We are aware of our price point. We are aware of our quality of work. We are aware of those other photographers out there in our line of business. We are aware of the competition. We know that not everyone can afford us. However, we also know that there are a number of people out there who just don’t know how to think about the ‘importantance’ of things.

We recently were sent a blog post by email this week . . . that discusses a woman who booked a $500 session with a photographer. She at the last minute cancelled because she knew she couldn’t ‘afford’ the session at the time. — I’m not going to explain the entire post because we want you to read it first hand — But, after a few life altering things happen to her and her family, she calculated $200+ of non-necessity items that she could have ‘lived without’ and put towards a session all within a matter of two weeks (correct me if I’m wrong on some calculations).

Please go and read this post. It just amazes me how things can change. And how often we don’t think about how to ‘preserve’ the time we have with our loved ones.

It’s ‘BEST CAPTION’ time again. These are some I’ve gone through that cry out for a TITLE.

To win:

1. Lend a caption that best fits the image and

2. The one with the most votes wins their favorite 5×7!

*Contest ends by 5/31 at midnight. Invite all your friends and family and Best of Luck!

We are now accepting emails describing to us the reasons you should receive free wedding photography. Emails shall include the following:

• Name of the Couple entering

• at least 1000 words describing you two as a couple

• 3 or more photographs that show who you are as a couple

To be considered for our contest, each applicant must blog, tweet and facebook about Tomme Hilton Gallery! When you email your entry please send us your links to prove you have done all three!

DEADLINE: August 31, 2010

*Your wedding should be scheduled in the off season of November thru February.

*Valued at 4500.

*Please email all entries to gallery.tommehilton@gmail.com

Thank you for applying! Best of luck to each of you. We look forward to our next FREE wedding couple!

RENATE & BRAIN

Married on June 5th! (wow, it’s been that long… eeekk!)

If you don’t remember Renate and Brian, check out their engagement photos… they were awesome! Despite the rain… We made it happen! AND, not to forget her bridals!! Sigh. Love, love, love them! She is the reason I can’t stand bridals! They turn out so great… yet ‘you’ cannot post them until AFTER the wedding! Ugh… the beauty of secrets right?

Renate and Brian’s wedding day started out with no parking at the hotel, wind that made your hair a whirlwind and humidity that that made you question if it was sweat or not. Ahem, It was a wonderful day to get married… ON THE BEACH! But let me just say… Renate and Brain… YOU ROCKED IT!  They were amazing. And let me drag them EVERYWHERE to get that extra shot… or as I call it, the ‘One more’ shot!

Take a look at their wedding photos. Let us know what you think!

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Well, As all weddings tend to never really go as quite as planned, enter Candice and Erich who were to originally nab their nuptials in April. But, Erich, who was working in Cuba got detained and Castro declared… ‘Wedding or not! You’re staying!’ Dictatorship. Get it? ((fizzle!?))

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Meet ROBYN & MATT:

Matt had his bachelor party the night before our engagement shoot.. for you future couples…. this is not the best time to decide to walk around Charleston in the elements if you aren’t quite feeling up to par.  But he cheesed it up for me quite well… and nearly got attacked by a pigeon but was all worth the while.

OH, the things you do for love!

Now, take a look at this couple-in-love before they TIED THE KNOT!

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Everyone who is reading this has at least one thing in common: The love of wedding porn. If you aren’t familiar with the term, let me enlighten you. Wedding porn is the visual embodiment of all things nuptial related. It often results in squees, jitters, listmaking, and sighs of brides to be, groans, silences, and nausea from grooms to be, and fond memories from married women. For the occasional groom: Flashbacks and rolled eyes.

Yes. All of us here love the wedding, whether it is ours or someone else’s. We come here to look at the pictures, take inspiration, lavish in the beauty, and then, just once (or maybe twice), applaud ourselves.

