The Gehmans | Photography Blog

According to The Bridal Association of America, the average bride invests $1505 on her wedding gown. Our thoughts are, why put it away after wearing it for just one day? Don’t put that gown away just yet! You’ve heard of “Trash the Dress”, but that’s not really how we roll. We like the idea of “rocking” the dress.  It’s a great chance to get away to some new locations, or just get a couple more shots than you were able to get on the wedding day.

A couple weeks ago, we took three couples to the Indiana Sand Dunes to Rock the Dress. One of these couples, Ryan and Krystal, had a January wedding with snow on the ground, so this was an entirely new look for them. Another couple, Nate and Janene, had a crazy thunderstorm/tornado come up on their wedding day and it chased us inside and the church lost power for a bit…. this kind of session allows them to get those shots we weren’t able to get on the wedding day.  And the third couple, Nevin and Natalie, made this the last stop of their honeymoon! Congratulations again, you two. :)

A couple of weeks ago, Jodi and I loaded up the kids in the minivan and headed East out of Iowa to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, my old stompin’ grounds. It was there that we met up with Gianna and Anthony for their engagement session, and we decided on the Lancaster Amtrak train station.

It was so much fun working with these two… the scenes came easy for them, and it’ll be fun to photograph their wedding in September!

A couple weeks ago, Jodi, Nastaran, and I drove to a small suburb of Chicago to photograph Brandon and Bernadette’s wedding. Bernadette’s family is Polish, so there were some fun traditions to experience that normal American weddings don’t include… for example, a lively three piece band in the house while Bernadette was getting ready!  That’s what you’ll hear at the beginning of Brandon and Bernadette’s Motion Picture at the bottom of this post. I’m a music guy and I’m always intrigued to watch other musicians, regardless of the style they play, so I enjoyed watching them even though I don’t have a polka playlist set up on my iPod. :)

“Brandon and Bernadette… we’ve enjoyed getting to know you two better over the past year. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we flew to Arizona for your engagement pictures, but we’ve really grown to appreciate you two. We wish you the most amazing years marriage can bring you, and hope to see you back in Iowa again soon!”

Adam and Katie Jo are the coolest.

Seriously.
We’re not the only ones who think that, either.

We have a great friend who is the Event Director at The Celebration Farm where Adam and Katie Jo’s reception will be held. We were having dinner with her, and told her we were going to photograph a couple that had booked with her. Her face lit up remembering the names, and said “Ah yes, they are the sweetest people!”  Then, as we spent the afternoon with Adam and Katie Jo, we discovered that we have a mutual friend back here in Iowa. So, I dialed him up on Facebook and told him we met his friends in Chicago, to which he replied “Adam and Katie Jo are two of my favorite people ever.” So, see? There you have it.

Adam and Katie Jo are the coolest.

We drove to Chicago to Katie Jo’s apartment and Adam took the wheel from there, which was a good thing, seeing that neither Jodi or I could a) execute an immediate u-turn as quickly as he could, or b) navigate our way through people and traffic, knowing where to turn and where to park. We ended up downtown a few places, and onto Navy Pier which was surprisingly quite “people-free”. The day was just a tad bit chilly, and apparently everyone else stayed home. :)

We had a crazy past couple of days, and are finally finding ourselves back at home after traveling quite a bit. Our week started by flying to Arizona for some photographic education from some excellent speakers and artists in our industry, and we came home ready to raise the bar even more in our work.  I was able to study with some excellent cinematographers, so our Motion productions will be getting even better. Jodi studied with some of the industry’s top photographers/business people, and we are expanding our product line to include more items that are customizable to your liking.

That’s all well and good, but there is one special person that you may have seen with us at weddings this summer, and a couple of sessions in between. Her name is Nastaran, and she has been interning with us, looking to gain as much insight into photography as she can.  She is the fastest learner we’ve ever worked with, and has gone from a beginner to creating some amazing images in a very short time.

We took her along to Arizona, and one morning Jodi decided that Nasy should be on the other side of the camera!  So, we borrowed a wedding dress from the workshop models, and she became our model for the morning.

