Well I’ve got a long list of to-do’s to get through today (don’t tell my sister that I’m blogging instead of finishing her engagement pictures at the moment), but I just had to take a minute to share with my blog readers the exciting new addition to one of the Jillian Zamora Photography wedding packages — a custom painting of the wedding day ring portrait! Of course we needed an example to show, so James started with a portrait I took of our wedding rings (bonus is that I get to keep this one!):

My husband James works as a full-time artist (you can view his site here) in addition to second-shooting with me at weddings each weekend and we’ve been looking for a way to fuse those two worlds together in a way that would benefit the Jillian Zamora Photography client base. James has been developing a body of 6″  x 6″ paintings for personal practice — paintings of coffee cups, old coca-a-cola bottles, and other day-to-day objects to show them in a different, more valued perspective.

“I will from time to time gaze on an object and think, ‘That reflective color is pretty awesome,'” James said, ” And I want people to see what I just saw.  So the mundane, everyday object is now something that someone will pay attention to.  Another characteristic I want to emphasize is nostalgia.  A nostalgic smell, taste, touch.. that pleases people.”

We wanted to offer our clients something different, something that only a photographer-painter-duo could offer and thus came about the idea to offer paintings of  the wedding day ring portraits. The ring portrait is a shot I aim to set up at every wedding in an effort to document the great symbolism that wedding rings hold to each couple. To give you a better idea of what exactly a wedding ring portrait is, here are some examples of a few recent ones I’ve shot:

At the Bennett-Terrill wedding I noticed that the bride, Jessica, had chosen Lamb’s Ear as an element in her bouquet and all the other floral arrangements at her wedding. Knowing Jessica to be an intensely purposeful designer, I figured she really liked Lamb’s Ear. When I saw a piece of it on a table, I grabbed it and decided it would be a perfect element to use in the ring portrait shot for this wedding.

When bride Laura was telling me that the wedding rings were stored with all the “other important stuff” including hers and her groom, Matt’s passports I asked if I might borrow the passports as well. I knew that travel is an important part of both Laura and Matt’s stories, both individually and together as they plan to one day be missionaries overseas, so it was the perfect element to use in their ring portrait from their wedding day!

And lastly, here is the wedding ring portrait I shot at Jacklyn and Matt’s wedding a little over a week ago. All of the centerpieces at their reception integrated old books, so, to reflect the feeling and design of the wedding day, I used that same decorating element in the ring-portrait set-up!

James and I are very excited about this addition to the newest Jillian Zamora Photography packages and I just wanted to take a moment to share it on the blog! But now I’ve got to get back to editing my sister’s engagement pictures. Since I began this post I received this text from her: “What’s the pic sitch???” I texted her the same thing she texted me yesterday when I asked, for the fifth time, for a guest list for a wedding shower I’m planning for her : “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh working on it . . . :D”

Fafafa! Have a happy Tuesday!

Sidenote: Recently I’ve been opting to post sneak peeks from shoots and weddings to my JZP photography Facebook like page instead of to the blog — it’s just a little bit quicker for me. So if you’re looking for some JZP sneak peek indulgence, be sure to check (and click “like” on) the Jillian Zamora Photography Facebook “like” page!