Year One: Recap 2008

Before I can move on to 2009, I needed to do a year recap to close out 2008....I'm happy that I can share it with my blog readers, but mostly, I am doing it for myself so I can take inventory of where we've come this year and to have a quick snapshot to refer to as time goes on.

Looking back, it was actually a really a great year - especially being that it was our first full year in business. However, the past few days I've been feeling discouraged and frustrated about knowing the right steps to take for our business to grow to the next level. Can I just be real for a minute? It's SO easy to look at and compare yourself to the amazing things that others in your field are doing and come out feeling like you are THE worst at what you do. With this just encourages doubt, feeling incompetent and only allows for taking steps backward. SO, having compiled all of our accomplishments from 2008 and feeling quite good about them, I am making a conscious decision to not let all the junk into my mind and to just push forward. 2009 IS going to blow this year out of the water....I just know it. :)

Without further ado, here's the top accomplishements/occurrences for the great year of OH-EIGHT!

Marriage: Year One. First, and most importantly, we celebrated our first year wedding anniversary on June 9th. The first year was a complete and total whirlwind of an adventure - new dog, new house, new business, leaving jobs, new friends, travel, etc. etc. It was NUTS. But it was great. :)

Here's a shot of us right before we took a bite of our disgusting top tier of our wedding cake. We look horribly wrecked, I know this, but in our defense - we had just returned from shooting a wedding in Pittsburgh.

Clients. 2008 brought us 17 fabulous couples to shoot their weddings. Seriously, we have TOTALLY been blessed by knowing these guys. I never thought that our clients would be those that we could call friends.

Travel. Some of those weddings we shot (and will shoot) actually brought some travel into our lives. In May we were able to travel to the Bahamas to shoot the wedding of Mary and Niall and then in June, we headed up to PA to shoot Joy and Matt's wedding. We also took a weekend trip to Savannah, Georgia to shoot Jon and Lauren's engagement session.

Geoff's first boat ride.....ever! (Bahamas...duh!)

Exploring Pittsburgh the day before the wedding.

My FAVORITE pizza place in Savannah.

Full-time Photographer....me?! With so much work, we decided that I would leave the safety of my full-time, salary paid job at Davidson College and fully commit myself to pursuing our business full-time. Some days I do miss working with college students, but there isn't one day that goes by that I regret taking that leap of faith.

Some "in action" shots of Geoff and I.

Branding. I love this one. Geoff worked his little butt off to design us a logo, business cards, a blog with some style, and my favorite, the intro animation. We also managed to get up a working website to showcase some of our favorite work.

Our rockin' card.

The blog, of course. :)

www.cheyenneschultz.com

Products. A big part of our business start-up was deciding on and ordering what products we would offer to our clients. We landed with Finao for our wedding albums, WHCC for our guest sign-in books and started using Jewelboxing for our dvd cases. Love em'!

Education. Furthering my education with photography was a really important piece to the business, and will certainly continue to be in the future. I was able to attend WPPI in Las Vegas last March, attended day workshops in Charlotte by Mike Colon and David Jay, and took a class at the Light Factory uptown.

Learning about how to create car trails in my class.

A shot I grabbed while out and about in Vegas.

New Friends. 2008 brought us some great new friends in 2008. Four of them actually joined us for New Year's Eve - Candice and Daniel from The Beautiful Mess and Alyse Woodward from A Perfect Engagement and her husband Philip.

Miscellaneous. I had the opportunity to second shot for 11 different photographers, began advertising in Carolina Bride, and was accepted into joining the network Modern Photographers.

And there go you. Phew! What a crazy year......now here's to an awesome 2009!