Rowell Photography | Toronto, Muskoka, Barrie, GTA, Ontario Wedding Photographers

Wedding Dates

Erika Hanchar — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:57:04 +0000

Every year there is always a few dates that everyone wants to get married on. They are the dates that book up the fastest and then we continue to get inquiries for for month and months afterward.

This years popular dates have been June 19th and August 21st. Actually the entire month of August is crazy for us.

But we still have some dates leading up to August that are available, so if you are getting married or know someone who is and is still searching for their photographers please contact us!
We can’t wait to hear from you!

And since no post is complete with out images, here are a few images that I didn’t post the first time around, but absolutely love.

Steve & Charlotte’s wedding at Toronto Botanical Gardens July 2009. Check out their wedding featured on Weddingbells Blog!
Enjoy!

Awaken

Erika Hanchar — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:09:38 +0000

Some of our very good photogra-friends Dave & Charlotte are hosting an awesome workshop on March 20th & 21st 2010 for photographers to open their minds.

Check out their line up, they even have a hypnotist!

So come join us and a bunch of super cool photographers for an awesome weekend. Get your tickets now and don’t forget to mention Rowell Photography when you sign up!

Photo of the Day #4 – Studio shooting

Erika Hanchar — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:57:24 +0000

I never realized how much I missed working in a studio until we opened our new home based studio. I love controlling light. Knowing how to use a studio is a huge benefit to photographers, there are so many new photographers out there only using available natural light. There is a whole other world of photography out there if you expand your knowledge of lighting. Ryan is a amazing at studio lighting, he should be teaching lighting classes to photographers.

Here is a pic of 2 of our most photographed clients, Brittany & Harley. You may recognize them as their faces have been on this blog before. They are both growing up so fast. I don’t even recognize Brittany anymore.

More images from their modeling studio shoot to come soon.

Erika & Ryan

Honeymoon Escape – Tara & Ryan – Versailles, FR.

Erika Hanchar — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:33:10 +0000

Tara & Ryan’s Honeymoon photo shoot lasted 2 days the 2nd day was at Versailles palace and Trianon Palace Hotel. This trip was my second time to Versailles Palace, and I was still overwhelmed. Its hard not to be, the entire palace is filed with framed paintings that could cover my house! I always have a hard time imagining people living there, its no wonder Petit Trianon was built as a getaway for Marie Antoinette. Having the chance to shoot at Versailles and around the gardens is very surreal. I am a huge French Revolution buff and I am full of useless facts about Marie Antoinette, so getting the chance to see everything on context was an amazing experience.

This is our very last post on the blog of Tara and Ryan for a while, they have had a very nice stay here, but its finally time for me to start putting together their albums (they have ordered one from each country we visited). yesterday Tara and Ryan left for Dubai, to move into their new home. Congratulations!!! we can’t wait to see photos of your new place. Stay in touch. (I know you will)

Erika & Ryan

Ryan, Tara and I in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles Palace.

A goofy shot of Ryan and I shooting Tara & Ryan

Ryan took this shot of the reflections of chandeliers in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom, I took the same shot when I was there 7 months earlier.

The ceiling fresco in the Bastille Hall, and an ornate doorknob with Louis The Sun King’s face on it.

Your love stories in our books

Erika Hanchar — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:00:38 +0000

Its been a while since I posted some pics of our albums. Ryan and I shot some of our newest albums back in September. Our amazing album company offers custom leather covers that can come in all colors.
We are offering a new signature line of covers this year that include a rainbow of colors in leather or suede!!

Check out these images of our albums. Most of them are printed on metallic paper, which gives the prints that extra pop! Its a personal favorite of ours.
Our favorite album choice is 10×10 (square shape) 32 thick pages, and either the red or the light blue, that’s the one below.

Us at Work

Erika Hanchar — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:00:16 +0000

Wow! it’s 2010!!! when did this happen? I guess almost a month and a half ago. Either way wow!

Last year was a great year, we shot some amazing weddings, visited some really great places and met some fabulous people. Its good to look back on everything you’ve done over the course of a year, its great to see how far we have come. Whenever we are out shooting we always try to shoot one another, to document us working, and since we are lazy when it comes to taking our own photos (I have been bugging Ryan for 2 weeks almost every day to dress up nice and do a shoot in our new studio) these images from 2009 will have to do.

Enjoy our 2009 re-cap!

E & R

My favorite pics of Ryan from 2009!

Paris de nuit et de jour – Tara & Ryan – Honeymoon Session

Erika Hanchar — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:00:06 +0000

If you ever go to Paris and have the chance to get driven around in a taxi in the middle of the night, stopping at all the sites as they are lit up, you MUST do it! Tara and Ryan wanted their honeymoon photo shoot to be photographed when there were as little tourists roaming the streets as possible. The only time to really do that is around 1am, when all the tourists are in bed waiting to get up early and wait in line at the Louvre. In Paris we did 2 little sessions one in the daytime with people all over the city and one in the somewhat quiet of the night.

