+ Backyard weddings.
+ Abbotsford (about 45 minutes east of Vancouver).
+ Meeting couples for the first time on their wedding day and they end up being rad.
+ Old school barns.
+ Black and white photos.
+ Little kids doing crazy shit at receptions.

Sally and Ryan’s wedding had all of these things.

We’ve always referred to Nordica as our baby, and it is. Nordica’s roots are deep within both our lives and we’ve nurtured it, fed it, and watched it grow ever since we gave it a name and started shaping it’s identity in November of 2009. Like any proud parents, we shone the limelight a bit too bright on a baby that we knew nothing about, and we may have blinded ourselves a bit along the way.

But, with naive in full force, we pushed forward believing our baby would grow to be awesome.

Nordica took a few steps in 2010 – steps that we were very proud of and still are – but those steps were not unlike a crazy teenager’s.

More confident then experienced, more talking then listening, more dreaming then action. In 2010, Nordica was the loud-mouthed guy who screamed greatness having yet achieved a thing, and yelling to the world all the things he wanted to achieve one day.

Then, in 2011, it started to happen.

Some – not all – of the things the loud-mouthed teenager was screaming began to happen. It was as though Nordica had just cruised the university, had a dream job in mind, and actually got hired.

We dreamt about photographing a wedding in Iceland. Nordica ended up beside glaciers on one trip, and isolated countryside the next.

We dreamt about photographing multicultural weddings. We found ourselves in Sikh temples, Mexican jungles, Swedish archipelagos, historical farmlands, Indian ceremonies and faraway ranches.

Throughout 2011, we lived the dreams that we envisioned to be possible when we first started. We had big ideas, and somehow they came true.

And as 2011 drew to a close, we realize that we weren’t yelling a bunch of bullshit without substance anymore, and we weren’t living in some sort of fantasy that would be whisked away.

We realized that our little man, Nordica, had done a great deal of maturing, and we are proud of who he’s becoming. There are many lessons to be learned still, but experience and achieving goals has lit a fire in our little man, and we look forward to seeing where the journey takes him in 2012.

We recently started doing private one-on-one mentoring sessions. And since we enjoy doing them, as well as getting to know fellow photographers, we’ve now decided to “go public” with them.

So, during winter/spring 2012, we’ll be offering private Nordica one-on-one workshops. Or two-on-ones, as is the case with us.

It’s a day of us (Cole, Jakob and you) hanging out, and the focus is on helping you move your photography, your brand and your business forward.

We’ll scout locations, do a photo session with a couple and edit everything together. We’ll chat about the business model we use, about blogging, about clients, about search engine optimization, and so on – we’ll talk shop, basically. The entire lot. We’ll cover any questions you have, and we’ll be open about everything we do.

Details:

The one day workshop is just that: an entire day (9am-5pm, we’ll provide lunch and have breaks throughout) and is meant for any photographer, emerging or established.

We’re offering the workshops on weekdays from February to May, 2012 and they are limited to one person per day (or two, if you’re working as a team).

If you’re from outside of Vancouver, we’ll pick you up when you get here and transport you from A to B, if needed. We’ll also provide you with options for accommodations.

If you’re based outside of Vancouver and would like for us to come to you, that’s fine as well. Additional charges will apply to cover expenses.

Booking:

If you’re interested in booking, or you just want to learn more, fill out this form and we’ll get back to you asap:

Nordica // Workshop

Please don’t hesitate to get a hold of us if you have any questions or thoughts about the workshops. We’re happy to provide you with more information.

Couple’s often ask us about general ideas and thoughts for their weddings. And our answer is pretty much always the same. We’re definitely no experts on weddings per se, but we’ve been to a few by now, and there’s one thing we’ve picked up on: The more real you keep it, the better.

Don’t put in a big effort just to be someone you’re not for a day.

Make your wedding who you are instead. Whoever that is. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to have a rad wedding, as long as the effort is there and you’re being real to yourself.

We’re not sure whether we actually had this discussion with Meg and Adam, but a wedding doesn’t get more real than theirs.