Meet Nasy…..

Then here’s a few other scenes from around Tuscan, Arizona.

This summer was a special one for my family! Due to a spot this summer where we had back to back weekends without a wedding, we used that as an opportunity to travel to visit grandma and grandpa and the cousins! Jackson, our oldest, learned to swim, we went for motorcycle rides, visited Hershey Chocolate Factory, went to great-grandma’s farm, and much more. It was a wonderful blessing, and a summer we’ll cherish for a long time.

Here are the cousins!

When Jodi and I started dating, I was living in Manheim PA and she was in Kalona IA. After a few months, she decided to move to Manheim for a few months to get to know my family better, where she lived with my recently widowed grandmother and got a job cleaning house for the Gehmans. Greg and Karolyn were wonderful to work for and we found them to be incredibly generous in many ways. Over the years, whenever we go back to Manheim to visit my family, we’ve tried to stop by the Gehmans and check in on how everyone’s doing and find out what the kids are up to now that they are 10 years older.

Between awesome one-liners, the general noise of getting 13 people and one dog to all look the same direction at the same time, and an old horse that was bothered by all the hoopla (to the point of charging and trying to kick Jodi), it made for a fun and hilarious photo shoot!

We are huge fans of Adam and Nicole, and you’ll see them once or twice more on the blog in the next month or so. But we were waiting until after their wedding to post the Motion Picture from their engagement session, because I didn’t have it finished yet they wanted it shown at their reception, and we didn’t want to ruin the surprise. Well, Adam and Nicole were married last weekend, so here’s their video shot back in March when we went to California for their engagement session, and then drove home to Iowa with them. You can read more about that trip here: Cross Country Photo Shoot. But for now, here’s the Motion Picture of their Engagement Session, and we hope you like it!

Have a great weekend!

Lynn and Brandi’s wedding was a delight to photograph! From the moments of getting ready, to the tears in Lynn’s eyes as he saw his bride for the first time, to the celebration at the end of the evening, the day was as beautiful as they could have hoped for. We loved working with Lynn and Brandi, and found them to be the most kind and generous people you’d ever want to meet.

“Lynn, we can all see it in your eyes (and hear it in your prayers) that you would do anything for Brandi. She is your queen, and you are proud to have her. Brandi, you have an amazing wedding gown, but you didn’t worship it. You knew that it might get a little dirty and wrinkly but that there were more important things. We love seeing a bride able to enjoy the wedding day, and you were so relaxed and chill about the whole thing. Way cool!

“But the highlight of our weekend was that we came away from your wedding weekend feeling like we’d just made two new friends. You both truly exhibited that renowned ‘Southern hospitality’, and we thank you for that. God bless you both as you launch into this new life journey… we wish you all the best!”
R&J

(Again, many thanks to our good pals at Moore Photography for their help at this wedding!)

Also, here is a shortened version of the Motion Picture from their wedding. Motion is an add-on we’ve been featuring since the Spring of 2009, and we LOVE it! We capture HD video during your wedding day, as well as photography, and mesh it all together, add some sweet music and you’ve got a wedding video you’ll want to watch again and again. There are just some moments of the wedding day that photographs alone don’t quite capture. Photographs create and tell stories, but Motion Picture captures entire moments, creates feeling, and reveals emotion.
Take a look!

“Something Tropical.”

“But not with a cactus.”

That was what Brandon said when we asked him to describe what he imagined the engagement session to be! They live in Arizona, so tropical wasn’t going to be a problem. We had never photographed in Arizona, and the weather back home was terrible, so this was win, win for all of us! We flew in to Phoenix, and met up with Brandon and Bernadette at their house in Scottsdale. To get a tropical look, we headed to a local resort for some poolside scenes. Add in some soft evening light, bright colors, and some fruity drinks… it was full on! After the evening light started to fade, we went downtown for a more urban look. We loved Brandon and Bernadette’s clean, modern style and can’t wait to photograph their wedding next spring in Chicago… it’s going to be amazing!