and I’m thinking “why the hell are all these people reaching in my pockets!!” Haha oh man that was a trip.
11. Our backgrounds aren’t exactly what you might expect. John worked in the corporate world for many years, Dawn came to us from the corporate world, and Alisha has a BA in Political Science with graduate work in International Relations. I’m the only non-corporate sell out (yes I will be getting retribution for that), but I have to admit I have a true passion for marketing. The past year I’ve started to put a limit on the amount of jobs I’ll take because I want to continue to spend a lot of time on the marketing side of Clark+Walker.
12. We try to make the studio as homely as possible, and everyone voted earlier this year that you must wear slippers to work everyday. Fuzzy slippers.

If there’s anything else you want to know just leave a comment or facebook us!

- Luke