Bob and I teamed up with Westcott to create a lighting kit that Bob uses to make stunning images and we are thrilled to share this news with you. I could say I'm a little giddy over this, but that would be a total lie! I'm A LOT giddy and you can probably see my smile from your where you are at now... it's that big! Thank you Kelly Mondora and your team at Westcott for brainstorming this idea with us. We are so thankful for your support. And Brandon Heiss, wow, you blew us away with the box design. Thank you!

A PERFECT PAIR FOR PURE LIGHTING CONTROL:
Whether you're just getting into off-camera flash or you're a seasoned professional, the HaloTM and ApolloTM are wonderful light modifiers that can take your location or studio lighting to new heights. They're fast, easy to set up and produce a wonderful quality of light. Bob uses the Halo & Apollo with both speedlights and mono block strobes.

PERFECT PAIR LIGHTING KIT CONSISTS OF:
(1) 45" Round Halo
(1) 28" Medium Apollo with Grid
(2) 8' Light Stands
(2) Adjustable Shoe Mount Brackets
(1) Carry Case

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and our 2nd (smaller) kit is a

45" HALO LIGHTING KIT CONSISTS OF:
(1) 45" Round Halo
(1) Adjustable Shoe Mount Bracket

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You can find more details, and where to buy these kits at Westcott.

We are loving our new business cards by Studio-Z. When it came time to selecting who would re-print our letterpress business cards, it was an easy choice. After seeing the beautiful cards Zida made for Kenny Kim, I knew we would be in good hands.

I can't stress enough how important it is that love your business cards. Bob and I are educators in the photography industry and we travel the world teaching lighting techniques and business strategies. More times than not, we are handed business cards with an apology or a statement of being in the middle of re-branding.

I remember the days that I felt that way. Many, many years ago and I have to stress "many", I designed our first business card and it listed documentary style weddings, elegant parties, private galas, corporate events, editorial, magazine style books, full service retouching and design, portraits and advertising. Yes, that's right, all that was on our card, not to mention our logo, name, title, phone, cell, email, and address. It was a disaster in the making!

What's important to remember when designing your card is to make sure it reflects who you are. You are your brand and you need to brand yourself beautifully because if you don't love the direction of your brand then chances are your potential clients won't love it either. And when I say brand, I mean your entire brand; your website, blog, business cards, marketing materials, social media accounts, etc., should all be consistent. I'm not a brand expert but I can tell you that I love what Bob and I have created and it reflects in everything we do.

Remember not to overload your business card with information. You do need to have your name, email, website and phone number. You wouldn't believe how many people do not have any contact info on their business cards, only their website. You don't want to lose a client because they have to go searching for your info when their time is valuable. I feel that adding a photo to your business card is an option, one that we decided against. We wanted our cards to have a clean, professional look and we feel that our logo clearly states that we are a photography company.

You also want to have a unique card, one that someone will remember and not toss when you walk away. We selected a die cut shape that matched our brand. Our logo and text is letterpress onto Cranes Lettra 600 gram paper. It's beautiful to the touch and piece of art which always elicits a compliment.

Avoid cheap, do-it-yourself, cards. You only get one chance to make a first impression!

Thank you so much Zida for your patience with me. You are a true delight to work with and I'm so happy with our business cards. I'm very proud to share these with the world...!

I hope this helps. Enjoy the weekend everyone!

God bless you and yours,

~ Dawn + Bob

Welcome to the beginning of our Italian adventure. Bob, our kiddos, + I flew to Italy to host a real wedding workshop where we photographed the beautiful wedding of Giulia + Marco, along with 11 of our second shooters. Yes, you absolutely read that right. As many of you know, we host photography workshops around the world and this one was beyond our wildest dreams! With the help of our dear friends, Max + Cris who organized our workshop and introduced us to our bride + groom, we spent 6 glorious nights + 5 fun days photographing a pre-wedding session, sunflower fields, a wedding in a castle, and the rolling hills of Umbria and Tuscany... a dream come true! After countless hours of laughing and sometimes crying, we all said goodbye in tears. The friendships that were made were incredible and will last a lifetime. I can't wait to write more about that soon.

Bob and I are super excited to share with the world a video created by Anton Lorimer of Lorimer Works. I'm not sure how to quite describe this video other than it being a workshop promo video, however, this wasn't filmed at one of our workshops. It was filmed at our Ghost Town photo shootout in Vegas. A big thank you to Crystal Pickering, Bob Young, and Tracey Taylor + Dee Green for the most incredibly kind words in the video. They have all been to one of our workshops in the past and we have remained friends and always will.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

xoxox,

~ Dawn

So, I've been holding out this amazing shoot from our REAL WEDDING + WORKSHOP of the year, where Tiffany + Miles said "I Do" in front of 100+ friends and family at the most beautiful southern chic venue, Cedarwood Weddings in Nashville, Tennessee.

