My daughter, Shannon, got her name in the paper for the first time this morning!  Her relay finished first in the swim meet between Brockport HS and Irondequoit HS!  Shannon swam the lead off leg and did very well, giving her team a large lead that they held throughout the rest of the race.  Great job, Shannon!

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, September 26, 2008, page 6D.

Hi all!  Here's a few images from Nickole and David's wedding!  Just wanted to share!

Scott and i are feverishly getting ready for the show on Sunday and trying to juggle work, play, and sleep all at the same time!  Enjoy!

Scott S

Well, I waited for it all day Sunday and then all day Monday and it didn't come!  I was looking for the point when my body would catch up to me after weddings on Friday and Saturday.  Friday was a relatively light 10 hour day but Saturday was a long 11 hour day with two and a half hours of driving to Belhurst Castle in Geneva and back.  

So, about 8:00 Monday night - wham!  I hit the wall!  Now a good night sleep and I'm ready to go again.  

Saturday's wedding with Nickole and David was probably our most fun wedding of the year so far!  Outside of the Ukrainian wedding mass being and hour and a half, everything was great!  Nice people, great locations, and terrific dancing!

The kolomeyka is a traditional dance that involves what, at times, looks like break dancing but is much more graceful.  The ladies all look to have had ballet training and some even have ballet slippers on.  They spin and jump singly and in groups to the quick paced music and look wonderful!  The guys also join in and you get to see some of what many of us think of when we think of Russia - doing a crabwalk while kicking out one or both legs in time to the music!  If I tried that I'm sure that I would break right there!  During the dance everyone tries to outdo their friends and it's a wonderful sight!  

All in all a great weekend and lots of images to come!  Also, if you are thinking of getting married, or you are engaged already, Scott and I will be at the Clarion Riverside Hotel for their wedding show on Sunday the 28th.  So come see us!

Good morning!  Just getting ready to go off to Nickole and David's wedding but thought that I would make a quick post about last night's festivities.  Andrea and Mike were married at St. Margaret Mary's Church in Irondequoit - what a beautiful church!  And what a beautiful couple!  Andrea was absolutely glowing!

We went on to the County Office Building for portraits and, although we were running late we were able to create some really great images that will grace walls for a long time!  That is a really cool place to shoot in - lots of marble, columns, and ornate iron work and brass.  I'm really glad that there wasn't another wedding party coming in behind us though!  Next time we'll schedule an hour, if possible!

Then on to the Rochester Clarion Riverside Hotel - just up the street and over the river!  The room was well appointed and the table decorations were all perfect!  The food was great, too!

Once again we got to spend an evening with Mike Bonanno of Stage Productions.  What a terrific guy!  See his picture above and hire him for your wedding!  

The night flew by!  As always, everything goes so fast.  We need to figure out a way to put things in slow motion for a little bit so the bride and groom can enjoy the moment as much as the rest of us do!

So, here's a few shots!  Tune in for more later!

Scott S

Scott and I have created our own Facebook Group - Slattery & Crist Photography - so, if you are on Facebook, come join us!

It should be spelled busy-ness! That's what it feels like! Scott and I have been on the go now for a while and just when we think were getting into a little downtime more calls come in! Cool! So, now we have a few more seniors to make portraits for in the next week or so, and we have to get ready for the wedding show at the Clarion Riverside Hotel in Rochester on September 28th, and we have to get our ad done for the Rochester Wedding Magazine, and we have four weddings in the next four weeks! This is fun!

Yes, that's right! We are finally going to advertise to the wedding public! Word of mouth has been tremendous over the last year and we have expanded more than we could have imagined! Thanks so much to everyone that placed their faith in us! Judging from the ecstatic response we are getting from our customers, we'll be around for a long time and expanding even further!

Scott Crist, layout artist extraordinaire, created a terrific ad for our first foray into the world of advertising. It's an iconic image of Veena and Gopal taken at Steamboat Landing in Canandaigua. Simple, tasteful, elegant, and fits our style to a tee!

Now, if we could just find time to do the other 100 things we want to everything would be great! Have fun and bounce back to us and let us know how we are doing and how you are doing! And visit us both on Facebook, too!

