Casey & Megan featured in theKnot Real Weddings

click the above image to view the whole piece

When Rebecca Crumley, the photo editor at theKnot, contacted me for selects from Megan & Casey's wedding shoot to be featured in the 'Real Wedding' section, I was psyched. She came across an old blog post of mine where I showed a slideshow of their Coffee Table Book Style Wedding Album. Thank god I had worked on my meta tags that day, as she was surfing looking for real Idaho weddings. Megan and Casey were such great people, and there was such a lot of love around, they made my job a joy that day. And, it really helps when clever creative people give me lots of beautiful things to shoot, as the folks at Delphine really outdid themselves with the escort cards and all things papery.

Kiteboarding in the Bahamas

On a working holiday for my 44th birthday, I found myself teaming up with my good buddy Gary who runs Exumakiteboarding.com. His company is on Exuma, a quaint little isle in the Bahamas with the best water and beaches for kiteboarding vacations, kiteboarding lesson packages, and kiteventures.

meet my buddy, Gary Sweeting....

Exuma is the most perfect place to learn to kiteboard. The water is warm, shallow, and beautiful aqua blue.

Even on no-wind days, we would take the boat out and have wakeboarding adventures, conch salad, and pet tame sting rays. Life does not suck here in the Bahamas.

Alex Korch heading out to rip it up at Runaway Bay

Not only did I learn to kiteboard - (I've always wanted to!) - I discovered all the shades of blue I never knew existed, and were living here in the Bahamas all along. This is the most beautiful water in the world. It's now my official favorite color.

As birthdays are concerned, I always want to keep on learning/exploring/living, seeing each birthday as another opportunity to learn something new. What have YOU always wanted to learn?

click here for more pics of The Bahamas

Photoshop workshop with Jonathan Kingston

Great thing about Ketchum/Sun Valley, is that we don't have to go very far to learn from brilliant, talented people, because they always come to visit US.  Such is the case with Jonathan Kingston, a documentary and underwater photographer and photoshop guru who gave his Photoshop CS4 basics and beyond training at my studio. I got to sit in for free (part student, part TA) since I transformed my studio/gallery into a classroom for 5 days. I even helped out when I could, because as they say, you can learn a lot when you teach.  Some lecture, some shooting, some practicing, some wax on - wax off, ....grasshoppahhhhh......

We even had Paul Liebhardt in the class (thank god, who knew photoshop could be so funny?!) Paul was both Jonathan and my favorite professor at Brooks Institute of Photography, BACK IN THE DAY. (a wonderful photographer with a great sense of humor-check him out!) Tables have turned, and now we're teaching the 'old dog' some new digital tricks. Class was small, so that left a lot of time for questions and personal attention. We had a great group of intelligent students, and we would even discuss the philosopy of color management?!

After 5 days of geeking out together, it felt like family, and we celebrated at Rasberry's for a wonderful farewell dinner (thanks Alfredo!!)

Photos Do Not Bend Studio was a great venue for the workshop - we'll be doing more here, so stay tuned.

But for now.... ahhh, back to normal (and back to work) 

A Great Cancer Survivor Story

What's so great about this image? It's a year and a half after we took these (below), again with her loving brother. During her chemotherapy, Jim shaved his head, too, and surprised her for her 31st birthday party in Sun Valley. That's love. Both were visiting Sun Valley again recently, so we had to do a follow up portrait! I gave Sunshine (no, that's her name, really!) all the high res files, and she's going to make a blurb book herself from her favorites. I love happy endings.

Thia wins another award!

I have to be honest - I was a  little bummed when I didn't win first, second, or third in the PX3 WATER competition - but when I saw the caliber of the honorable mentions, I was very proud. It turns out there were almost 40,000 entries worldwide.

This image is of a shark tank in the middle of a swimming pool at the Golden Nugget, downtown Las Vegas. Oh yeah, AND there is a waterslide running through it, too! Only in Vegas, baby. I spent HOURS in the pool trying to catch people/sharks/somebody in the waterslide for a perfect moment (but that's what I do for fun). 

For more great winners of other Px3 contests click here

More coffee table book style wedding albums

Here is Dave & Mandy's book. Another great heart and soul wedding. I spread out the images and used lots of negative space....I had Brandon, my summer intern as a second shooter on this one

And here is Nicole and Hart's destination weddingin the Californian wine country,
at the hip BarnDiva restaurant.
I did this one on my own with no second shooter as well. 

Hart & Nicole by Thia Konig | Make Your Own Book

Coffee Table Books for wedding albums

Brides are flipping over these!

Casey & Megan by Thia Konig | Make Your Own Book

This is from Casey and Megan's heart-and-soul wedding at his parents' house on the river in Hailey. It was so much fun to photograph and put this book together for them. They loved it!

Those other 'auto-fill' template albums can be pretty cheesy, so I started designing these coffee table books how I would want my own wedding album to look. Clean, contemporary and fun. I lay out each page by hand, and think and work with the emotional flow, and I love playing around with the images - placing pictures that you wouldn't normally think of together (but surprisingly, they work), and bouncing color off black & white.

If you went to Casey and Megan's wedding, you can click below to see the official Blurb release and to buy the book. Brought to you by Sun Valley wedding photography by Thia Konig

Casey & Megan

By Thia Konig

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Casey & Megan by Thia Konig