Adam has worked the main part of his life at the farm where the ceremony was held, he proposed to Meg on a berry field nearby, and they basically live inside the reception barn. Well, they don’t, but very close.

Meg and Adam knew exactly what kind of wedding they wanted. They made it their own and it’s pretty safe to say that every single person in that barn had one helluva good night. Mason jars and all.

The Jessica and Karl wedding was originally featured by the pink-haired awesomeness known as Kat over at Rock N Roll Bride.

That wedding has now been picked up by the equally awesome sites A Million Little Details and La Belle Bride.

Thank you to Chantale from La Belle Bride and to Somer from A Million Little Details for putting up this wedding. We tremendously appreciate it!

Check’em out at the links below. And leave a comment or two on their sites if you’re feeling up for it.

La Belle Bride and Million Little Details

Anyways, we took a calm walk around the Burrard Street Bridge and towards Granville Island, and mustered up some photos for their engagement shoot. Let’s just say that it was a little bit different (in a good way!) and the pictures are damn cool.

Here’s a teaser for now, and we’ll pop some more up next week! Thanks Andrew and Karran and we’re stoked about your upcoming wedding!

Well today a wedding Nordica photographed was featured in this awesome wedding website, which we thought was pretty damn cool.

The wedding was Jessica and Karl from Stockholm, and apparently the ‘Blue Theme’ was attractive enough for Kat from Rock and Roll to use on her very successful website. This is a bit about the UK based Rock and Roll Bride’s site:

Rock ‘n Roll Bride (Noun) A rock ‘n roll wedding is a wedding where the couple actually acknowledge that to plan a good wedding, they have to incorporate themselves and plan what they love for their day.  They laugh in the face of the wedding industry and the wedding magazines that tell them what they need to do to make a ‘good wedding’.

It’s not about being ‘cool’, being a rebel or even thinking of the most unique idea you can, it’s about planning a wedding that reflects you and your partner and declaring your love in your way.

To be featured on this site, you don’t have to be cool.  You don’t have to be ‘out-there’ or ‘offbeat’, you just have to be you ♥

So thanks a bunch Kat for popping us in the mix! We appreciate it and you’ve got one sweet wedding website going on there eh!

This is the wedding featured. And this is where you can find Rock and Roll Bride.

A short while ago, Marc Smith from Amuse Consulting got in contact with us about the celebration that was about to happen at the Sinclair Centre. Turns out this beauty of a building was having its 100 year anniversary (which is pretty ancient in Vancouver terms!) and they had some pretty special plans to get people in the building. Awesome stuff!

So we were asked to join in on the fun and have set up a small ‘retail space’ of sorts in the main foyer of the building (beside the food court). While this is something totally new to us, it’s kind of cool to mingle with people and have people come in and chat with us. So, if you haven’t much to do on your lunch break or whatnot, pop on it!

Ohhhhh yeah. One more thing. We’ve got some killer specials going on this week only as part of our being at the Sinclair Centre. We want to get some bodies in this great building to see how marvelous it is, so here are some specials we’re offering this week only.

If you come into the Sinclair Centre until Friday (on the corner of Granville and Hastings Streets), here’s what we’re offering:

—

1) $150 Family Portrait Session (Regular Value: $500)

This outdoor portrait photography session guarantees your family five (5) images that will be in both black and white and colour (so 10 altogether). We will do the shoot at whatever location you choose.

This offer is valid if you book the shoot with us at the Sinclair Center, and from that point, we can select a date for the actual shoot.

2) $100 Social Media Photography Package (Regular Value: $300)

This package will include a quick outdoor photography session with us on any day during our time at the Centre. So you come into the Centre, we will go outside the building to a few of our favourite spots and voilá – you’ll experience the most painless and short photography session of your life!

From this session, you will receive five (5) headshots in both colour and black and white (so 10 altogether), as well as a Twitter account set up for you with a custom background. If you already have a Twitter account, we will make you a customized background. We will do this shoot on the spot, so come down to speak with us!

