Kristy & Jeremy's Engagement Portraits

We always find it to be a tremendous compliment when couples choose us to photograph their wedding before even meeting us. Kristy and Jeremy did just that and we are so happy they did. We got to meet them for the first time this past weekend when they drove down from Charlotte. While they were in the area we decided to have their engagement session the same day and we had a great time getting to know them.

Kristy's ring was so unique and gorgeous. The center stone is an enormous aquamarine, her birthstone, surrounded by sparkling diamonds. We love different and seeing people put unique touches on engagement rings is so refreshing.

We can't wait for their wedding at beautiful Homewood in Asheville, NC.


Curtis & Emily
Kismet Photography

Going Green!

We try to be as earth friendly as possible in our personal lives. And this year we challenged ourselves to do the same for our business. Over the last few weeks, we've converted most of our documents (except contracts) into paperless PDFs that we can email to clients. We've also changed all the light bulbs in our office to compact fluorescents which use a lot less energy. Once we figure out how to get Ruby (our cat) to run on a wheel to power our PowerMac G5 computer we'll be all set :)

While searching for ways to be more green, we stumbled across this website that has a wedding carbon footprint calculator. We plugged in the figures from our wedding and our total was 25,750 lbs CO2.

That sounds like a lot especially since our wedding had less than 50 guests. If you ever wondered what kind of impact your wedding will have on the earth, go ahead and plug in your figures. The point here is not to start crossing people off your guest list....but if you would like to make your wedding more earth friendly and offset it's carbon footprint, here are some ideas we found online:

-Buy wine from a nearby vineyard or beer from a neighborhood brewery. Get your wedding cake from a local bakery, and use seasonal flowers, not imports.

-Anything you do to make your wedding a little more modest—from wearing a borrowed wedding dress to choosing recycled paper or a website for your invitations—will lower its contribution to carbon emissions.

-Buy 100% PCW recycled invitations that are processed without chlorine. Encourage guests to recycle their invitations, or have seeds embedded in the paper so that guests can plant the invitations and enjoy the flowers that grow from them.

If anyone has any other ideas, we'd love to hear them!


Curtis & Emily
Kismet Photography

Oscar Night 2008

This weekend we appeared on stage at the Peace Center in downtown Greenville, SC for a one night only performance. Sadly, we were not the stars of a new Broadway play but instead were there to photograph all the glitz and glamour of the Junior League of Greenville's annual Oscar Night America party.

This was our third year donating our services to the charity event. We braved the freezing cold to play paparazzi and get shots of the well-dressed event-goers as they walked the "red carpet". Several local restaurants provided wonderful food and tons of area businesses donated items for the silent auction, including us.

Here are a couple shots from the evening.







Curtis & Emily
Kismet Photography

Rachel & Ben's Engagement Portraits

This week we got together with Rachel and Ben for their engagement shoot downtown. We first met them over a year ago and now their wedding is less than two months away! Wow time flies! What we really enjoy about Rachel and Ben is they are so down to earth and fun to be around. We're also so happy for them because they just bought their first house! Congrats guys.

After we hit some new spots downtown, we decided to try out a completely new place Emily and I found. Its just a wide open field with tall brown grass (read: weeds) and it's perfect for sunset pictures because the warm sun really brings out the amber colors.

Here are some of our favs from the shoot.

And because there were so many others we loved, here's a slideshow. Enjoy!

Curtis & Emily
Kismet Photography

Holy High ISO Batman!

The last couple of days have been really busy with finalizing some albums and meeting with new couples. We also shared a Valentine's Day dinner with a few friends. Marc and Colleen, from the Wedding Festivals, treated us to a fabulous dinner at their beautiful home, which just happens to be the Gassaway Mansion. Mike and Tammy, from Unforgettable Wedding Video, were also there and since Marc and Mike are photography lovers, we took our new D3 along to show them.

Now that we've finally had a chance to really play with the D3, all we can say is WOW! We knew it was going to be a big step up from our D200s, but we had no idea how big of a step. There are so many great features and improvements that we could go on forever, but for now we'll just show a high ISO comparison. All of these images are straight out of camera using each camera's auto white balance and with just a little sharpening for the web.

Here are a couple quick shots of Ruby, our mascot, in very low light.

D200 ISO 3200

D3 ISO 3200

And here are the same images cropped to 100%. To really show the differences, we cropped on the shadow side so the high ISO noise would be even more apparent. For those who don't know, noise is similar to film grain in digital cameras and too much can introduce nasty color artifacts.

D200 ISO 3200
100% crop

D3 ISO 3200
100% crop

Here's a grab shot of our friend Mike at the Valentine's dinner. This was shot as ISO 6400, which our D200s couldn't even do. The D3 actually goes up to ISO 25,600. Talk about INSANE!

D3 ISO 6400

D3 ISO 6400
100% crop

As you can see there is a tremendous difference in the image quality at these high ISOs. Of course, with our D200s we rarely went beyond 800 or 1000 and used flash to supplement the light if possible. This means with the new D3s we won't be tied down to our flashes nearly as much and will be able to capture beautiful ambient light (or lack there of). This will be great for the candlelight ceremonies we have coming up this year!

We can't wait to try out the D3 at our engagement shoots coming up and will be posting more images soon.


Curtis & Emily
Kismet Photography

Our Baby Has Arrived!!!

After weeks of waiting, and nervous anticipation....our 2.7 pound baby came today! It's our new Nikon D3. We don't want to make the D200's feel jealous, but it's incredible. The 3 inch LCD and incredible low light ISO performance are enough to make us drool. We can't wait for the other one to arrive so we can both shoot with these awesome cameras!

It didn't arrive till late this afternoon, and by the time the battery charged, we didn't get to play with it as much as we wanted to. Tomorrow will be like Christmas and we'll be posting some images then, so stay tuned.


Good Night,
Curtis and Emily
Kismet Photography