Hello and welcome to the blog of Robert and Kathleen Trenske. We are a husband & wife wedding photography team based in the Fairfield area of Connecticut. We love photography and shoot weddings and events throughout the northeast and beyond. We are available to travel worldwide to wherever your wedding plans take you!
We would love it if you took some time to look around, check out our galleries, slideshows and package information. We hope that our blog will give you the chance to get to know us a little better – through the weddings and sessions we shoot, the places we go, and the friends and family we love. Feel free to connect with us through comments on our posts (we really LOVE comments!!), e-mail us with questions or give us a call to set up a consultation so we can talk about your day.
Thank you again for taking the time to visit us, be sure to check back often! We look forward to hearing from you soon!!
Rob & Kathleen
I was just going through my folders and trying to clean up my desktop. While doing so I found this photo I took of our niece Maura, while we saw her over the Christmas holiday. It is amazing how quickly she is growing up. Although quite serious looking, this one was one of my personal favorites and I just had to share.
Also check this POST out to see a few of her from last Christmas, I LOVE the Santa Hat one!!
HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE!!
Before I talk about anything, I have to start off by apologizing to all of our really awesome and loyal blog readers. We have not published any posts on our blog in a little while and to be honest it has really been weighing on us. We usually post far more often than this. We have been sooo busy (not that we are complaining) but we are making time right now to share something with all of you that we are very proud of.
It has long been a goal of ours to enter some national and international photography competitions. We aren’t as concerned at the outcome of the competitions as we are about actually entering. As a photographer, it is a very valunerable thing to put your work out there in the sole purpose of being judged by your peers. By doing this, we feel that it is one way that we continually learn and continually improve on our work. This way we can be better and better for all of our clients.
So that being said, I am so excited to share with you that one of my images was selected as a finalist in the Best of Weddings Competition. We will know if it makes it higher while we are out at the WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photographers International) Conference in a few weeks. This image that was selected made it as a finalist in the Wedding Humor category, and hopefully you can see why. It is one of those images that makes me laugh every time. Here is the image:
I also have to give a shout-out to another great CT photographer, Sam Chinigo who also is a finalist in this competition. Congratulations Sam!
Kathleen and I also entered 11 of our prints into the WPPI 16×20 competition which we will also know how we placed while we are out in Vegas in a few weeks. Keep your fingers crossed :). We will keep you posted.
Hope everyone is having a great week!!
Today we decided to take a day trip out to Sedona to get away from all the craziness of the conference and enjoy the only really warm day of our trip. It was really wonderful to get to experience a completely different landscape than what we are used to at home. The mountains and valleys as well as the red rocks were simply beautiful and in most cases breathtaking. We spent a lot of time just shooting for ourselves and trying to take it all in.
Here are just some of the many photos that Kathleen and I took today.
As some of you already know from following us on Twitter, we are in Phoenix for the ImagingUSA Conference put on by PPA. We will however have plenty of access to e-mail so if you need anything please do not hesitate to let us know. We thought we would share just a few photos with you. Hope everyone back home is having a great weekend, we hear it is quite snowy. Stay warm and we will talk to you all soon!!
By the way if anyone that we don’t already know of is also out here, please let us know. We would love to meet up!!
For all of you coffee, tea and hot chocolate lovers out there, boy do I have something for you. Despite our “NO GIFT RULE” our best friend (sister really), Breheny gave us a super cool Keuring Single Cup Coffee Maker.
If you haven’t checked these out yet, you really need to. It really beats trying to make a good pot of coffee at home and it is so much better than leaving the house every day to get your caffeine fix at either Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks. Not to mention it is much cheaper, about 55 cents per cup compared to upwards of $5.00 at either of the two previous mentioned coffee venues. I couldn’t believe how many different varieties of coffee, tea and hot chocolate are available in the super convient K-Cups made especially for Keurig Coffee Makers. There are tons of flavors and from our experience they are delicious. Even Dunkin and Starbucks is said to be making their coffees available in the K-Cups soon.
