Location Spotlight – Schoepfle Garden

Spring at Schoepfle Garden in Wakeman, Ohio is dazzling, a photographer’s dream! Comprising seventy-seven acres of botanical gardens and woodlands near the Vermilion River, Schoepfle Garden is the perfect place in spring and summer for the photography of lovers. The bloom of love evident on the faces of engaged couples blends with nature’s extraordinary bloom in gardens like Schoepfle.

How do spectacular places like Schoepfle Garden come to exist? They typically grow from one person’s curiosity about flowers. In this case, a man who was once a banker, and then publisher of the Elyria Chronicle, traveled to Europe and came home brimming with ideas about flowers.  The result of his passion and willingness to study botanicals is that decades later, ordinary people like us can enjoy their transcendental beauty.

We hope you enjoy the glories of Schoepfle Garden, collections of rhododendrons, roses, hosta, cannas, flowering shrubs, magnificent trees, and much more. It would be our great pleasure to photograph you and your beloved, or your family and friends in this place of love and passion.

Location Spotlight - Cleveland Metroparks Zoo

Northeast Ohio is a land blessed with natural beauty both in the wild and in the cultivated areas. The great Cleveland Metroparks Zoo is a little of both! The famed cherry blossoms of Washington DC have a serious competitor in the blossoms of Cleveland.  Our zoo is a marvelous place for photography with dappled natural light coming through the trees that adds a quality of timelessness indoor photography can rarely achieve. The softness and colors of nature bring out the beauty in humans as well.

These photos were taken in spring with the blossoms in bloom, but throughout the seasons the Cleveland Zoo is a wondrous place for photography. It's especially good for engagement photos because it offers a wide variety of spaces within the zoo and the surrounding Metroparks from which to choose. Give us a call to explore natural areas for your engagement, wedding, and family photo needs.  Daniel Photo Pro photography makes you see how beautiful you are!

It’s Wedding Season!

Spring into Action to Create Your Ideal Wedding

As the U.S. slowly opens up again, thanks to the ever-increasing number of vaccinations, lovers everywhere are thinking about engagements and weddings. Except for the birth of children, weddings are the most splendid way of spreading excitement, happiness, joy, and LOVE! Weddings are a message to the world that no darkness lasts forever; love always triumphs.

If you’re good at organizing, you may not need this, but if you’re good at procrastinating about things you’re not experienced with, this one’s for you!  

The pandemic has produced a huge backlog of weddings. The best of the following will be booked quickly.

Key Things to Do Now:

• Choose a date - check with the people you most want to attend before setting it
• Choose a venue
• Choose a photographer
• Choose an officiant
• Choose a caterer
• Choose musicians

After these are booked, then you can start on the fun parts, like what to wear, table settings, themes, and parties. Congratulations!

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Re-marrying?

Wedding Tips for the Previously Married

Many people who have lost a spouse for one reason or another, don’t think they’ll want an official wedding if they find new love.  However, Love, as the poem Desiderata says, “is as perennial as the grass”.  It comes around again when least expected. What also comes around is the desire to share the joy of a new union with friends and family, so most couples end up planning a wedding though it may be smaller or more intimate than what they had the first time.

For a couple who has been married before, the elements of the wedding are often quite different than first-time brides and grooms. First-timers focus on the theme, decorations, and how the wedding and reception will appear on social media.  Second or third-timers, tend to lean toward making the wedding comfortable for family and friends, a blending that may include people from families of a previous spouse. Yet the desire to make their wedding a reflection of who they are, what they care about, and how they want to be perceived, is strong in a couple who dare to risk marriage again.  Plus, creating a wedding event is fun!  The second wedding can be even more fun than the first because experience lessens the stress.

If you’re re-marrying, don’t be shy about creating a wedding event that will make you smile when you’re looking at the photos years later. Do think carefully about making the event easy for others, especially the elderly (don’t forget they may have hearing issues and they want to hear those vows!), but make it your own unique event.  Love and marriage are as perennial as the grass, so surrender your fears and create a day you’ll treasure.  We’ll be there to photograph it for posterity!

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The Eye of the Photographer Sees a Deeper Picture

It is the rare woman who can look in the mirror and see her own beauty, in part because beauty hides from eyes that are conditioned to see what’s wrong rather than what’s right. Thankfully, on engagement and wedding days, the creative eye of an experienced photographer sees a woman’s inner beauty that radiates from the love and happiness in her heart. In the hands of an excellent photographer, a bride’s broad smile and shining eyes transform her like no amount of makeup ever can. In her preparations for the big event, brides work so diligently on their outsides, but the photographer sees deeper and that is why wedding photos are so treasured.

