Happy 5 Year Anniversary Gronde Photography!

We can't believe it's been 5 years since we started Gronde Photography!  (fun fact:  Chris originally named HIS business Chris Gronde Photography... That ended quickly.  lol)  We started this business during a horrible recession and statistics show that even during good economic times, most start-ups don't make it past 3-5 years, but here we are!  We've had our up years and our down years, but we truly appreciate the support of those of you that have followed our journey; through either being the most amazing return clients or even just those who follow us through social media and this blog.

This past year we were honored once again to receive the coveted Wedding Wire Couples Choice Award,.  This marks us in the top 5% of Washington, DC Wedding Photography based solely on the reviews from our past real couples (your reviews really do matter to us!).  We also, once again, received the Editors Choice Award from Two Bright Lights for providing amazing photography to local and national magazines, blogs, and other publications that seek us out time and time again to feature in their outlets! 

We have also expanded our reach to new brides!  Previously we spent most of our concentration on WeddingWire.com because we felt they had a higher dedication to local vendors, but after several phone calls and conferences and the launch of their new site we are proud to be new partners of TheKnot.com!  When a new bride goes to look for Washington, DC Wedding Photography we will prominently be shown on the first page of their search!  With our new storefront on their site we need YOUR help!  If we have photographed your wedding or even just your engagement photos please take a minute and click the link below and tell TheKnot about your experience with us so new brides can feel better about picking up the phone and setting up a consult with us because they have heard it directly from you!

What we are most excited about is this next year!  We have re-branded with a fresher simpler logo, cleaner website, and a new devotion to providing the best service of any photographer in the area and we owe a lot of it to the reviews and feedback we have received from you!

First off we present to you...our new logo!

Our name is first and foremost.  It is very important to us and needs to be unmistakable.  Then there is our iconic butterfly.  There is a chalkboard butterfly above the desk in our studio that has the quote written on it: "Without Change, there would be no butterflies".  Change can be scary sometimes, but when it happens the outcome can be some of the most beautiful moments of our lives!  These are the moments we want to be there for: Graduating Seniors, Engagements, Marriages, Newborn Babies, 1st birthdays, and every year following!  This new logo shows a side-view of two butterflies that are coming together, but once they are together they appear to be one butterfly.  There is one thing we love more than weddings and that is marriage!... strong, long lasting, inseparable, beautiful marriage.  This icon, to us, is our vision of marriage.  Two people becoming one inseparable union and it's something we want you to feel in your own wedding photos when you see them.  The final thing is our new tag line.  "Imagery for the soul" is something that we want our clients to see and think about when they see their images and think about where to hang them in their home.  We want our images to be more than just a capturing of a moment in time.  We want them to tell your story.  Whether it is the story of your wedding or starting your family, we want your images to be a constant reminder of the feelings and memories from those times in your life and bring peace to your soul every time you walk by them or show them to others.  We are so very excited to show this new logo and image for Gronde Photography to all of our new clients!

The next big thing on our minds this year is our 2015 Dedication to Service!  There are a lot... and we mean a LOT of photographers in the greater DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virginia) and a lot of them are really good photographers and some of them aren't.  Some charge 10k per wedding and some charge under 1k a wedding.  There's your small privately own studios and then there's your "wedding entertainment conglomerates" where you can get your DJ, photographer, caterer, coordinator, dress, cake, favors, flowers, and everything else from one place like some kind of "Wedding Wal-mart".  A lot of these photographers charge about the same or maybe even less than us.  A lot of them take pictures that are just as good as ours; however, there is a lot more to your wedding and the months leading up to your wedding besides the photos and how much they cost and that is where we want to shine brighter than any other photographer in our area!  We want to provide the best possible service that money can buy.  We want to be your favorite vendor from your wedding!  We want you to come back to us when you start a family and have maternity pictures and newborn pictures and so on.  The first thing we did was completely redesign our wedding packages to put more emphasis on providing a complete service to our brides.  One way we have always done that is by providing TWO photographers with EVERY package and every session.  Something we have added to our new packages is that every single package includes an heirloom wedding album.  If there is anything that every bride and groom should leave their wedding with it's an album.  Maybe your first apartment together isn't big enough for huge canvases on your wall, but every couple should have an album that they will one day flip through with their children and talk about that day with them.  We encourage you to read reviews from our past brides on The Knot, Wedding Wire, or our website and see what they are already saying about our dedication to service! 

