Steve Goldhaber's Blog » Blog about a Chicago Wedding Photographer

I just got the nicest email from Pictage. They let me know that Sarah Mowry (I photographed her wedding about a month ago) went onto Pictage earlier today and posted the following comment about me -

“We would recommend Steve without any hesitation. Our wedding photos, album and slide show are FABULOUS. He is extremely talented, professional and easy to work with. Steve captured so many special moments throughout our day and we will be enjoying the photographs for years to come. Definitely hire Steve! He’s the BEST!”

Thanks for your kind words Sarah and Duke! I really enjoyed working with you guys and I had a great time taking pictures at your wedding. I’ve posted their slideshow above… just click on the picture.

It’s been just about a week now since I launched my blog, and I’m thrilled with the response so far. Over the past 6 days, I’ve had 656 unique visitors who created 779 user sessions. A lot of visits are from friends and family, and a lot are from other photographers. So it appears like I have the audience I was trying to reach. Above is a chart which shows the traffic over the past week. Thanks for everyone who has visited the site. Make sure to say hi in the comments section next time you stop by.

I’ve been working on updating my website for about a month now. I designed my original website about a year ago and had somone help me turn everything into one large flash file (Thanks Danny Davis). This time I’ve designed and built everything on my own. I used a program called iWeb to make it all happen. It’s not the most sophistiated web program out there, but it is very user friendly and gives me the ability to update content whenever I want. I hope to get the site up in the next couple weeks. In the meantime, here’s what the home page will look.

So I bought Show it Web to basically show my pictures online. I was happy enough with the ability to do this, but I found another way for ths program to work extra hard. When I design a wedding album, I now convert the album pages over to JPEGs and upload those into the slideshow. This is soooo much better than burning a CD with a PDF that is over 100MB. The only drawback I’ve seen so far is that any text is hard to read, but you can always send that over in an email. Here’s a sample of an album I rencently designed and sent to a client.

So you might already know that I’m getting married in Grand Cayman on May 5th 2007. I’ve created a website for the wedding that provides details of the island, hotels, etc. We’re still right in the middle of planning. Ironically, we just hired a wedding photographer who lives in Grand Cayman – her name is Rebecca Davidson. We’re really excited to work with her.

Here’s a quick sample of some of the content that’s on the website –

THE PROPOSAL
It all started on February 12th, 2005 when I took Carolyn on our first date to the Around the Coyote art festival in Chicago. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Around the Coyote is an art festival where you get to walk through various artist lofts and studios and look at their work. We spent about 5 hours at the art fair… getting to know each other, looking at tons of work, etc. And at the end of the date, we asked each other who our favorite artist was. And strange enough, out of the 50+ artists we looked at, we both had the same favorite one. His name is Kevin Lahvic. Back in April, I called Kevin and told him our story about how we really enjoyed his work during our first date. He loved the story and at my request, agreed to create a one of a kind painting titled “Will You?”. The painting is of an abstract man on one knee proposing to a woman. So I told Carolyn (who just accepted a new job) that I bought her a congratulations present. When I revealed the painting, she obviously knew it was not just a present for her new job. And that’s how I proposed to Carolyn.

It’s hard to believe one year has gone by. Alright, I’m actually a little behind… the official anniversary was on September 11th. Here’s a slideshow of some of the pictures I took on their wedding day.

Each week I’m going to post a new image. Here’s the first image. I took it this past weekend in Green Lake Wisconsin.

Joshua Goldhaber (my nephew) is hilarious! He’s around 7 months old and is just starting to crawl around. Carolyn and I spent the afternoon baby sitting him about 2 weeks ago and had a great time. He was feeling extra adventurous so I set the slide show to a James Bond theme. Click on the above picture to start the slideshow.

www.stevegoldhaber.com

After looking for the best way to showcase my photographs online for the past couple months, my journey finally came to an end. I found a software called Show it Web, which was created by a fellow wedding photographer David Jay. The software lets you upload pictures, add music and create custom slideshow effects. It’s all very easy to use and I’m amazed at how customizable it is. I’ve posted an example of a slideshow from a recent wedding. Click on the above picture to take a look.

www.stevegoldhaber.com

My answer to this question was where’s Green Lake? I learned it’s around 2 hours outside of Kenosha Wisconsin. Carolyn and I went there this weekend to visit some friends from Chicago (Alison and Matt.. by the way thanks for a great weekend guys it was a relaxing breath of fresh air). Anyway, we had fun at their lake home. We bummed around the town, went fishing, and also went waterskiing. Here’s a funny pic of Carolyn waterskiing. She’s been waterskiing before, but she never got up all the way. This explains the excitement in her face.

www.stevegoldhaber.com