The other thing we have in common is love of The Tomme. For most of us, Tomme has entered into our life, or the life of our loved ones, and captured beautiful images on our wedding day. She’s managed to stop time and give you images of that day that went by in such a haze that when you paused to listen to the voicemails or watch the video, you don’t even remember half of the things that were said.

And so, I present to you (in the best of my bride frazzled memory), a day in a wedding with Tomme:

Firstly, the most important thing about anything ever is time. I’m a bit neurotic about time, so I made sure that we had (in our ideal nothing ran late schedule) 3 hours before the ceremony for pictures and one between ceremony and reception for pictures. That’s four total hours just for pictures. Cuh-razy am I. And you know what? I wanted more. But okay. Here’s a snapshot of your day with Tomme if you’re crazy like me.

7:00 am: My bridesmaids and I rolled out of bed, kissed our menfolk and were off to the hair dresser. We had a hair cut appointment crisis the day before, so we had one bridesmaid who had to get her hair cut that morning. Luckily, the only one who was planning to get styled was I. We arranged for our make up friend (awesome wedding present) to meet us at the salon to do makeup there.

9:25 (ouch, the plan was to leave at 9:10): We arrive at our ceremony reception site and guess who is there and waiting! My already dressed man and Tomme and Erica! I was so relieved to see Tomme there in her very own car. It has been in the shop the entire week before and she had only gotten it back on Friday. She had been ready to rent a car to come, but that expense on top of a transmission! Yikes! Hugs and kisses were delivered all around and Tomme went straight to my shoes. I was preoccupied for a bit getting things organized (our wedding was completely planned and set up by myself and our family and friends, no vendors etc for that) while Tomme and Erica had fun with kayaks, shoes, buckets, bicycles, ladders, my dress, flowers, leaves, and all kinds of creativity. I kept coming back to see what they were doing because it just looked so neat! Greg (the husband, I guess I should mention his name!) and I shoot ourselves, but I know I’m definitely not on that level of creativity. I think I heard Tomme say “Purple shoes!” at least three or four times.

*From here on the time is an estimate because I took my watch away from myself.*

10:00: Time to get dressed! Tomme, I, and my mother went into the downstairs apartment where we were holed up to get dressed. This consisted of open windows and Tomme teetering precariously in a chair because the light was poor, and pulling my dress up very, very slowly.  After this, we ventured outside for my portraits. Erica went to take care of a very patient Greg.

I have to admit that before the day got there, I was very anxious about locations to do our photos. I didn’t think there would be a lot of opportunity for photos at our actual location so I was obsessing over other locations we could travel to. My stress was unneeded. Tomme apparently had more than enough to fuel her creativity. I was able to go on auto pilot, just be happy that I was there, and forget about the time for bit! Tomme directed and I followed as clumsily as I could, and from the images I’ve seen, I look like a super model! I didn’t feel the least bit self conscious, was totally at ease, and just had fun being me, being dressed up, and knowing I was getting married. I can’t even remember if we really talked. I think we did while shooting, but then there’s that fuzzy bride memory.

Finally around 10:40 or so, we decided to head downtown to the Sheraton Hotel on the roof of which Greg and I shared our first flirty moments with each other. Tomme even makes walking down the street a photo shoot! Not an opportunity slips past her or Erica. Tomme was walking in the front occasionally jogging forward and turning around to snap pictures, and Erica was behind doing the same. I definitely felt like a movie star with an entourage posing in front of buildings, crossing the street, kissing, and hugging. Once inside the Sheraton, Greg, Tomme, and I shared private elevator ride to the top floor *wink*. Here we discovered Greg was not a fan of my sticky lip gloss!