Ok, back to Boston. Sunday we all went to John and Marie's house for a Labor Day pool party. Ken and I knew many of the people there already but still met some terrific friends! We (meaning Mike) cooked corn on the cob and steak tips on the grill and other brought dishes to pass.

John's mom brought a memory from my youth with her - chocolate pudding pie! My Grandma Slattery would make me chocolate pudding pie in the small graham cracker crumb tart pie tins. The good pudding. The cooked kind. With the skin on top after it cooled. I sometimes wished that the whole thing was just the skin! It was great!

John's youngest boy started the party by giving us a demonstration in the art of "belly flop" - you know, dive into the pool spread eagled and land flat on your belly in the pool! Not a good idea if you weigh more than 50 pounds. It can really hurt! However, if you're a young boy with an audience, and an aim to please, you can jump in with little fear of anything but a small slap of water on your belly, chest, and face!

Soon, Mike and Micky's son joined in and they were having a good ole' time! Then John came out. Not young. Not 50 pounds.

He waved to the crowd to fierce applause, posing for portraits and waving his hands in the air as his daughter egged him on. His form was perfect, as you can see from the picture I took as he was in mid air over the surface of the water. The splash was deafening and large! The moan of the crowd was even louder! And, if he hadn't already imbibed in a few alcoholic beverages, I'm sure that John would have felt something!

The rest of the day was terrific and spent drinking margaritas, eating steak tips, and cruising around the party with my camera. So, here's some samples !

Mike, Micky, Ben, and Riley - thanks very much for having the two of us down to Boston. We had a great time and can't wait to see you all again soon! I hope that Ben found my note and the rent for the use of his room for the weekend! Love to all!

I've been at Kodak now for 17 1/2 years and before I started here I was a summer hire working in the Electrophotographic Process group of what was then Copy Products Division. It was a great group to work in - Jeff Blood, Mike Frauens, Trent Stetz, Michelle Kwarta, Tom Foster, George Walgrove, and, among others Anne Lairmore, were all engineers there. Anne was pregnant at the time with Lianne! I had a lot of fun that summer and, when the opportunity arose, I came back to interview for an opening in the group. I arrived in suit and tie for my interviews. Anne was the first to tell me to lose the tie. "You don't need that here!" she said. Since then we have worked together, essentially in the same group until I moved to manufacturing last year.

Anne asked Scott and I to do Lianne's senior portraits this year, which we did last Friday night. I was surprised that Lianne remembered me at all - her brother, Ray, didn't. Lianne is a great girl who loves her spaniel, Angel! Angel greeted me in typical doggy fashion by trying to rummage through my kit. After my newfoundland and two labs she was no big deal and went off to bark at a hole in the ground!

Here's a sampling of the images from our couple of hours of shooting. All the location images are done using SB-800 flashes on stands with Paul C Buff remote triggers. Sometimes with CTO gels and umbrellas and sometimes not. Just us playing around. Enjoy!

PS - I'm still not done talking about the Boston trip! So those of you who thought that maybe I would forget should stay tuned!

Avid readers will remember that we photographed Alexander and Cristin's wedding in July this year. Such a great looking couple and we had a lot of fun! We just recieved an email from them with some nice words for us that we wish to pass along. Thanks so much Alexander and Cristin!

"My wife and I hired Slattery & Crist to photograph our wedding in July 2008. We were very happy with their work. Not only are Scott Slattery and Scott Crist talented photographers, but they have some really nice equipment as well. They did an excellent job of capturing a combination of posed portraits and candid shots throughout the day. I highly recommend them to anyone looking for a wedding photographer, or any photographer for that matter. They do photography because they love it — and it shows in their work. We couldn't have been happier hiring them."

Alexander and Cristin Gartley

So, where were we? Oh yeah, the Red Sox - White Sox game! Ken is a White Sox fan so he was a little bummed that the Red Sox bombed his pitchers - homer, two triples, five doubles, I think! There were 24 hits in all! By far the most hits I have seen in a game and it was still a yawner. A few hip checks may have helped... Can you tell I'm a hockey fan?!?

Mike and John, on the other hand, are rabid Boston fans. Doesn't make any difference which team or sport it is, they are rooting for Boston! I often wonder if I would be that way if I lived in Pittsburgh. So, at least they had a good time!

