Denver Wedding and Portrait Photographer | Michele Schanker | 303.242.7268 » Lifestyle Photojournalistic Photography

It was probably about a year ago when I got this email from a coworker and friend asking me if I would be willing to travel to New Jersey to shoot their wedding. Now at the time I didn’t even have one wedding under my belt yet. So I was a bit shocked, a bit nervous, but excited at the same time. So I obviously agreed to shoot the wedding. The time flew by and the day was upon us. The day that I drove to the Orange County airport to board a plane to Philly. It was hard to believe that time had gone by so fast and it was time for Michele and Brian to become husband and wife. Now the nervousness had died down by now, because I had quite a few weddings under my belt. So now I was just excited.

Here’s a few from Michele and Brian’s special day:

Michele’s mom gets a look at Michele with her hair and makeup all done!


I just had to get this shot. We both have the same name and we both spell it in a unique way…with 1 “L”.












After the family portraits were done in the church we decided to head out into town for some fun shots. Unfortunately by the time we got there it was pretty much dark…but we worked with what we had. Do you like this one in color or black and white?



Their first dance was just so sweet.

As a pretty new wedding and portrait photographer, I definitely find that I am still trying to find and develop my photography style, especially when it comes to weddings. For a while now there is one style of wedding photography that I’ve been wanting to bring into the mix. What is this style? It is fashion inspired wedding photography. This is something I’ve been loving since the time I saw it. Part of me thinks I haven’t been daring enough to push it outside of my comfort zone and capture some of these images. Well, this weekend I went to a workshop that will hopefully change all of that for me. The one thing I know that is in developing my wedding photography style, I want to incorporate a bit of the modern traditional, photojournalistic, and fashion inspired images all into one style.

The following images are some of what I captured during the Doug Gordon Photography Workshop in Glendale, CA.

I am totally digging these square crops! But I really love square pictures and albums anyways.

Before the crop:

And after the crop, this time rectangle:

Before the crop:

After, this time back to square:

And a few more:



And one more cropped

Here is Jason and Kelsey’s engagement session slideshow. Enjoy!

As always, if you want to see it in a separate window, click here.

I recently finished my first draft wedding album design. I decided that the way I want to handle albums is to design a draft and then provide it to the client through a slideshow that they can view. Then they can provide changes back to me. Anyway, I thought I’d share a few of the pages I just finished. The album I designed in a square one.

Also – did you notice my blog changes? I decided I wanted to change up the log and background. My website will be going through an overhaul as well in the near future.

Saw this today on another Photogs blog and thought I’d pass it on here as well.

Photo junction software for albums is available for free!

http://blog.photojunction.com/2008/11/free-to-all.html