I guess the best part of this incredible piece of technology is that you can’t mess it up. Simply choose your coffee, pick your size (small, medium or large) and in about 15 seconds you have a fresh-brewed cup of coffee. Talk about something you would see in one of the “Back To The Future” movies. Don’t get me wrong, once in a while I will still have an Ice Coffee from Dunkin or a Frappuccino from Starbucks but this has made our day-to-day coffee drinking so much nicer and enjoyable. Check out all of the great options at http://www.Keurig.com
First Regular Blog Feature: Inspiration
In the spirit of starting the New Year off fresh, I started going through old boxes and folders hoping to clean out some drawers. In the process I discovered our wedding planning box from our own wedding – dusty from lack of attention for the last year and a half (we got married in September 2007). Like I do most of the times I clean, I seized the opportunity to take a break. I sat down on the floor and looked through the contents of the box. It was filled the standard wedding planning materials – to do lists, receipts for purchases, and tons and tons of pictures I tore out of magazines for inspiration. Dress ideas, flower ideas, decoration ideas – I had pictures of every possible detail. Looking at the box, you’d think I had seen it all. Yet, even with all of those magazine pages I always see some great new idea at the weddings we working and think, gee why didn’t we think of that?
I always try to take note of all the great ideas I see (and take tons of pictures of them), to share them with my friends and family that are getting married. Then it hit me – why not share it with not only them but all of our 2009 (and 2010) brides on our blog?! So this will be a new regular feature – right now we’re aiming for once a month and hoping to do more throughout the year. Since today marks the very first one, you can expect a new one on the first Friday of every month.
So to all you blog readers – here is our first (of many, hopefully), regular features titled simply, Inspiration. They’ll all be different – some will be based on color palettes, some will be seasonal, some will convey a theme, etc. And all of the pictures will be from weddings we have personally photographed – ideas from real brides and actual weddings (mostly right here in Connecticut). We want these inspiration boards to spark ideas and conversations – so feel free to comment away….ask us questions, give us your feedback, etc.
Since the holidays are such a popular time to get engaged – we have two friends that just recently got engaged (congrats Mary & Melissa!) - we decided to start off the first inspiration board with holiday theme. The holiday season is so magical - the churches are decorated, family is gathered together, and love is just in the air. And brides can have a lot of fun with their dresses too – you can add a cape, a fur stole, or a red sash. Plus there’s the opportunity for so many great reception details – red always pops but it really comes alive against a snowy backdrop and Christmas lights can dress up your reception venue.
To celebrate the New Year, we decided to post a video from our best New Year’s Eve ever.
Dublin, December 31, 2005
We arrived in Ireland a couple of days after Christmas. For the first couple of days we explored the city. In our explorations we discovered a very cool pub. It was a three-story building along one of the cobblestone streets in the Temple Bar area of Dublin. On the first floor was a traditional bar, similar to one you’d find in New York or Boston, with a cover band playing a lot of American hits. The second floor was an adorable restaurant serving that felt like the kind of place you’d find in a country inn. The top floor was our favorite – it was a true Irish pub filled with locals and a traditional Irish band. As soon as we discovered this place we knew it was where we wanted to celebrate the New Year.
New Year’s Eve day we had dinner at the restaurant on the second floor, surrounded by people from all over Europe. It was such a cool experience – the couple next to us was from France, the group to the other side of us were from Australia. Walking through the tables you could hear several different languages being spoken but there was one common thread, everyone seemed so happy. After dinner we headed upstairs to the pub to celebrate for the couple of hours till the New Year. The band was in full force and the room was packed – so much so the floor was bouncing. Rob and I looked at each other almost in disbelief that we had found such a cool place to be for the last few hours of 2005. After hours of classic Irish songs, the band leader let us know midnight was just a few minutes away. To mark the moment, he pulled out a poem by William Butler Yeats, “The Fiddler of Dooney,” and read it to the crowd. Definitely a once in a lifetime expereince – where else in the world could you hear a poem read in a bar before the New Year? I have to say hearing them play Auld Lang Syne and giving Rob a big kiss at midnight, I think we both knew 2006 was going to be a great year. And it was.