Although posed pictures are important to record a meaningful event like a wedding for posterity, the dozens of photos captured when the engaged or newly married couple are celebrating with guests often reveal the true story. That is the story of the boundless love shared among the whole group. Unlike the bride and groom who perceive that the most important parts of the wedding are the actual events they’ve prepared, the photographer knows the relationships are where the magic lies.

Daniel of Daniel Photo Pro through his photographic lens sees with artistry that typical wedding photographers don’t have. He sees the event in its wholeness, and in its potential for bringing enduring happiness to an expanded family.  Plus, when Daniel photographs a bride, she always looks beautiful in the finished photos!

Secrets of the Wedding Reception Table

Most couples planning their wedding feel an inner urge to offer their guests a wonderful dining experience at the reception. It feels like the payoff for the support of family and friends through the long engagement/wedding process.  Be aware, however, that the dining experience can be the place where the expense begins small but quickly escalates into the stratosphere! It’s also the part of wedding planning that can be most contentious for the bride and groom.  The bride often has a vision of the reception tables created in her mind before any costs were determined, and the groom doesn’t see the importance of it all.

Wedding planning, especially with a tight budget, is so difficult for couples because they have no or little experience.  That makes some want to outsource it all, and that can be a fast way to make a wedding very expensive.  The secret of wedding table decoration is to start as simply as you can, being aware that every item you add for décor, also adds to the price. There's a myriad of ways you can have tables you love while holding down expenses, so explore different approaches before purchasing anything. 

For example, renting napkins might be five times as expensive as making your own from discounted fabric.  Using wildflowers may be far cheaper than florist flowers. Making the cake table glorious and the dining tables very simple can still be beautiful but less costly. The main secret is to take your time and practice restraint in creating your perfect reception. Whatever you come up with will be fine. In reality, the payoff for the guests of being part of a wedding is simply JOY and the realization that a new family is beginning and Life goes on. Photographing that pure joy is the bonus for the photographer and what makes wedding photography so much fun.

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Engagement Parties - What to Expect

In these modern times, when a couple decides to marry, there are a multitude of events they have to decide upon long before the wedding. Engagement parties, wedding showers, bachelor and bachelorette parties, and dinners for the families to meet, etc.!  Friends and family often start thinking about how much it’s going to cost them to support the happy couple. Are these events new or have they always been around?

Apparently, they’ve been around since ancient Greece when an engagement party was a commercial transaction between the father who gave his daughter in marriage and the groom. The bride was not present! Times have changed, thank God! In the US, engagement parties have been a tradition in the northeast for a long time. The practice has spread across the rest of the country in recent decades.

An engagement party is intended to announce and celebrate a couple’s recent engagement. Its purpose is also to help families and close friends who will be involved in the wedding get to know each other. The parties are traditionally held in the bride’s home, but some couples may want to throw their own.  If the engaged couple holds the party in a bar or restaurant, they should be thoughtful of the costs for guests.  A simple home engagement party with family and very close friends is safer these days and can be shared on social media so that everyone receives the news.

Remember during your engagement and wedding planning, that much of what couples feel they need for a “successful” engagement and wedding has been developed by the wedding industry. Keep it simple, be thoughtful of family and friends, but do plan to present and preserve your memories with professional photos!

Love Warms a Winter Day in Garfield Park Reservation

As we inch closer to a much longed-for spring, there’s still time for the wonder of winter. Look what happens when a bright new love is added to a winter scene right here in northeast Ohio. This couple, undeterred by ice, snow, and chill, chose to have their engagement session outdoors. What a fun day it was!  Garfield Park Reservation turned out to be the perfect background for their joyful love which comes through so clearly in the photography.  The arched stone bridge and other physical structures of this background, including the natural formations of snow, ice, and a waterfall, are ideal because they add a dimension of timelessness and history to the scene. That makes the current happiness of the lovers even more apparent.  These engagement photos which capture a once-in-a-lifetime day in their lives will provide memories to warm their hearts and souls in winters to come.

We hope you enjoy these photos. Remember that although smartphones take nice photos, professional photography captures and creates memories at much greater depth and breadth. The expertise a photographer develops over the years of seeing what the camera sees makes a profound difference in quality.  Call us to book your engagement photo or wedding. Spring offers a lovely background too!

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In Pandemic Times, Celebrate Every Holiday with Zeal!

Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17, is the next one up so plan to celebrate in some way, even with family and friends at home. Throughout human history, we’ve found solace in celebrating holidays, because it’s celebrating LIFE! And that’s what we’re all trying to do now. Stay alive and healthy, and be there for each other.  Whether or not you’re Irish, Saint Patrick’s Day is a fun one to celebrate. Legend says that Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, drove its slithering reptiles into the sea! No wonder so many people raise glasses of cheer to him on March 17.

Imagine celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day and every other holiday celebrated in the US over the past 103 years?   That would be well over a thousand holidays. A thousand days of good cheer, celebration, love, and sharing. No wonder Miss E has thrived for so long.  If you want to live a long, happy life, celebrate Life and Living every chance you get!