3) $2000 Wedding Photography + Free Engagement Shoot

Our wedding packages start at $2500 and engagement shoots are priced at $500. However, if you or a couple you know come down to the Sinclair Center and we book a wedding, that is a savings of $1000. Our weddings guarantee 2 photographers, unlimited coverage, minimum of 400 images and images ready within 2 weeks.

—

So, we’re hoping that people find the time this week to come in and say hi! And if you’re into getting some awesome photography done, maybe these specials will put you over the top! Some great deals for sure and all you have to do to get them is visit us in the Sinclair Centre!

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The nice thing is people seem to be the most interested in our wedding photography, which is a good thing!

So, we’ve dedicated this post to your questions from Formspring. And remember, you can ask us anything you want over on that site (and can ask questions anonymously if you choose!). Click here to ask us stuff!

If I’m getting married overseas, how do I go about booking you to be our photographers?

Send us an email (please, we love to travel!) and we’ll go over the details.

Jakob is to Brad Pitt as Cole is to _____?

http://ow.ly/1sJHk

What is your post-shoot processing steps? You seem to do a lot of editing and the pictures look great! What are your procedures?

This is something that can’t really be explained in a few sentences. But basically we do some adjustments in Lightroom (WB, cropping, basic editing etc) before opening the picture in Photoshop. In PS we do a variety of things depending on the image.

What is the best part of wedding photography? And worst?

Preparations are usually fun. Not sure there’s a worst part, but sometimes there are somewhat boring parts of the day.

You haven’t really stated on your site how you give proofs to your clients – care to explain?

We use Smugmug. Clients get a password protected gallery where they will find all of their images.

What is your workflow like (with software I mean)….

Nikon – Lightroom – Photoshop.

What lenses do you two use?

A variety of nikon lenses. Mostly primes though.

How would you describe your wedding photography style?

We actually answered that exact question in a Q and A on our blog recently: http://nordicaphotography.com/questions-and-answers-nordica-photography-weddings/
But here goes:

 Probably journalistic. We are at your wedding in the morning and won’t leave until the very end. With two shooters, we hope that our pictures tell the story of your day, which in our interpretation would make the style journalism where the pictures speak for themselves.

 As far as the actual style of the photos go, we love minimalistic, clean shots and we love to play around with colour, light and patterns.

Why don’t you offer different wedding packages

Well, let’s put it like this. In a way you can say that we do offer different packages. But we don’t want to make those packages for you, we want you to make them.

 That’s why we start with a base price, and offer all of our additional services, such as coffee table books or engagement shoots for example, as add-ons. You choose which ever ones you want. 

And we want to keep things simple. That’s why we’re not counting hours. We will be at your wedding as long as you want. It’s all up to you.

 We recommend that you have us for the whole day though, because having pictures from early morning to late evening that actually tells the whole story of your wedding day is so much better than just having photos from a couple of hours.

So you two shoot weddings together – I get that – but when you’re at a wedding, how do you decide between the two of you who does what and what you focus on?

We talk. And we decide on where we are going to be during the wedding. Take the preparations for example. Then one of us can focus on the bride getting ready, while the other one can hang out with the groom and get pictures of his preparations. If there was only one of us, it’d be way harder to get the same coverage.

How far in advance do you book weddings?

We take on bookings anytime, but we prefer to not book any more than a year in advance.

Do you have a hard copy/album of your wedding portfolio?

We could get you one if you were interested! info [at] nordicaphotography.com

Youre based out of Vancouver but do you travle for weddings?

We’ll go anywhere so long as our travel expenses are covered. If that’s the case, we have a prorated rate (we don’t charge our full price is it’s a destination wedding).

Like your logo. How did u come up with it?

1. We wanted something that was kind of like a Nordic flag.
2. We wanted to keep it dead simple but still look cool (so it’d be a good watermark as well).
3. The colours were meant to have a northern sort of cold feeling.

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Who The Eff is Nordica

A little lightbulb went off in my head recently: Who / What the heck is Nordica Photography? I mean, obviously I know (and Jakob  knows), but for everyone else, you probably think we’re just a couple Eurotrash photographers who bombard the internet with our stuff.

