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A Testimonial from Lee & Karin

Dear Prospective Aperture Photographics Customer...

It has been almost a year and a half since my wife and I married each other, and it’s been crazy to say the least. We’ve purchased our first home, our first baby is due in a month, and we finally got around to printing larger versions of some of our wedding photos just a few months ago. I can’t remember what our caterer served at our reception, but I’m sure it was good. My wife says the flowers were beautiful, but she can’t recall exactly which flowers she carried. In fact, a great deal of what happened on the day of our wedding is now a blur, and it wasn’t that long ago (this from an absent-minded husband’s point of view – my wife would disagree!) There are, however, three things that have endured. The first is our love for each other, the second are the ring-symbols of that love which were crafted for us by Sumiché, and the third are the photos taken by Glen Johnson and his assistant, TJ. For many people, the wedding photography is sort of important, but not a big part of their budget. For us, it was over 25%, and only a year later is the absolute most valuable asset from our wedding day. Let’s face it: your wedding will be hectic, hopefully in a good way. As the years pass, your recollections of one or your most important and LEAST memorable days of your life may boil down to those images captured by your photographer. Personally, I can’t browse through ours without getting teary, because Glen is simply a master at capturing the love my wife and I feel for each other.

When you look at the images on Glen’s website, it’s difficult to imagine you in them. They are the stuff that entire wedding fantasies are made of, and it seems impossible that you could be that photogenic. That is, until you see what Glen can make with your raw material. Earlier this year, someone approached my wife on the street and told her that she was on the back cover of Portland Bride Magazine! We raced to the grocery store, and sure enough, there we were, serving each other wedding cake… in a very provocative way, I might add. But it’s not simply the artistic value of Glen’s abilities that make him worth every penny. Choosing Glen is an insurance policy. At our wedding, my wife’s mother worked furiously on hand-making her dress, completing it literally 10 minutes before our ceremony at 5 pm in mid-October. Our plans of taking a few hours of photos before the ceremony fell apart, and we were left with only 10 minutes of light after the ceremony… at least that was my assessment. Thankfully, Glen and TJ had some tricks up their sleeve. First, we got through family portraits in what must have been world-record time. While Glen was capturing the obligatory family shots, his second photographer captured what our ring-bearer was doing in the meantime: digging up worms by the riverbank.

With the light fading and family portraits out of the way, Glen and TJ walked us through a number of shots that they had planned earlier in the day. I could have sworn that it was too dark, and it would have been easy to get frustrated… but Glen was able to show me some of the shots after taking them, and I realized that our photos were going to turn out just fine. In fact, it was plain DARK when he had a stroke of genius, and put us on a floating raft in the middle of a fishing pond at our wedding site. This was never part of the plan, and in the low light, it was difficult to even see what we were doing. I poled out to the center of the pond, both of us just inches above the water, and it paid off: Glen captured another photo that really represented the spirit of the day. Here we are, in the dark, on the verge of tipping into the drink, yet so completely in love with each other that all the thoughts of the day have disappeared. It shows in the photo, and for the rest of our lives, we’ll look at that photo in our baby’s room and think of that day and the images that might never have been ours had it not been for Glen. Because of our scheduling SNAFU, we could have come up empty-handed in our expectation for fun, romantic photos of our day. But our investment in Glen’s abilities and personality proved to be the best use of our ceremony resources. Almost every other consideration in our wedding turned out to be fleeting, with most of it being packed up and returned at the end of the weekend. Choosing Aperture Photographics is the one decision that, even to this day more than a year later, we would both choose over and over again. If you have any questions or concerns about choosing Glen as your wedding photographer, my wife and I would be eager to discuss them with you. His love and craft is as much a part of our wedding memories as the photos are, and I would highly recommend him to anyone wanting their wedding photos to be of superior artistic quality and worthy of preserving the memory of your day for the rest of your life and beyond.

Lee Rodrigue
Portland, Oregon, USA