Surprisingly the taxi was not that expensive, it worked out to being a lot cheaper than a hotel car! Completely worth staying up late for.

Check out some of our favorite images we took along Champs Elysees, the Louvre, Arc du Triomphe, and Montmartre.

Erika & Ryan

These images below were taken in a small garden beside Place des Abbesses, there is a tile wall dedicated to the words “I Love You” in every language.

The steps to Sacre Coeur, Montmartre.

The steps at Sacre Coeur Basillica are always bustling with people and street performers. It is my favorite unobstructed view of Paris.

My favorite shot of the trip!

The City of Love – Paris, Fr.

Erika Hanchar — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:31:28 +0000

Happy Valentines Day everyone!

We hope you all have a super romantic day with the one you love. In honor of this occasion we have compiled a few images of Paris, France from our last trip abroad. Paris is known as the most romantic city in the world! But since we all can’t be there today let’s day dream about cafes, beautiful buildings, and the city of lights all lit up at night. Picture yourself in our travel images below.

Have a great day, filled with love, laughter and thoughtfulness.

E & R

PIE Magazine – Real People and Style

Erika Hanchar — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:00:19 +0000

That title above is the name of our favorite local project. If you ask us why we love to live in Barrie, our answer is always because of projects like this. Ryan and I along with a huge team of photographers, writers, designers, makeup up and hair stylists, our editor Sandra Roberts along with an amazing arts community make up PIE Magazine.

Check out the images below, these are from the latest issue out at Chapters now!
If you are a business and you are looking for an awesome place to advertise, PIE Magazine is a high quality, widely distributed, and well respected choice. The best part about advertising is that PIE offers you the chance to have your ad photographed and designed by professional photographers and graphic artists.

So you could get Rowell Photography photographing your ad!!

Check out the PIE Magazine website, and stay tuned for issue 3 coming soon.

Erika & Ryan

(Left) Cover of Pie Magazine issue 2 (Right) Fashion images and article by us!

Sinton full page ad by us!

Scenes of a Celebration – Tara & Ryan – Hluboka Castle & Prague

Erika Hanchar — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:28:40 +0000

What to say about Tara and Ryan, I have been thinking about this all week, mainly because I want to say something really good because I know they will read it. But I have been having issues thinking of what to say. Usually I can think up an awesome blog post in minutes about people I have only known for a day. But Tara and Ryan we have known for 3 years now. Its not too often that we will even book a wedding that far in advance. I think the more you know someone the harder it is to describe them. Let’s just say that I have pretty much spoken to Tara almost everyday for the last 6 months! and before that it was at least once a week. No one reads our blog more, or comments more than Tara. If you type Tara and Ryan into an email search on our computer it will probably blow up from over load. That’s how many emails we send back and forth.

Here’s the thing, sometimes you just click with people, sometimes certain people just understand your humor, they appreciate your work ethic and they value your time. That’s Tara and Ryan, they are awesome clients. So after 3 years of being email and facebook friends their amazing wedding adventure began and we finally had the opportunity to hang out with them and really get to know them. Ryan (my Ryan) and I were off to London, England. That was the first stop on the trip, we planned to capture Ryan and Tara hanging out with their friends, sight seeing and then their engagement session. Then we would head to Prague for a few days for the wedding, and then to Paris for a week for their Sweet Escape Honeymoon photo shoot.

Traveling can be really stressful, this trip at times tested our patience as we took 4 planes, 2 trains, got stuck at the airport for 8 looking for our lost baggage with them, got stuck on a plan on the tarmac for 4 hours, took a bunch of cabs and the underground and the metro a billion times. But traveling with awesome people makes all the hassles, stresses, line ups, long flights and train ride bearable. Traveling for 3 weeks with Tara and Ryan was a blast! I don’t know if we could have done a trip like this with anyone else.We are really lucky to have clients that made the journey so much fun! but we are even more lucky to have gained two awesome friends to travel with. We can’t wait until our next adventure together.

Ryan and Tara are moving this month to Dubai! I really want Tara to write a blog about her new life there, and if she does (hint, hint) I promise to read it everyday and comment on every post.

So here are a bunch of images from Tara and Ryan’s wedding at Hluboka Castle, in South Bohemia, Czech Republic.

We hope you love them as much as we do. There are more to come from Paris!!! so stay tuned.

