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Prem and Cheridy
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Dear Family and Friends,
As you may know, we don't send out Christmas cards, but we like to let people know what's been going on with us in the year. This is kind of a photo tour of 2005. If you don't want to read all this, then hit delete now!!
| The first few months of the year provided a great time to continue getting our photography business in order. From tweaking the website to learning proper accounting practices and all the boring stuff that needs to be learned to run a business. Cheridy continued her soccer leagues, Prem was playing wallyball and we both played in a weekend volleyball league through our church. In February we sold our rental property that we had in Sacramento and used some of that money to buy some equipment that we needed for our business. We would love to show you a picture of the property, but we never saw it ourselves! Buying, renting, and then selling a property that you've never seen is definitely an interesting experience. In late March we went to a photography convention in Las Vegas where we learned a TON of new techniques and business models that will significantly impact the way we shoot pictures, edit pictures, advertise our business, etc. etc. After that was over I met up with my friend Ben and we went on a road trip through Death Valley and around the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Many of the roads we wanted to drive were blocked with snow which caused for some long detours and we had a couple cold nights sleeping in the flatbed of Ben's pickup truck in sub-freezing temperatures. However, the sunrises and sunsets were well worth it! |
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| Through the rest of April and May we really worked on implementing some of the lessons learned at the photo convention which were really fun and exciting to try out. We spent some time doing in-studio portrait jobs as we waited for the weather to get warmer. |  |
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June was busy with weddings and we're finally feeling like wedding photographers as opposed to photographers trying to learn how to do weddings. It feels pretty good. |
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In July, we flew out to Montana to celebrate Cheridy's parents 20th anniversary. We stayed with Cheridy's Uncle Mark and his family near Kallispell, Montana. It was a fun week of hanging out, playing basketball, watching movies, white water rafting...etc. |
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After coming home from Montana Cheridy and I jumped right back into weddings and it was really tough trying to get caught up. Going out of town in the middle of wedding season was not the brightest idea but it was nice to get away. We worked pretty much 7 days a week for almost 80-90 hours per week from July through the end of October. |
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August was the height of our wedding season and it also brought on the beginning of shooting high school senior pictures. We tried doing some creative things to try and get away from the standard look of high school senior pics that everyone was used to seeing. This kept us quite busy for a couple months. | |
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November was the end of our wedding season and finally provided us time to start getting caught up and also to relax and take a breather. We also finished developing a promotional DVD that highlights our work. It was a huge project where we had to hire a musician to compose music and then sort through thousands of pictures to turn over to a friend who put the video together. You can see the video by clicking here. |
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In December we went with a group from our church down to Mississippi to help rebuild after the hurricane destruction. We were helping to establish a partnership between our home church of Kensington in Troy, MI with the church down in Hattiesburg, MS which is Mt. Carmel Baptist Church. We went and did some roofing work and a little bit of drywalling and were able to purchase and organize some of the tools that future teams will need to go and do work down there. We spent a day going in to New Orleans and it was very difficult to see the destruction. It was like a giant abondoned city. Driving down the streets of the empty suburbs you could see how many dead people had been found in each house based on the spray paint marking left on the outside by the search and rescue teams. It's so easy to forget about what happened down there because most of us lead lives that were for the most part unaffected so we just get back to our daily grind. Sometimes...it's just easier to forget than trying to deal with it and help out in what is a completely overwhelming task. Then to think about the recent tsunami that was big news for a month and then the big earthquake that killed 100,000 people in india and pakistan that was barely on the news for a week. It's very difficult to even think about all those things. Being down in Mississippi, we worked really hard from sunrise to sunset and after leaving I felt like the work we did wasn't even a drop in the ocean compared to what needs to be done. It was a bit discouraging but we just tried to remember that everything happens one little step at a time. |
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As you can see, our lives this year were totally consumed by our photography business and it was really amazing how much things have progressed and changed in such a short time. In this one short year we have grown in leaps and bounds both personally and professionally. This coming year already has some exciting things planned. We're hoping to go back to South Africa to do another mission trip along with hopefully buying our first real house (which means we have to buy a lawn mower)...living in a condo has been good, but we're ready for a house. Love, |
info@arisingimages.com
586-944-7736