**side ramble about the amazing-ness of Tomme**

All lip gloss aside; I do have to say that in both shoots I’ve done with Tomme thus far, Greg is her crowning achievement in my eyes. As much as I look at the pictures and say “Man, she made me look HAWT!,” the primary thing that sticks out in my mind is just how comfortable she makes Greg in front of the camera. Before our engagement shoot, I was so worried, because he has always been a behind the camera person, and let’s face it: Men don’t generally like having their picture taken. Greg is a photographer, his dad is a photographer, his uncle was a photographer, etc. Comfort being the subject isn’t exactly in his DNA. However, Tomme gets to talking with him fabulously and he just loosens and flows to the point that he even helps my awkward self move to where I need to be!

**return to timeline**

Once we were met by the rest of the group, we sadly realized that the roof of the Sheraton had been changed substantially, but we still made it work. Tomme once again was a fearless leader, moving things about the bar that the roof had become and directing us where she wanted. Hope the wait staff upstairs didn’t mind us relocating everything. I’m pretty sure none of us put it back.

Even waiting on the elevator shots were being taken. Even going back down the elevator more shots were taken. One I especially love is of the two of us coming out of the elevator holding the doors and kissing. So much time utilization. If I did that at work, I’d be so productive. Instead, I’m writing this! Oops.

12:25pm: Then of course, we return back to our ceremony and reception site predictably a bit behind time. At this point, my response is “What the hell? It’s a wedding!” The ceremony was supposed to start at 12:30! At this point, I honestly lost track of Tomme until after the ceremony, for obvious reasons. One surprise however, was Erica up in the balcony when we were getting ready to walk down the aisle! I saw my sister waving like an idiot up at the balcony of the house and I, in big sister fashion, look at her as if she is an idiot. Lo and behold, Erica is upstairs taking pictures! Every angle covered.

During the ceremony, I had absolutely no awareness of photographers anywhere. The only thing I was aware of was my shaking knees, Greg making a silly face, my telling him not to make me laugh at the point in my vows where I was promising to make him laugh, and ending up laughing instead of crying. If you haven’t gotten there yet, I hope your ceremony is just like that. It was awesome.

After the ceremony, the herding of cats commenced. Greg’s family was fabulous. They were where they needed to be when they needed to be. My family however, wandered off immediately if their picture wasn’t being taken at that moment exactly. (To any of my family potentially reading this, I love you but it’s true and you know it!) Tomme’s skill with Greg apparent does work on other beings. She was able to make my parents hug (Squee) and look cute and lovey! I think we got some nice family portraits, and I have a pretty awesome picture of me almost licking my sister’s face that I’m  pretty excited about. Who would have thought? Family pictures made fun!

What I loved though, is that after this, after stealing our rings for ring shots, and the eating and everything, Tomme took advantage of every spare moment to snap a few more pictures, steal us away for a few more moments, and in reality it gave us a nice bit of alone time away from all the chattering family. Alone time with Tomme is definitely worth it. She gave us a chance to just talk, be silly with each other, be silly with her, and have fun. I think Greg’s mom knew where to find us whenever we weren’t readily available by following the sound of shutter clicks.

Tomme initially entered into my life as a potential wedding vendor who I begged and pleaded with to shoot my wedding, knowing I couldn’t afford her. I was just that in love with her work. I eventually managed to get money wrangled in, and we managed to work up a deal. With all of her editing (and trust me guys, she puts a lot of work into her editing), she’s on her computer a lot, we became chat buddies and began talking and texting regularly. My car is a local only vehicle (barely that anymore) and we live in Columbia, so our first face to face meeting was at our engagement session in Charleston. I’m really glad to be able to say, that not only have I found someone I can continue to have chronicle big moments in mine and my family’s life (I’m so going to be doing maternity pics one day down the line), but also a really good girlfriend and confidant.

The moral of the story from this Bride is this: Love your photographer, be willing to do that crazy stuff she comes up with, give her the time she needs and your pictures will show the results, and practice smiling for hours on end a few days before the wedding, otherwise your face will hurt.

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What a great blog! Thank you Natalie and Greg for taking the time to write about your experience! We enjoyed sharing your day with you! It was a great trip to Columbia! Hopefully out next trip will be to TRASH THAT DRESS! *wink*