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Marc made it to the stage, accepting his trophy for winning 1st place at the recent 16×20 print competition for this year’s WPPI Convention held at MGM, Las Vegas. When Marc’s name was called out by Jim Garner and Bambi Cantrell, and I saw his winning photo projected on the big screen, I was blown away shocked, “Honey, you won 1st!”. The Awards Night is like the Oscars of wedding/portrait photographers, and a great way to end the week-long WPPI convention, which was attended by more than 10,000 photographers worldwide.
This is it Photography also earned eight Accolades of Excellence for the categories Wedding, Portrait, Children, Advertising, and Landscapes.



Marc’s “The Modern Woman” won 1st place in the Glamour category.

We made a handful of friends at WPPI, one of them is the cheerful Louis Pang, who is a multi-awarded photographer based in Malaysia, and he conducts photography workshops too. Louis took awesome shots of the event, including this photo of Marc on stage. Visit Louis’ informative blog.
Photo by Louis Pang

We learned megatons in this year’s WPPI.
I took Yervant’s class for 2 days, and I learned from a master. Yervant is one of the top wedding photographers in the world. Brought up in Ethiopia, with an Armenian descent, his father was the official photographer for Ethiopia’s royal family. Fast forward, Yervant owns an upscale avant garde photography studio in Australia. He is a funny guy, very approachable. He took the time to know his students, I think there were 20 of us ‘students’. Then he showed us how he photographs. The next day, he generously shared his digital darkroom techniques. That was priceless.

While I was taking Yervant’s class, Marc was taking Jerry Ghionis’ class, another Australian photographer, who is considered one of the top wedding photographers. Marc was inspired by the Jerry’s unending creative thoughts.

And another speaker I listened to was Marcus Bell. Marc and I have always admired his works. I was blown away with his presentation. He shared about his troubles when starting photography, and how he arise and passed each adversity. He incorporates video and photo stills, which intensifies the impact of a wedding story. A standing-ovation from the audience, when his presentation ended. With our love for movies, Marc and I are working on combining video and photographs, now that we have our Canon 5D Mark2 camera which has HD video, the possibilities are endless.

We are very excited for this year 2009. We can’t wait to work with our clients.