I just received the most amazing message from a photographer in the Minneapolis - St. Paul area.  She attended our seminar on Urban Photography at the DWF Convention this past March and came away determined to add this kind of coverage to her repertoire.  I wanted to share this with all of you:

I cannot tell you how much this moved me.  To know that our words and our images have impacted someone else is a truly amazing feeling.  Teaching is something that we are new to, and we sometimes question if it is worth it - the time we take to prepare our seminars is a huge commitment.  We quite literally spent close to 90 hours preparing for our talk at DWF.  But when you get a message like this one, and we have received others as well, it reinforces why we wanted to teach in the first place.

We never really thought that we did anything different or interesting - we just did our thing, the way we wanted to.  I think because so many photographers in Vancouver also use the city as their studio, we kind of assumed that everyone else, everywhere else was also doing the same thing.  In fact, we worried that our presentation wouldn't resonate.

It is so important for us, as photographers and people, to explore what moves us, what sets us apart and what inspires us to be better.  We feel so lucky to had some influence on the changing face of wedding photography and to inspire others to move beyond what is expected and comfortable and to find the thing that challenges them to be better.

Ali, thank you so much for taking the time to send us this email - you have no idea how much it means. I'm so proud of you and you are doing a beautiful job.  I'm looking forward to seeing you again.