A colleague of ours was recently offended that his client wanted to include her personal digital snapshots in her wedding album. The response was something like: “There’s no place for that crap in my beautiful album! I told her, ‘Absolutely not!’”

I just shrugged, agreeing that, of course, while the quality would pale to professional photos, personal shots from someone’s throwaway point-and-shoot or iPhone are no less important than the ones they pay the big bucks for to get from us.

“So, you put those shots in those books you do?” was our colleague’s question.

“Absolutely,” was, and is, our answer.

In constructing our last two wedding books, we included at least three double-page spreads of past photos – those taken over several years, dozens of locations and events. Why? Those photos are part of our couples’ history; and they are important.

Thank you, Wedding Jeannie, Jeannie Ward of Los Angeles and Las Vegas Wedding Concierge, Tracey Kumer-Moore for orchestrating this intimate and personalized wedding weekend experience for Danielle and Terry in Las Vegas.

Additional Creative Partners, include:

Johnny Gonzalez, Stylist

The Cake Artist

Naakiti Floral

Sight and Sound Events

Jalan Arnold, Wynn Wedding Salon

Kassi Weist, Encore at Wynn, Las Vegas

Reverend Richard Walters (no link available)

Maui. The night after their wedding rehearsal. A chartered cruise with 33 of their favorite friends and family members. No need to pose Toni and Travis. Here,  the couple steals a private moment.

Having survived endless errands and an odd encounter at the Maui marriage license agent’s office earlier in the week, Toni and Travis finally had a chance to relax during the days leading up to their ceremony.

Standing behind a canoe oar loaded with 35 leis crafted just for the guests, the couple steals a moment.

“To be honest, at our engagement shoot it wasn’t kissing for photos that I minded, it was how I thought I looked in our photos that I didn’t like,” confessed Klark.

“For one thing, I thought my lips looked funny.”

“I grew up having my picture taken all the time, so it felt natural to me, but it did take Klark awhile to get used to seeing himself in photos,” added Brittany.

“By the time the wedding rolled around and now our honeymoon–I’m no longer uncomfortable,” concluded Klark.

In this photo, Brittany and Klark enjoying the pool to themselves at Maui’s exclusive Ho’oilo House.

Are your photos you?

I know, it sounds crazy, but recently  a wedding planner shared a story with me. She planned a wedding out of the country at a gorgeous location that held meaning and history for the couple. The couple hired a photographer whose work the bride had seen in several magazines.

Sounds great, no?

But then the photographer put the couple through their paces, posing them “editorial style” (which, in the wedding industry, basically means staged photojournalism) around the property, wiping the smiles from their faces and focusing their gazes away from one another, in dramatic fashion. The photographer made excellent use of the landscape’s natural beauty, but in creating the ideal portrait, he failed to capture any sort of connection the couple had for one another. The end result was highly stylized photos resembling a pseudo Vogue or GQ shoot. The problem? The photos did not truly represent the couple.

In fact, it was only two years later that the bride ran into her planner at another function. They reminisced about the bride’s destination wedding. “Everything was perfect,” shared the bride. “Except for my photos. I actually get mad when I look at them. I hate them. They are not us.”

Weddings are a celebration. A wedding couple epitomizes the human connection. These elements occur spontaneously at a wedding and when captured by a photographer, provide images that reflect the couple.

“Editorial” portraits, however, are designed to showcase details and locations while showing a couple in a fantasy or staged environment.

The way we see it, if your love is real, let your photos be real. Why stage it? – Natasha Chornesky, WriteShot

Photo caption: Though appearing as if it could be a so-called “editorial style” shot, our accompanying photo of Lauren and John was captured during the couple’s bus ride from church to reception. “If there’s one thing I hate,” says WriteShot primary photographer Chris Cozzone, “it’s setting up unreal shots in phony scenarios.”

Albuquerque’s Hotel Andaluz is the oldest hotel in the city. Listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, the hotel recently underwent a 34-million dollar renovation that included much more than a property’s standard updates. WriteShot’s book will detail the history of the hotel and the story of the entrepreneur with a vision who breathed life back  into it, transforming the property into the only USGBC silver-level LEED certified building on the National Registry of Historic Places.

Commencing with the hotel’s creation by Conrad Hilton in 1939 and ending in the present day with Gary Goodman’s vision of a sustainable luxury property, WriteShot’s book will tell the building’s entire story.

Want four more reasons to help fight cancer? Look to the right.

This week, we were fortunate enough to help out Flashes of Hope for the Nevada Children’s Cancer Foundation.

Flashes of Hope is a nonprofit organization that changes the way children with cancer and other life threatening illnesses see themselves through the gift of photography and raises money for pediatric cancer research.

Anyone interested in donating, can visit Flashes of Hope here.

Sometimes the things I am upset about or frustrated with or just plain old don’t understand are trivial to others. But they’re important to me. They loom big in my landscape. Then larger issues appear, like this past week’s earthquake and tsunami. Or this week’s children I met when Chris and I shot Flashes of Hope for the Nevada Children’s Cancer Foundation.

Perspective.