*ouch*

...my vagina hurts.

Lately, I've taken to buying bridal magazines. Mainly the localized versions of national rags: most recently, The Knot and I Do For Brides ("For Brides" and bigass hairy dudes with expensive camera gear, apparently. Guess that last bit wouldn't fit on the magazine header).

I'm avoiding the big-name fashion mags (Glamor Wedding, Vogue Wedding, Ranger Rick Wedding, etc) mainly because I don't give a shit what $4M will buy you in a "Hollywood Fairytale Wedding"™. I want to stay in touch with what's new/hit/hot/happening/popular (and most importantly, perhaps: selling) in local weddings. As some of you know, a friend, Ben and I have started working towards breaking into the wedding photography biz. The way I see it, these magazines are business-research tools, not just some creepy old guy buying girly magazines.



Thankfully, it looks like things are beginning to get interesting. Ben and I (mostly Ben) have apparently managed to book our first destination wedding (woot!). We've been booked to go to Cancun, Mexico in a few weeks. We don't have the tickets in hand yet, but we met with the bride and groom. And they seemed to like our work enough to sign a contract. I'm cautiously optimistic, but trying very hard not to get ahead of myself. Once the tickets are in-hand, I'll probably move to full-on giddy. It's supposed to be a three day affair; leaving town Friday, returning Sunday. We're hoping that this will lead to future destination weddings. Ya see, destination weddings tend to be a catch-22: Nobody will hire you to do destination weddings, until you've done destination weddings. But you can't do a destination wedding until somebody hires you to do one, which nobody will do if you haven't done one before. See what I mean? Hopefully this will be our foot in the door of the destination wedding world. And an added bonus is that the couple getting married is young (~23ish) and are the first of their group of friends to get hitched. If we do this, and do it well, we may have the beginnings of a wedding empire on our hands.