Erika & Ryan

p.s- I wanted to mention one last thing, Tara and Ryan hired a wedding planning company called White Agency in Prague to coordinate their wedding. Natalie Dlouha did a spectacular job!! We have had the chance to get to know her even better by email over the past few weeks. Check out her blog here. If you are planning to get married in Czech Republic (which we highly recommend) you must call Natalie. She is a pleasure to work with, speaks a bunch of languages (her English is awesome!) and I cannot recall at any point in the day where there was any stress, I think this was the first stress free wedding we have ever been too, and I am sure that we can thank Natalie for that. Plus we traveled 3 hours south of Prague for the ceremony, and then back again for the reception. Amazing job! We can’t wait to work with you again soon.

Wedding Trade Show Booth Design

Ryan Rowell — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:23:11 +0000

Each year I start to notice the stats pickup on one of our older posts about our trade show booth and it prompts me to think back about how we pulled off the trade-show booth design. It was honestly very easy, and was all done for under $350 excluding furniture and decor. We wanted to make sure that it could fit inside a longer van, and was easy to put up and take down. Hopefully you can learn from what mistakes I made and figure out easier ways of doing some of the things I did.

The Floor

The question comes up a lot in email and conversation on how or what I had used for the floor of the booth, and where did I get it. At the time I wanted something that was small and simple to transport, not to mention I wanted something as cheap as possible. Laminate flooring or floating flooring is exactly that cheap. Knowing that I needed enough for a 10′x10′ booth, and that worked out to 100 square feet (gotta love my math skills haha) all I had to do was find the cheapest per square foot I could, and hopefully the nicest colour too. I don’t remember what the price was exactly but would guess it was about $1.30/sq. foot.

The key to the flooring was laying it out ahead of time. So I taped off a 10′x10′ section of the floor in a room and then started to assemble it and cut the excess, until it was all finished. Once I had the taped square all filled with flooring I started to disassemble it piece by piece and label each wood plank with a number until it was all packed up. The key to this was marking one corner as the back left or where you wanted to start and then marking each piece of flooring with successive numbers to make putting it back together easier.

When the booth was being set up we used an under matting for the floating floor. You have to do this or when you walk on the floor it will crackle when dirt gets under it. Because we were in a warehouse (convention center) for the show it was nice to not have to stand directly on the concrete all day. It was also nice not to have snap crackle and pop there with us too when talking to each passer by.

Making sure that there were no trip hazards we also purchased flooring edges to go around the open ends of the floor that were exposed to traffic. These were applied with duct tape to the bottom of the finished floor by putting the tape half under the floor and the other half under the edging. You can see in the video where we seem to float along the edges of the flooring for no reason, it was actually making the tape stick. Here is the link to the video.

The Walls

The walls were made from 2″x2″ pine, and 1/4″ MDF boards. I had the MDF cut into the desired sizes of 2′x8′, giving us 5 sections of 2′x8′ and one more section left over that was a little taller but still 8′ long to make the wall behind the sofa. Each of the 2′x8′ sections were laid out with the pine on the back to create a frame along the inside edge of the panel. I also made sure that the edges were flush against the pine and MDF so that when they were assembled they would not show a gap between them. I had to pre-drill each of the MDF boards to secure them to the pine and countersink the holes too make the screws disappear when I put some wood puddy in the holes. My father also suggested we use liquid nails between the pine and MDF to add more stability. Painting was done after the boards were all assembled and the holes were filled in. I skimped on the paint so I didn’t have to buy more than what was needed and only pained the visible parts of the walls, where the rest was blank to be covered over by chair rail.

I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough stability for the wall and that it would fall over, but I didn’t worry for too long, I have worked on TV/Movie sets before and have seen dozens of walls built and changed and built again and all of them with just simple supports. So I decided to create a triangular support for the back of my wall, and to prevent it from falling forward or backward I would use some sand bags on the support (I actually used bags of water softener salt because they were cheap and could be used again).

The original plan for putting the wall panels together was to use bolts and washers inside of pre-drilled holes in the pine. But because I had plenty of wood clamps I decided to use them. As a backup to the wood clamps I simply used 3 1/2″ wood screws to make sure the boards didn’t shift when picking it up and putting it in place.

The Decor

To show off one of the features of our albums we decided to put one in a large punch bowl with our fish in it too. Our albums are waterproof and we couldn’t think of a better way to display them, then to have it in water. It was a hit, and we received many strange looks and lots of comments on it.

The sofa we chose to use was one with a pull down middle that can be used as a table, and it served our albums well when couples would come to sit and look at our work. It also was helpful to have a place to sit for all those displaced grooms-to-be with bags cutting off their circulation. It was also our hook because if he seemed interested then so would the bride-to-be when she finally found out where he was.

We decided last minute to buy some vinyl stickers to spice up the walls and to give some much needed colour to our display. I actually just thought they would look good and decided to buy them whether we would use them or not.

