Kyle Hepp

January 24, 2011

First of all, thank you so very much to everybody who entered the survey! There were almost 150 of you, so again, gracias. I really appreciate you all taking the time to do that. The winner was Heather, one of our beautiful past brides! I always love when people I know win the contests, but I 100% don’t rig them, FYI.

I’d like to address a few comments from the survey.

1. The most requests for “What you would like to see more of on the blog,” were Seba’s guest posts, and the me making a fool out myself/dancing videos. I am definitely working on getting Seba to guest blog more, but it’s like pulling teeth. He can’t think of anything to write about. I give him suggestions and he hates them all. Then he writes something and erases it because he doesn’t want anyone to know about his life because he’s a crazy man. And as for the dancing videos, I’m down to do more, but it’s not like I run into music while I’m walking down the street every day. IF that were the case, I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to dancing.

2. For the most part, I got about 25% of you saying that you wanted more photos, and 25% saying you wanted more personal posts in Chile. The rest of you said you liked the balance the way it was or that the photos are great and the personal posts are great, but that you want me to work on not posting 17 wedding posts in a row and then 17 expat life posts in a row. Believe it or not, stick to a blog schedule is actually one of my goals for 2011. During high season I’ll post photos Mon/Wed/Fri and personal posts on Tues/Thurs. Then I’ll do vice versa doing low season. The weekends I may occasionally have to put up photo posts just so I don’t get behind on my clients getting their blog love. It’s hard for me because there aren’t enough days in the week to post when we’re doing so many photo shoots, but I’ve basically stopped posting the family shoots we do — we still photograph families when asked, but since a lot of people would rather not have their kids on the internet, and I’d rather that my blog be more focused on weddings and couples, I’ve stopped putting most of them. But anyways, I hear you loud and clear. I will do my best to post every other with photos/personal/photo/personal as long as schedule permits.

3. The split was about 50/50 as for those of you who love the design and those who hate. Personally, I’m in the 50 that love it, so I don’t see the design changing anytime soon, sorry to the other 50.

4. I’m working on finding a solution to the archives. You are certainly right that there has to be an easier way to look back through them. I’ll get my web maestra, Jennette, right on that!

5. Someone else suggested that I make this blog more of a portfolio and not show every single session we do. But to me, that defeats the point of a blog. Blogs are for current work. Clients and prospective clients are seeing the work that we do every single weekend, so they know exactly what they’re getting when they hire us. They’re not looking at a handselected portfolio of the 50 best images I shot in a an entire year. Any photographer could blow people away if they did that. The photographers that I respect are the ones who churn out great work and show it to their audience regularly. That’s what I’m striving for.

Alright, moving on. Time to answer a few questions.

The big one, the one that everybody wants to know — Is everything you say about your couples true? OR How do you think of such nice things to say about the people photograph?

Yes, and yes. Wait, that second question wasn’t a yes or no.

Yes. Everything I say about them is true. I think of nice things to say about them because I do genuinely like almost everybody we work with. Even if I don’t totally hit it off with them and think I’ll be best friends with the bride and groom for life, I am with them on a day when the vibe around them is nothing but love. If I haven’t been able to get to know the bride and groom well and directly don’t as much of personal loving relationship with them, it’s not hard to look around the room and start figuring out the reasons why 100 or 200 or 300 of their closest friends and family have come from all over the place to celebrate them and why their friends and family love them. When I first meet a couple, I try to figure them out. A lot of times there is one stronger character trait or undercurrent that defines their relationship, so once I find that, I take it and run with it. This isn’t terribly hard for me, but I have a tendency to expect the best out of people and automatically go in looking for the good. Seba has a tendency to hate people, so if he wrote these blog posts, it’d be a different story

This is something that people have commented on ever since I started photographing couples and writing about them — How can you find something new to describe every couple? Are you for real? Carrie even posted a comment in my last post about weddings influencing my perspective on love. I recommend you read it, she’s the late comment down and it’s hilarious funny.

I find it interesting that people are so fascinated by this, and have been since I started doing these kinds of posts.

Look at it this way — if you went in, every single time you met someone, thinking, “I am going to write an amazing story about how cool these people are. Let’s see, what makes them awesome?” and then spent your entire time with them focusing on why they are cool and why people love them and why they love each other, you’d probably be able to write nice blog posts about all the new people in your life too.

Moving on. That was really the only question that was repeated throughout.

Next is: Do you use a lensbaby? I am curious about how you get the focus on some of your photos.

No. I don’t use a lensbaby, though I think they’re pretty cool too. I use a 24mm tilt shift lens to get the effect where the focal planes change, like the picture above, from Anna and Andrew’s destination wedding in Spain.

And last question for today: Will you stay in Chile forever or make the switch to the U.S. at some point?

Hmmm. Good question. For right now, the solution for us is six months there, six months here. That’s basically how we work it right now. At the moment we normally go to the U.S. for 1.5 month increments or so. It’s a lot of travel, which does get tiring, but we both love being able to see our friends and family both here and in the U.S. We just bought an apartment here and the long term plan would be to buy an apartment there too though we’re a long ways from having the money for that. I also don’t know where in the U.S. we would buy a place, simply because my family is spread out (Michigan and Florida) and both parents have plans to move. My friends are all over the place too. There isn’t really one specific place where I have more friends and family than anywhere else. That, plus weddings around the country, is why our next U.S. trip schedule looks like this: San Francisco-Miami-Breckenridge-Grand Rapids-Richmond.

Honestly, I think this is pretty much the ideal expat situation. It’s sometimes complicated, but most of the time awesome.

I’ll save the rest of the questions for another post, because this one is getting long already! If you want to ask me anything, but didn’t leave your question in the survey, leave a comment because I’ll do another Q&A post soon.