We all arrived the day before the wedding to begin our workshop and take Tiffany + Miles out for an incredibly fun photo shoot that Arline + Doug, T+M's parents set up for us. We were so excited to begin this day........ and you can see why when you look at the photos.......... A TOTAL DREAM!!!

Their wedding day photos can be seen here:
Tiffany + Miles | Wedding on our website
Tiffany + Miles | Wedding on our blog
Tiffany + Miles | Wedding book design
Tiffany + Miles | Wedding on our Facebook Page.

Enjoy and leave us some love! Tiffany + Miles will love it and so we'll we!!!!

God bless you always!

~ Dawn + Bob

This is it........ the REAL WEDDING WORKSHOP of the year, where Tiffany + Miles said "I Do" in front of 100+ friends and family at the most beautiful southern chic venue, Cedarwood Weddings in Nashville, Tennessee. I think this is the largest amount of images from any one event that I've ever posted. I hard the hardest time narrowing down the images. You can see even more on our Facebook page, right HERE.

I don't even know where to begin. This was such an incredible wedding + workshop experience. Tiffany's mom, Arline, is a photographer that attended our Vegas Love Story workshop in 2008, and assisted us with our 2nd wedding + workshop of Sarah + Brent in St. Simons Island in 2009. Arline is now a dear friend of ours and well, it's was her daughter's turn to get married. Tiffany + Miles wanted to share their wedding day and make it a dream wedding for photographers to walk away with a beautiful portfolio southern wedding. So, with that being said, we had 18 photographers sign up to shoot this wedding with Bob and learn from him. With the amazing help from, Angie Garbot, plus Arline's crew of 3 photographers, I would bet I could safely say this was the most photographed wedding in history totaling 24 photographers. You ask "how in the world does 24 photographers not get in each others way?" and "who on earth would want 18 photographers be educated on their wedding day?" well, all I can say is that we were blessed with 18 of thee most amazing attendees/photographers to shoot with and well.... only a couple who comes from a family of photographers, Ace Photography, would be this crazy!!! We all had the BEST time ever at Tiffany + Miles wedding and the images below will show you how incredible a dream southern chic wedding can be!

Thank you, THANK YOU, thank you Arline, Tiffany + Miles for letting us be part of your incredible wedding day. Tiffany, you looked stunning in your Karen Hendrix Couture gown. If you're a bride reading this, you must check out Karen's work. She is an extraordinarily talented, creative, designer who is a beautiful, sweet woman and so gracious about her success. Also, a huge thank you to Karen and Linda, the owners of Historic Cedarwood Weddings who made us feel so welcomed. Their southern hospitality goes beyond any simple expectation. Their exceptional team graciously worked around all the madness and all our photographers beautifully. I dream about the day we can photograph another wedding there!

Tiffany + Miles, from the bottom of our heart......... THANK YOU! You two are so meant to be together. You are crazy in love and it's so fun to see!!!

Much love and blessings for a long, happy, healthy life together!!!

xoxoxo,

~ Dawn & Bob

Ps: This is just the wedding day blog post. I still need to go through all the images from our day before and after the wedding... OMG!

Bob Davis and I are very excited to announce that we'll be speaking at the 2nd Annual Convention International Del Foro De Fotógrafos in Madrid, Spain. We are very honored and can't wait to meet everyone. All Spanish speaking attendees will be wearing headsets for translation. We couldn't be more honored to be presenting with some incredible speakers such as Yervant Zanazanian, Jim Garner, Kimberlee & Marissa from The Boudoir Divas, Sergio Photography, David Beckstead, Rogelio Romero Serrano, Clemente Jiménez Fotografos, Vinicius Matos, & Francisco Guerrero. A HUGE thank you to Rodolfo Apria for the invitation. And we're also happy to see that our fine art book company, GraphiStudio, is one of the sponsors! We are very honored and can't wait to meet everyone!

TWO OF OUR FAVORITE IMAGES FROM THE DAY!

Wow........ time flies when you're having fun! Summer is in full blast and so is wedding season! This post is long overdue and I'm excited to finally share some photos from our last workshop in May. We were invited back to the Schaumburg Regional Airport by John Rippenger, Justin Barchfield, and Sean Kline. What a great group of guys!!! Our workshop 2 years ago was such a success, it was a no brainer to say YES, we'd love to do a workshop at the airport again! And the biggest surprise was from John's friend, Chuck Greenhill, who made a special appearance with his P-51 Mustang airplane. Chuck is so cute and completely stole the show. The photo above is one of my favorite photos of the day!

