Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Cute Things

August 5, 2011

I hate checking mail! Not email; the old postman, two bills and a million flyers, snail mail! Having dodged it for weeks, after much struggle today, I dragged my feet to the mailbox around the corner and came back home with a 4 inch thick stack of multi-colored shiny pieces of paper, 99.9% of which will end up in garbage moments later. Somebody needs to take a satellite picture of me holding all this paper waste and send it to Al Gore!

Anyways, after all the tearing and shredding, at the bottom of the stack I found a small yellow envelope with our names on it. I turned it over and it said “If undelivered return to: Uroos Ali …” followed by an address. I opened the envelope, and inside I found the cutest little card congratulating us on the birth of our little one! Now, we’ve meet Uroos twice, one for the initial client meeting, and second when she came by to sign everything for her wedding this December. But the fact that she actually kept up with what was going on in our lives, and took the time to go out, find a card and mail it, means a LOT to us! I immediately went upstairs, woke Mehreen up and started waving the card in her face.

So Uroos and Khalid, we couldn’t just send you a lame email saying thank you, which you’ll still get. Your card gets its own entire blog post!

Oh, btw, Afroz turned a month old today!


cute things

On Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2011

On a cold December evening, she sat in her dark room, a solitary light emitting from her iPod playing Norah Jones. An iPod he’d given her earlier in the summer when things were brighter. She counted the little change she had. It wasn’t enough. She thought about her bills. What little there were, her mom paid. The only thing she really spent any money on was the GO train she took to downtown and then TTC to St. George campus. And then she decided. If she walked every day from union station to university she could save enough to get him a gift. And so she walked.

Years later, they danced to Norah Jones on Valentine’s day in their little home in the suburbs.

Destination Wedding Photographers

Arugula salad with Apple and Tomato Slices garnished with Feta Cheese and Cashews and topped with Raspberry Vinaigrette

Destination Wedding Photographers

Beef steak with Baby Roasted Potatoes and Garlic Mushrooms

Destination Wedding Photographers

And to end the night, Meem made the most delicious out of this world Chocolate Cake Balls!

Destination Wedding Photographers
Destination Wedding Photographers

Happy Valentine’s day everyone.

Back in December, we wrote about our first sponsor child Irfan. At the same time we also sponsored a girl, but the correspondance from Plan Canada about the girl got lost somewhere in the courier world. So we followed up by phone and Plan Canada sent us another information package about Rabia!

Rabia is 12 years old, lives in Pakistan with her parents and four other siblings. You can find out a little more about Rabia by reading the text in the following images.


Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child
Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child
Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child
Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child
Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child

To our very pleasant surprise, in today’s mail we received hand written letters from both Irfan and Rabia. Irfan had some help writing his letter because, according to the letter, his writing isn’t legible. However, Rabia wrote the letter by herself! We’re so proud of both of them! We can’t wait to write back.

Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child
Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child
Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child
Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child
Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child
Toronto Ottawa Photographers Plan Canada Sponsor Child

(Sorry about the quality of the iPhone pics; We were too excited and eager to blog about it!)

Love Grows

March 13, 2010

Love. It’s hard to contain it in a definition. What it’s not though, is a statement. A combination of words thrown together in empty shells of conversations. It’s organic. It grows. I don’t mean it grows in strength or intensity, but that it lives. It ages. It scars and wrinkles. In that growth may dwell moments of intense weakness, where a mere whisper may cause it to vanish altogether. And out of those weak moments, giant spirits of hope evolve. When you can’t fix things, but only know that in the morning, you will try again. You will simply try. And love … will continue to grow.

As wedding photographers, one of the things we feel the need to do, is to constantly re-invent ourselves. That means constant learning; be it shooting techniques, lighting techniques, post processing, or just improving and strengthening our visual aesthetics so we can see shots before we click. And due to the nature of wedding photography, there isn’t a whole lot of practice or experimentation that can be done in-the-field so to speak. When a couple hires us, we don’t go in and “try” stuff. At the same time, we know that we need to have an ever-growing arsenal of shots and techniques in our belt to be able to pull them out and use them in tight spots.

Consequently, we are always using each other as guinea pigs to try out new stuff on our off days. A good by-product of having to do this is that we can end up with some shots of ourselves that we would otherwise never take. Interestingly enough, we both fight to be behind the lens rather than in front of.

We took the following shots in this little corner in our building gym. This is what the corner actually looks like (sorry about the noise; iPhone picture):


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These following shots were taken in this same corner without any backdrops.

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In case you are wondering, Mehreen was listening to Black Eyed Peas.