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How to Have a Wedding that’s Authentically You

You could almost call it a tradition in America…a woman becomes engaged and starts to create a wedding experience. First, she gathers magazines, the thick costly ones with hundreds of pages, to get ideas. A better way is to sit quietly with yourself and find ideas within yourself. Only you knows you!  Only you and your beloved know what your relationship means and how you want to share it with your world.  Most women underestimate their own creativity and ingenuity. Those thick magazines and Instagram posts about wedding stuff are all meant to sell you things.  Find out what’s meaningful to you before you start buying.

For example, if you and your fiancé love Cleveland and spend your happy hours together doing the things that make Cleveland special, focus your wedding theme on that. If you love nature, use that, or if you love partying, create an event that captures the fun you love to make happen. When people get engaged, they’re all excited and immediately begin thinking about how they’re going to schedule everything, notify everyone and book vendors.  Put the brakes on! It’s best to get clear about what you want. Brides typically take the lead, but the long term marriage will be better if they include the groom from the very beginning. Grooms have dreams too! Movies and commercials have told us for decades that weddings are all about the bride having her special day, but in truth, it should be about the couple, defining their commitment and celebrating their own unique love.

So if you’re getting engaged, or have just gotten engaged, spend a weekend pondering what you both want, how you want to feel after the wedding is over and you’re looking at your photos. Having done that, book your date, and of course…your photographer:)

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What is the Reality of Love?

Is Love magic?  Or do we just wish it was? A strong case may be made for believing that Love is magical. Here it is: Love can change a person’s mind and heart, sometimes in an instant. An instant! One person reaches for another’s hand, or just touches a finger, for the very first time. Emotion flows quietly through each person as both realize the significance of that act of vulnerability. Time stops. Everything changes. Possibility is born.

Love makes its presence known over and over in the lives of humans. It is the single experience that cannot be invented or fabricated. For humans, Love is the reason humanity keeps going. It just appears, seemingly out of nowhere.  In some of the photos we’ve shared below, we looked for a heart, the universal symbol of love, but in others, we noticed it later during editing. That’s the magic of Love in reality. It just is.

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Oferta especial 15 por 50 durante el mes del amor

Si la casa se incendia, ¿qué agarra al salir, además de los niños y las mascotas? Fotos reales!

Las fotos reales son tesoros. Capturan a los que amamos, los tiempos que apreciamos, las vidas que vivimos en un momento del tiempo.

En honor al mes del amor en el que cae el día de San Valentín, Daniel Photo Pro ofrece 15 minutos por $ 50, donde barremos con el equipo listo, dispararemos varias tomas que has planeado con anticipación y listo ... tendrás atesoradas fotos de este tiempo histórico que estamos viviendo.

Sus 15 minutos de fotografía pueden ser en interiores o exteriores; solo necesitamos saberlo de antemano. Le daremos pautas sobre cómo preparar un entorno en su hogar u oficina para las fotos. Después de que los editamos, los tendrás listos para descargar.

Aunque el dinero para cosas especiales es escaso para la mayoría de las personas durante estos tiempos de incertidumbre, el deseo de proteger, acercarnos y disfrutar a nuestras familias es mayor que nunca. Por eso creamos 15 por 50. Es una forma de permitirle tener algunas fotos profesionales sin gastos extraordinarios.

Cuando reciba su descarga y tenga copias impresas para usted y su familia, todos estarán encantados. Podemos mirar imágenes en las computadoras todo el día, pero nunca es lo mismo que tener una fotografía en la mano. ¡Contáctenos hoy para reservar un día y una hora para sus 15 por $ 50! 440-787-3806

15 for 50 Special Offer during the Month of Love

If the house is on fire, what do you grab on the way out other than kids and pets?  Real photos!

Real photos are treasures. They capture the ones we love, the times we cherish, the lives we lived in a moment of time.

Honoring the month of Love in which Saint Valentine’s Day falls, Daniel Photo Pro is offering 15 minutes for $50, where we’ll sweep in with equipment ready, shoot several shots that you’ve planned in advance, and voila…you’ll have treasured photos of this historic time we’re living through.

Your 15 minutes of photography can be indoors or outdoors; we just need to know in advance. We’ll give you guidelines on preparing a setting in your home or office for the photos. After we edit them, you will have them ready for download.

Although money for special things is tight for most people during these uncertain times, the desire to protect, to grow closer, and to enjoy our families is greater than ever. That’s why we created 15 for 50. It’s a way to allow you to have some professional photos without extraordinary expense.

When you receive your download and have prints made for yourself and your family, all will be overjoyed.  We can look at pictures on computers all day long but it’s never the same as holding a photograph in your hand. Contact us today to reserve a day and time for your 15 for $50!  440-787-3806  

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