Something else new we want to announce here is something we are kicking off TODAY!  We're calling it "Client for Life"!  This is something that we are including with the top wedding package of our Gronde Photography Signature Wedding Clients.  We want our brides to come back to us year after year so badly, that we are going to do it for free!  Yes, you read that right... FREE!  After your wedding, every year until we can't physically hold a camera any more you will get one free session to use on anything!  Family photos, newborns, boudoir, whatever you want.  That is how dedicated we are to serving you and making lasting relationships with our clients!  If you are a past bride (or portrait client) and are interested in this.  Please email us today and let's talk about it! 

One more thing... and this is something you are going to want to share so please forward this on to all of your newly engaged friends.  Because this is the 5 year anniversary of Gronde Photography and we want to serve as many newly engaged couples as we can this year and next so we can REALLY test out our new brand:  if you email us and set up a consult with us during the month of April or May we are offering $500 off ANY wedding package (to include our new Gronde Photogrpahy Signature Wedding Package) for our remaining 2015 or 2016 wedding dates!  Can you believe it?!?! 

Thank you all so much for reading and following year after year!  If we had the chance to serve you last year... tell us down below what your favorite memory with us was!  If you're a new client or just a follower:   What is something you are looking forward to or would love to see from us in 2015?  Please, stick around and keep following!  We have so much more to share with you in this next year, including an announcement next month that we are BEYOND excited about, but can't spill the beans just yet!  Thank you all again from the bottom of our heart!

Chris and Brandy

Gronde Photography

www.GrondePhotography.com

ChrisAndBrandy@GrondePhotography.com

Happy Fourth Anniversary to Gronde Photography!

First of all, we wanted to say Thank You all from the bottom of our hearts for even reading this blog post whether you subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter,Google+, Instagram, or any of the other 500 social media sites we seem to be a part of.  (It’s really a full time job just keeping up with all of them)

If you would have asked us 10 years ago (or even 5 years ago) if we thought we could build a photography business that would be this successful, we wouldn't have believed you.  It really has been an amazing four years growing this business to what it is today and we feel like during the next few months and the 2014 wedding season, it will grow more than it has in the past four years combined.  We found some amazing photographers to mentor us into taking what we already have and make it thrive even more and we have learned SO much about the business side of photography.  We've changed so much of what we do and offer already.  We have loved the response we have received via reviews from our recent brides and clients!  We don't want to just offer you amazing photos on your wedding day; we want your entire day to be better because we are there.  For our family clients, we want to provide you with timeless art for your home that fits the style of your family, personality, and story of your lives.

We are so very excited to start our 5th year at Gronde Photography and see where this road takes us.  With Brandy leaving active military service with the US Navy soon, there are multiple options open for us and where we can go or what we do from here.  Brandy may have the opportunity to go back to school and earn another degree, find an awesome day job being the incredible administrative assistant that she is, or possibly be full time with Gronde Photography and operate out of the studio we may set up in our home.  This would let her take family and newborn clients during the week and allow us to include more of those during our busy wedding season.

We are putting a large push this year to ensure our clients have their photos on their walls; however, unlike a large majority of other photographers, we will otherwise be offering in person consultations/ordering sessions to show you the difference in the quality of prints and products we offer from our new vendor this year and show you samples of how great they will look on your wall.  So many clients get their DVD and never take the time to have them printed and hung on their walls.  Even we have fallen into the trap now and again with our OWN family photos!  We feel this is simply because we were not offered prints by the photographer and just never got around to doing it ourselves.  Our new prints are printed on 3mm styrene so that they are more durable and don't bend as easy, they also have a protective UV coating that makes them smudge resistant, fingerprint resistant, fade resistant, and even water resistant! (dare we say child resistant?)  This also, means, for your most important images you can frame without needing UV protected glass or glass at all! (a large portion of the cost of framing)  Our new prints are more durable, last longer, look better, and are more affordable to frame than what you can get by taking your images to CVS or ordering from Shutterfly.  One of the other changes, that will start very soon, is that we will no longer be providing DVD's with our packages.  Instead, we will turn to USB drives.  Technology has gotten to the point where many computers no longer have optical drives in them and that limits where you can view or upload your images and the last thing we want is for your images to stay on the DVD and not be shared with everyone (word of mouth is our #1 marketing tool!).  Even some tablets have USB ports now.  We know this is a great move for us and a great service to provide to you, who have often requested this change!

