Best wishes Ashley and Jacob!

Congratulations and Best Wishes to the Saads! They were married in a private ceremony in Billerica this past weekend.

Mark from Curtis Knight Entertainment kept everyone moving and the caterers, Mr.Jack's Catering, kept everyone happy!

Here is one more for the Tale of the Traveling Tattoo! (Don't forget to send us in your photos!)

Keep a look out for Ashley and Jacob's album in the coming weeks!

Our first class is now history!

The first class at ASA Photographic Studios is now a part of history.



Thanks again to JB of Special Effect Photograhy for his picture contributions.


Gail and I had a wonderful time hosting this first training class and hanging out for the day with other photogs.

During the afternoon break, we took everyone on a walk around the grounds. We also brought people up to the Studio. It was very cool to share it with everyone.

Some things we, as hosts, learned = )
-Ask the furniture shop above us to turn off their air compressor the night before a training = )
-When you make coffee for the afternoon session, don’t leave it in the kitchen. Put it out so people know its there (yes we read your surveys!) We're sorry about that! = )
-Labeling everyone’s lunch orders is an easy way to win points with starving students!
-Tweak lights

How good was our class? Well, so good that Mac and PC users co-existed peacfully!



From student to raffle winner! One Hunt gift card went to a Billerica native.



Overall, it was a great overview of Lightroom. It both enlightened us to a couple of features that we weren’t using and reinforced for us how thoroughly we know and use this program.

From this class we are inspired to pull together follow up power sessions that shows how we use Lightroom to significantly increase the quality, organization and efficiency of our workflow. This will be hands on workshop focusing 80-90% on the Library and Develop modules. This, for us, is where Lightroom shines…..

Let us know if you would be interested in joining us for “Lightroom for Lightspeed”. Date to be determining, but we are considering Monday/Tuesday evenings starting around 6pm.

A big thanks to everyone again for joining us at the beginning of our new venture!

Adobe Lightroom Training - Sunday March 15th

As most of you should know by now, the first class at ASA Photographic will be a full day of Adobe Certified Lightroom Training on Sunday, March 15th 9AM to 5PM.

Proudly, our first instructor we will be Jeff Shaffer of Shaffer Smith Photography LLC. You can read more about Jeff by clicking the link.

Click here for more information on the class and Jeff Shaffer.


Don't Forget! Register by March 8th to be entered into our classroom raffle to win 1 hour of one-on-one online training with Jeff. More goodies will be raffled off too!

OK, here is where I get to express my opinion without too much filtering from Gail.

George's opinion...
"Adobe Lightroom is hands down the best tool to be put out for photographers since, dare I say it, Photoshop itself! Whether you run high or low picture volumes, if you are not looking at Lightroom, YOU ARE MISSING THE BOAT!"

Yes Lightroom is a slightly different animal at first that you need to adjust to, but once you grasp the power of the workflow, you will NEVER go back. Photoshop is still as great as ever, but Lightroom takes 90% of the "normal" things you would do to an image (or to 1000 of them) and streamlines it beyond belief. I personally edited through 50,000 images last year with relative ease.

Other benefits: Organizing your images in endless ways and making them more accessible then ever. Easily keep you best work in virtual favorite folder without ever having more than the original files to reference. The printing module is a dream!

We’d love to hear your feedback and we hope you will spread the word! If you have any questions please e-mail me at george "at" asaphotographic "dot" com.

PPAM - Always striving to be better!

WOW! Gail and I had a GREAT time at PPAM last weekend. For those of you who do not know what PPAM is, it is the “Professional Photographers Association of Massachusetts.” The conference was a four day photo fest in that left us inspired, overloaded, educated, entertained, overwhelmed, humbled and broke (just kidding, but you can't help but to buy stuff at these conferences!) We found areas that we need to improve and also had some of our own little victories.

Most of all, we made a lot of new friends...too many to list!

We jump started our first PPAM convention with a great portrait presentation with Master Photographer Don Chick. We made many notes to try and put to use in our own studio set-up. Thanks Don!


Here we are with Rene and Joan Genest. A husband and wife team whom we identified with immediately. They did a live baby/child portrait session--Gail and I could not stop laughing at how their professional relationship paralleled ours. They were truly inspiring to us and we learned a lot of great techniques from them. So thanks to the two of you as well!












We also met Tracey Budabin from Sucessware. Photo courtesy of JB (Thank you JB!)

Poor Tracy--we literally had our own private “husband and wife photographers with kids” counseling session right there at her expo table!

Tracy, I personally want to thank you for giving my wife some hope! We will be starting to work with Successware as soon as we get it!


Dan Doke had us up early on Saturday, though it was worth it. Once again showing us that he can go to any venue we have worked at before and find an even better perspective then we did! Damn you Doke! = ) Keeps us on our toes though.








Mike Fulton from TriCoast Photography had to be one of my personal favorites.
He was the final speaker at PPAM and I did not know he was going to show off the new Radio Poppers! I have been a fan of the poppers from V1 and I think I was the only one in the room who had taken delivery on the newest Px units so it was awesome to be able to talk to Mike about them! I nearly leapt out of my seat with excitement. Gail thought I looked like I was a kid at Disney Land.


I can’t tell you how wireless TTL has changed our workflow and it was the GREATEST thing to have Mike out there talking about it. I am hoping to get Mike into our studio sometime to run some hands on workshop as well.








Gail and I had entered some of our work to be judged. I had no idea what to expect and I was blown away at the spectacle of it all. It was like an Olympic judging panel all lined up in front of a rotating neutral gray cube under calibrated lights each with their own electronic scoring pad! They were allowed to debate each piece too as they felt necessary.
All our entries were scored in the high seventies on a scale of 100. A couple even were seen a second time for possible upgrade to a merit which would be an 80 or better. And, one of my prints actually was considered "Deserving of Merit" with a score of 80. I was so pumped. On the same note, Gail entered two electronic albums for judging and both were seen twice for possible merit! The bummer is she just missed it on BOTH! We learned the difference between client albums and competition albums. The fact that she came so close showing client albums was excellant. She's is going to tighten the albums up for competition and present them at PPANE in September.

We would not have entered at all if it was not for Nancy Green. When we showed up at her studio to drop off our submissions on the final day of entries (classic "George and Gail" I might add), she showed us how a comp print is typically presented.
Horrified at how we had "mounted" ours, I was ready to take my home again and wait until next year! She quickly talked me down and told us to enter them anyway. So quite literally, I owe my first 80 to her, "Thank you Nancy!" Nancy took the creative theme category this year for her depiction of “Security.” Nice job Nancy! A total sweet heart made even better by the fact that she gives GREAT hugs and loves to PARTY!

Here she is in PARTY mode as a matter of fact! She might just kill me for this one = )



Jeff and Karen Baker hung out with us too. Jeff, Gail and I were running around securing seats for each other at all the seminars. We had it down by the end!



After the awards were all gone (thanks to Jennifer Hudson and Paula Swift) and the sessions over, as fried as we were, it was a bummer when the conference came to a close...though it was a relief to have this babysitting NIGHTMARE over with!







As great of a time as we had with our new family at PPAM, nothing can touch cuddling up with ours = )


A VERY VERY SPECIAL THANKS TO CHRISTINE, NONNO AND GRANDMA, JEN AND JAVIER, GRAMPY, CARRIEANNE, RICHARD, AND LAURIE FOR HELPING US TO MAKE THIS CONFERENECE ATTENDABLE! Do you guys have plans for September 12-15th?