I had fun taking pictures and experimenting with angles and focus! The young couple in front of us were from Florida and kept raising a sign in front of them between innings and, as she was cute, I took a nice profile shot while she was holding up her sign.

A girl down the way from us was actually keeping the box scores! I didn't think that anyone did that any more. I remember keeping them for my dad's softball team when I was little. I loved to color in the diamonds when they scored a run! That was back when there were fields of ball diamonds where the building I work in now wasn't here - in Kodak's hayday. Back when I had some interest in baseball.

The one thing that no one likes is the walk out of the ballpark after the game. Wall to wall people all going to the same place - the train station! Yes, some of the clubs close by had lines out front of people trying to get in, but for the most park people are staggering to the trains. I say staggering because, although a beer at Fenway was $7.50, there were a lot of drunks! Similar to a Bills game though!

So, we had fun, saw a game in Fenway before they tear it down. Which they will eventually. Surely it's not big enough for the owners. Not enough seats. Not enough income. I hope they don't though. It's a great park and reminded me of Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, where the Red Wings play.

Enjoy the shots and I'll be back with Sunday's Labor Day bash at John's house!

Scott S

A short timeout from Boston! Scott and I had our pre-wedding meeting with Nickole and David tonight at Marge's - right on the beach on Lake Ontario!

What a wonderful couple! We talked about everything having to do with their wedding from the bagpipers to the Fire Station to the Ukrainian dancing! This is going to be a fun one - not that the others aren't fun but this wedding has real cool potential!

The best thing was that as we were all talking I was taking a picture here and there. Neither Nickole nor David showed any discomfort with that - very cool! So here's a few parting shots!

Scott S

Downtown Boston is a dichotomy of old and new, young and old, foreign and domestic, stone and steel. All piled together. And Faneuil Hall seems to be the meeting place! The plethora of restaurants, shops, curbside entertainers, and just plain people is a pleasure to pass through or to just sit and watch. At any given time there is a clown making balloon animals, an acrobatic show, and a live statue within a few yards of each other - all surrounded by people. It really is a cool place!

A grandmother is surrounded by her grandchildren as they looked over the horses hitched to vis-a-vis carriages for tours. One granddaughter is a little put out by the smell and felt that she had to cover her nose with her sweatshirt!

A young Indian woman has a street-side vendor wrap her in a colorful outfit. When I asked to take her picture she just beamed!

An asian couple strolls away from the crowds after making their purchases.

A young girl drops a dollar into saxophone player's case as he plays for donations on the walk. He switched his tune from a slow soulful number to "A Tisket, A Tasket" just for her. She clapped her hands to the music.

And don't leave out the pets! This yorkie was having a field day smelling everything in site!

Just a fun place to be in. I could stay there all day and just watch and shoot. But we have to get to the game. That will be the next installment so stay tuned and enjoy!

This is going to be a long one! Two or maybe three parts as there are some great images of great people from our trip...so, here goes!

Saturday Ken, Mike, and I joined up with John Sears (Searsy) to go to the Red Sox game versus the Chicago White Sox. We drove to the station and took the train in to the city to the Kenmore station. We walked around Faneuil Hall and ended at the The Black Rose Pub for a few pints of Guinness. What a great pub! It was a target rich environment for my camera. The atmosphere is great and the people are happy, animated, and varied.

After a few rounds we decided to get going and find dinner. But, as we were about to leave, I noticed a couple of older gentlemen standing at the bar looking a bit lost. I offered them our two seats and they were so good as to offer to buy us another round. We couldn't refuse their hospitality! So, the one gentleman (from England) took our orders... Scott - Guinness (he nods), Ken - Guinness (another nod), Mike - Smithwicks (he looks at Mike funny and says Guinness), John - Harp (he calls him a derogatory version of cat!)

We started talking and they were both from a photography group that had just spent the week in Penobscot, Maine together and were on their way to Seattle. So we talked shop for a while and I gave them a business card so we could get back in touch later. I hope to get an email and a picture of the four of us together. One of the shortcomings of being behind the camera all the time is that you don't get in many pictures!

So here's a few shots from The Black Rose and assorted stuff!