As you might know, I went for a destination wedding assignment to Vancouver, Canada. Kathy and Pomy gave me lots of opportunity to photograph them before the wedding. There were a few gatherings with family and friends, which gave me some great opportunities for informal shots. We also scheduled an engagement session. You might wonder about the purpose of an engagement session. In my experience, this session, is one of the big factors to increase the quality of images on the wedding itself. It is a warming up between couple and photographer. The couple gets used to be continuously photographed and learn to act natural. For me as photographer it allows me also to learn more about the couple. Engagement shots are also a nice addition to the final photo book  etc. Kathy and Pomy suggested to Granville Island for the shoot.

Granville Island is a fantastic location, offering interesting spots and really nice light. Loved the location and working with Kathy and Pomy!

For more information about offer on weddings and other photographic services, please visit: Jurgen’s Photography

Please click on the thumbnails to start the slideshow.

2009 was an interesting year for Jürgen’s Photography. The Web site went through some major changes and brought back to it’s core, what it is all about: Good photography. A good friend gave me valuable insight and advice on how the online presentation of Jürgen’s Photography could be improved.

I started the year, using a flash based Web site design, which I thought, looked great, but didn’t help you, the viewer much. The site took far too long to load and I can’t imagine on how many of you, got bored waiting while waiting for the first image to load, before aborting the load and moving on to another, fast loading site.  After I realized this, I created a hand coded page in simple html, which loaded fast enough, but was too text centered. That’s, when I received the honest response from my friend @mountainkat:

“You’re a photographer, for heaven’s sake! Show your photos!”

Today, I am still wondering, why these words were not all capitalized. That brought me back to the drawing board and it took me a month or two to come up with what I am standing for as photographer. My site found a clarity it didn’t have before. It just took one more evolutionary step to get to the site, you are looking at today. Blog, homepage and archives have the same look and feel. There are still some flash elements, but they are not essential to load the page and understand, who I am as photographer.

The current design of Jürgen’s Photography’s web site has been around now for a couple of months and I still like it. There always some minor tweaks and the need to update galleries with newer images.

2009 is also the year, where I understood much more about social networking, including Twitter and Facebook. Twitter connected me with a community of photography friends across the globe who continue to inspire me. (Please check  @mountainkat @conflagratio @kellyshipp @wahliaodotcom @andrevr @jchernandezjazz @CJulienPhoto @scotbaston @rtd13 @carybranscum).

The Facebook fanpage of Jürgen’s Photography is growing consistently and is yet another source to meet and connect with great people, who share the passion of photography.

The first quarter of 2009 saw the launch of the Cape Town Photography Meetup Group. When I started the group, I looked at it as a great source to learn about what people want to learn about photography. At the end, I learnt so much more about photography and how other people see the world than I would have dreamt of. We will be meeting for our next practical meetup on 9 January. Please visit our Facebook page for more information.

So much about the past. 2010 will bring some more exciting developments. Sign up for Jürgen’s Photography’s Facebook fanpage, as I will introduce some special promotions for members of the fanpage only.

I will be traveling to the Northern hemisphere in the first half of 2010, in particular, Northern America. Contact me, if you want me to photograph your wedding or portrait or headshot while I am on my trip.

Over the next few months, I will also create more videos for the blog and web site. I found a lot of inspiration via the Nikon Festival, for which I created this video.

You will also find more of my personal work with a lot of b/w and landscape during 2010.

Finally, 2010, will see the creation of a workshop in cooperation with another photographer from Cape Town. You don’t want to miss this, if you want to learn more intensely  about photography. Watch this space.

There are a couple of more ideas, I am working on and you will be one of the first to see more about that during the course of this year.

2010 will be exciting. The top image was inspired by a challenge from @scotbaston to photograph the first sunrise of the new decade. Thank you Scot, for coming up with the idea and communicating it within the community of Twitter.

Facebook is one of the most popular platforms on the Internet. I have been very active over the last few months with the Twitter community and a good portion of the members of the Cape Town Photography Meetup Group, are also Tweeple. One of the questions, I had over the last few months was, on how to structure my communication with the members of the meetup group better. We are meeting  twice a month and not only the need for better communication from me to the members, but the communication between everyone becomes more important.

During our last meetup, I asked the question, on how I could send out invitations more efficiently and received the answer to use Facebook. I have been on Facebook for a while and developed a fanpage for Jürgen’s Photography, but had the feeling that I never really gasped the full potential of the network. Something made click for me on Saturday. On the same day, I created the Cape Town Photography Meetup Facebook Group. On Sunday most of the active members of the meetup group became member of the Facebook group and posted the first images.

Then I looked at my current fanpage and decided that it needed a makeover and integrated it closer to the main site of Jürgen’s Photography. You find now far more information about Jürgen’s Photography and I will start to run exclusive special offers for fans of Jürgen’s Photography. Visit the fanpage and become a fan to get the special offers. During the course of this week, I will start my first promotion.

I’ll see you there.