We've taken a long time to research what USB drives to offer so take comfort in knowing we are only offering the best!  In addition, we will be offering 2 types of files: 1. Print quality - These will be the files that you can use to print IF you decide not to order our fabulous prints.  2. Online quality - These will be watermarked images that are specifically formatted to display on social media but are NOT large enough to print.  What files you receive will depend on what package you purchase, but rest assured all photos will still be up to the standard you have grown accustomed to from Gronde Photography.

Thanks for reading!

Chris & Brandy Gronde

What a Great Year: a brief look at how far we've come in our first year

So Gronde Photography is coming up on its one year anniversary of being an official business.  I'm almost done with my degree in Photography and Brandy has completed her associates and continues on to her bachellors degree in Entreprenural Business Administration with a minor in Marketing.  Am I ready to take on this job full time and quit my IT job?  No, not yet.  Having a day job doesn't make us less photographers like some might think.  What it DOES allow is for us to take risks, try things we wouldn't normally try and be inovative in our photography because our photography isn't what is paying our bills.  We aren't double booking weddings because it's the off season and we need the business.  We do this because we LOVE doing this!  It also allows us to keep our prices low and allow people who can't afford the average $3,000-$5,000 for wedding photos for this area to still have beautiful wedding photos.  We don't have to charge an arm and a leg because all our bills are paid by our day jobs; all of the procedes from our photography business pretty much gets turned around back into the business to buy new and better gear and other things we need to make our service to our custmers that much better.  When you're in school and you are trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, people always ask, "If you had all the money in the world and didn't have to work every again, what would you do?"  The answer is simple... I would be a photographer!  But if I had all the money in the world I would just go around giving great photos to brides who couldn't afford it.  And other pro-bono work for cancer foundations, senior photos for kids whose parents can't afford it, and so many other organizations!  Everybody deserves great photos! 

Lets look at what's going on now.  We do have over twice the shoots booked for this year that we shot last year already.  I can't wait to start shooting weddings again this season.  Courtney is one of our first ones up and we had such a great time with them in their engagement shoot last summer and she is our first bride to book a bridal session/"trash the dress".  Did I mention she's a firefighter, a local hero, and we will hopefully have free reign to the fire house for photos?!  Keep your eyes peeled on our Facebook Page to see those pictures!  The Cherry Blossom Festival is also here in DC and it's such an incredible backdrop for beautiful pictures and we hope in the short time that they're in peak season we'll have some clients who choose to take advantage of it cuz either way I'm gonna be out there shooting.

Also, for school I've been working on a documentary photography project on the DC Metro escalators.  For those of you not from this area, there are 588 escalators on the Metro line leading to and from the stations.  On any given day 15%-20% of those are broken or undergoing maintenance.  Several have had failures causing injury to patrons.  I've been going around and documenting these repairs as best I can without getting arrested by Metro and TSA that now roam the stations.  You can watch my flickr account to keep up with the status of that particular project.  Another project for my Adobe Lightroom class has been a series of portrait sessions I've called, "The Alter Ego".  Two of these photos my professor has encouraged me (who by the way NEVER likes my photos and has been known to tell me my shots are "too comercial" for her taste) to enter them into a jurried gallery show where they have a chance to be hung in the campus art gallery and even win a cash prize.  I'll keep you posted on the status of THAT!  I have a few more weeks left and if anyone would like to help me by modeling for my "alter ego" project please email us or comment below! 

Finally I'd like to show two sets photos. 

They are all of my second favorite model to shoot (Brandy will always be #1) and a dear friend of mine since we were 15, Victoria (Torri) Barth.  The first photos are from the first shoot I did as a professional with the help of my lovely wife Brandy not only modeling but also assisting with wardrobe, styling, and art direction.  The second are from my most recent shoot, one of the "Alter Ego" shoots, of the same model.  Changes in style composition, posing, editing workflow, and lighting are quite apparent and the reactions to this photo from the last are exciting.  I'm so happy all of our clients have enjoyed their pictures thus far, and Brandy and I are both SO excited for the shoots we having coming up and continuing to grow and share and capture all of their special memories on film!

Make sure you subscribe to our blog, fan us on facebook, and follow us on twitter so you won't miss any contests, deals, or news that may come out on our 1 year Anniversary on April 21st!

Chris and Brandy

Gronde Photography

http://www.grondephotography.com/

www.facebook.com/grondephotography

www.twitter.com/grondephoto

Providing Northern VA, DC, and MD with all your portrait needs!  From family photos to Wedding photography.  From Senior photos to newborns and maternity!  We capture your special memories on film!