All in all the booth was a piece of cake, thinking back on it now we could have done a few things differently, but the method to which we built our very first trade show booth worked for us. It took us just over 3 hours to assemble once we were at the trade show. It would have taken us a lot less time had done a practice run at home and had the chance to iron out some of the wrinkles, such as: cutting the floor trim and crown molding ahead of time, and having the velcro on the crown molding we used at the top of the walls before we left. Even just pre-drilling the holes for the chair rail would have saved so much time. We also didn’t assemble any of the furniture until we got there so that was more time that could have been saved. You can also see in the video that I spent too much time deciding on how I was going to mount the photos on the back wall too. Setting up this type of booth is a 2 person job! So make sure you have someone there to help you build, especially hold up the walls while you put the supports on.

I would really love to thank my father so much for helping me every step of they way and for letting me use his home to lay everything out. Without your help and guidance I don’t think this booth would have been as much of a hit as it was.

Thanks Dad!

-Ryan

Head Shots Promo

Erika Hanchar — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:26:21 +0000

In the 5 years of Rowell Photography’s history February has always been the busiest month for head shots.

To celebrate our new studio located in suburban South Barrie, and Rowell Photography’s 5th birthday!! We are doing a head shots Promo Month.

So only for the month of February our studio sessions are at a very special promo rate. So if you are an actor, model, or professional and you have an updated look, or are just updating your brand and would like more information just give us a call or email and spend some time with us in the studio.

We can’t wait to see you all soon.

E & R

A Bridal Session – Prague, Czech Republic

Erika Hanchar — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:00:38 +0000

Since we were only spending 3 short days in Prague, Tara our bride wanted to do a bridal shoot around the city the night before her wedding. First we headed to Prague Castle, and St. Vitus Cathedral. St. Vitus is huge, and a similar design to Notre Dame in Paris, and because it is so huge, no one really noticed that we were doing a mini bridal shoot with off camera flash right inside the church (this is a feat, because in most Canadian churches they are really strict on photography, and even more so they are strict on flash usage.) In Europe they seem to encourage photography, I love it!

I really love these images inside the church.

I don’t really know how to describe Prague, but when you are there its comfortable. Ryan said “It feels like home” Its quiet and beautiful, and people say hello in the streets. The same night we did this shoot below, we came back to the hotel, had dinner , then Ryan and I headed out again just to walk around the city at night. It was 11:30pm and on a snowy night people of all ages, especially elderly people were out taking a stroll. Its a very safe feeling city.

Behind our hotel were the huge medieval city walls, most parts of the walls date back to the early 1300’s. It’s amazing to be at the center of so much history. Prague will always have a special place in my heart.

Cheers

Erika & Ryan

Prague, Czech Republic – City of 100 Spires

Erika Hanchar — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:00:06 +0000

One of my closest friends in the whole world Meagan Duhamel was traveling a few years back and, of course I was crazy jealous of her. She always used to say “Don’t worry Erika, you will get to travel, and when you do, make sure you go to Prague because its the most beautiful city in Europe!”
She was so right, I have no idea how any other trip to Europe will top this. We didn’t even see Prague in summer with its gardens and fountains. But we did get to witness the quiet of the city at night.

We all flew from London to Prague to photograph Ryan and Tara’s wedding at Hluboka Castle, 3 hour outside of Prague, Czech Republic. We were only spending 3 days there so we had to pack in as much as possible into our short time in the city of Prague.
Ryan and I walked from our hotel The Crown Plaza Prague Castle all the way through the city and across the Charles Bridge taking photos, visiting touristy souvenir shoppes, and old antique stores.

Prague is so quiet in the winter at night. When we crossed the Charles Bridge there was a very talented man playing beautiful music on wine glasses.

If we could live anywhere in the world, Prague would be it and I think you will love it too once you see these photos.

Cheers
E & R

An Engagement – Kim & Chadwick – Collingwood, ON

Erika Hanchar — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:00:43 +0000

We have been to Collingwood a lot this past few months. Mind you, we haven’t hit the spa in ages, we need to go back. Its not hard to love Collingwood, its gorgeous there.
We had the pleasure of photographing Kim & Chadwick’s engagement when we arrived back from Europe at their cottage. They have a beautiful walking path across from their place that looks up at the Blue Mountains. Its a totally uninhabited view. There are no houses or roads or people in sight.
We are so excited to shoot this wedding in June for a bunch of reasons:

1. Kim and Chadwick are an awesome couple, they couldn’t stop laughing and giggling through our whole shoot. I love clients who make their own fun!

2. We get to shoot at Blue Mountain because they are getting married on top of it.

3. We get to work with one of our most favorite wedding planners ever! Sheryl Clifford of Wedding Ties.

You won’t want to miss this wedding on our blog coming in June. Plus Kim is wearing Vera!!!!! so you know its gonna be good. Without further adieu, here are some of our many favorites of Kim and Chadwick. Thanks again for an awesome shoot.

Erika & Ryan