We had another amazing group of photographers join us at this workshop! Laura Brantley, Brittany Caryl, Stacie Kemp, Lisa Recine, Richard Reyes, Kelly Scarlati, Jessica Shirk, and Gus Zimmerman. I absolutely loved each and everyone of them. They are not only amazing people, they left us feeling really inspired. They were full of great questions! They shared their passion, their heart and souls with us, and we couldn't have asked for a better group to spend 2 incredible days with!

I just don't even know where to begin thanking our Operations Manager, Michele Gonzalez, she is also my niece. She works for us almost full-time and she keeps us on track. As our business flourishes, she manages everything for us so we don't absolutely lose our minds. We love her to pieces and are so thankful to have her in our lives for so many reasons!!!

Michele did a fantastic job organizing this workshop for us and taking care of all behind the scenes stuff. Finding reliable models and makeup artists are no easy task, and she always finds the best! She arranges all the meals that are sponsored by our incredible vendors that make our business so much better, Pictage, Photographer's Edit, Pixel2Canvas. Thank you to our vendors who shouted out about our workshop and supplied us with goodies to give away, FJ Westcott, Camera Bits, Radiopopper, Showit, GraphiStudio, and Kubota Image Tools. We are surrounded by amazing vendors who are vital to our success. Make sure to check them out!

And lastly, a big thank you to everyone who helped out with the over-the-top shots Bob got of John Rippenger's T-34 airplane. Radiopopper loaned us 45 units to make these shots possible, along with all the flashes our attendees & friends contributed, thank you Kenny Kim, Jenn Gaudreau, Jaclyn Simpson, Veronica Hinojosa, and Todd Pinckney. Thank you Angie Garbot for helping us out with our Nikon shooters. And wait... can't forget about Fritz Cripe who took Bob up in his chopper to get these photos! Fritz even took me and Kelly, our model, for a ride! We love you all and are so blessed to call you friends!!!

Thank you everyone for investing in us and trusting us to help you further your passion for your photography business. We are so grateful for to have met you all. Bob and I want you to succeed in this crazy fun photography industry, so please know that we will always be here for you if you have any questions! Just say the word!!!

We love you all...!!!

~ Dawn and Bob

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INCREDIBLE MODELS:
Gigi Schiller
Kenny Morrow
Jenna Martinelli
Kelly Marie Campbell
Adrianna Gnoit

TALENTED HAIR/MAKEUP ARTIST:
Jaycie Kurfess
Rebecca Morrow

Just because your camera can shoot at a crazy high ISO doesn't mean the quality of LIGHT is good.  Bob will go through the evolution of light using small speed lights, direct flash, bounce flash and multiple wireless remote flashes, and show you how to create studio quality light anywhere, anytime, as shown in the helicopter photo above.

Attract clients that appreciate you as an artist. Raise your prices successfully without losing your client referral base. Get your work published.  Be confident at sales meetings. Dawn will be thoroughly covering these topics, their workflow, retouching, and sharing how they grew their small town business into a high-end, low volume signature brand and how YOU can too.

Another successful DAVIS LOVE STORY WORKSHOP that happened in Hinsdale, IL March 23-24, 2011. We rented a beautiful historic studio which once was an old movie theater to host our workshop at. It was crazy cool and I think all of us agreed it would make the most amazing photography studio. In fact, I think there were about 5 of us that said we'd go in on it together! I love to dream!!!

We had the most amazing group of photographers with us again! Joel Alonzo, Tricia Hanson and Hannah Anderson, Chris Blake, Gaynor Eisenberg, Jenny Kenney, Vito Radchenko, Josh Resar. We always say that God knows exactly the right amount of people to bless us with and he brought us some pretty incredible people to spend 2 wonderful days with.

A huge thank to our Operations Manager, Michele Gonzalez. I don't thank her enough. If it weren't for her, I'd be seriously lost. She is so instrumental in our business and she helps us prepare for our workshops. She does so much for us, I just can't thank her enough. We love you Michele!!! She spends hours behind the scenes making it all come together beautifully. She organized the meals which were sponsored by our amazing vendors, Pictage, Photographer's Edit, Pixel2Canvas. Thank you to our vendors who shouted out about our workshop and supplied us with goodies to give away, FJ Wesctott, Camera Bits, Radiopoppers, and Showit. We could not surrounded by more amazing vendors who are vital to our success. Make sure to check them out! And lastly, a big thank you to Angie Garbot and Jenn Gaudreau for all your help during the workshop. You are both incredible people, talented photographers, and dear friends!!!

We are incredibly grateful to have you all at our workshop. For believing and investing in us. Remember, just because the workshop is over, doesn't mean it's over for us. We are here for you and we want you to succeed. Call us if you need anything!

We love you guys!!!

~ Dawn and Bob

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MODELS:
Gigi Schiller
Cole Pellock
Jenna Martinelli
Lauren Ashley
Suzanne Plahm


HAIR/MAKEUP ARTIST:
Jaycie Kurfess