So, let’s clear the air here today folks and give you the explanation of who we are, why we’re in Vancouver and how Nordica was born. It should only take 4 or 5 minutes here…

School in Sweden

Alrighty then. Let’s start with a  wee gander at these pictures:

Jakob on the right drinking Vodka, Cole next to him with something in a flask, an American dude and a wee fella’ from a town called Lycksele. It’s 3AM by the way and the suns still up..

Cole, Jakob, the wee fella from Lycksele, the lovely Therese and the American dude. Fun times.

Those drunkin’ party pictures were taken back in 2007 when Jakob and I met. Actually, when I met my lovely girlfriend Therese as well (she’s the girl in there eh).

This was from our graduation in Umeå, which is a university in Northern Sweden where we all met. We were all taking a masters program in business, and aside from partying a whole bunch and doing our damnedest to actually show up to class, the three of us all became high-fivin’ buddies.

That’s all well and good, but here’s a question I’m constantly asked: “Why the hell would you go to Sweden”? Great question! So why did I go to Sweden? I’m from 100 Mile House, which is splendid little village north of Kamloops and a far cry from Umeå, Sweden.

Well, this was back in 2006, and at the time my reasons for wanting to spend a year in Sweden went more or less went along these lines:

• Pretty cool scenery
• Free education (there’s no tuition for anyone in Sweden)
• Not a bad way to spend a year after my bachelors degree
• The education probably should be mentioned
• Smokin’ hot girls
• Why not?
• The program was in entrepreneurship which seemed pretty interesting
• I wanted to learn another language
• I just wanted to get away

So in a nutshell, those are a few reasons why I went. Another small influencer was probably that I had lived in Helsinki, Finland for a while back in 2003. I went to school there as well and while I was there, I had the chance to meander around that neck of the woods a wee bit, and I sort of fell in love with the place (the Nordic region). So, school seemed as perfect excuse as any to head back!

Application sent; application accepted; and off I go. Time to giver at a school in Umeå, Sweden.

Look north, my friends! Umeå is way up there, parallel with Yellowknife. It gets seriously cold there.

Getting Hammered with Jakob (Where we met)

So when the program in Umeå actually began in August of 2006, it was the first time I met Jakob. And let’s just clear the air here in case you haven’t met Jakob: He’s one quiet dude.

To give you some retrospect on why that is, let’s start with the fact he’s Finnish (not Swedish – he’s just lived in Sweden a shit load and his mother tongue is Swedish). If you’ve ever met a Finn, you know that they really appreciate silence. They would have no problem sitting in a room with 50 people in dead silence, and this culture is the sort that really only pipes up when it’s really necessary. Until you fire a few ‘adult pops’ in the ol’gullet, then you’ve got a none-stop-talking-Finnish-person, as was the case with Mr Jakob. So, he seemed like a pretty damn good guy for me to be around: A guy who would listen!

We first met at a student bar called Corona in September 2006 . I had been blazing through a few of the aforementioned wobbly-pops, and low and behold Brad-effin’-Pitt cruised on into the bar. What the hell was Mr. Brangalina It doing way up here? I had to ask.

“Brrrrrrraaaaaaaadddddddd!!!!!!!!!!”

“Forlåt, nej, jag heter Jakob” (Sorry, no, my name is Jakob)

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh”

Turns out Jakob (that lucky prick) looks exactly like Brad Pitt, and I was having a delirious-intoxicated-stupid moment to think Brad Pitt was hanging out in a student bar in Northern Sweden.

But, that was about it. That’s where I met Jakob. After that, we continued our domination of the poopsies in Corona and continued afterward to the after-party.

Turns out though Jakob and I had every single class together for that year and we were sort of competitive with one another. Actually a whole lot of competitive. Whether it be my domination of him in classwork, my domination of him in a Swedish game called Kubb, my domination of him in bocce, my domination… you get the point – we were competitive (and I’m sure if he was writing this, he’d tell you the competitive domination was the other way around). But this competitiveness was a good thing for sure, and probably the foundation of our friendship.

Cole, the wee fella from Lycksele again, and Brad Jakob

This is bollé, a Swedish game like bocce. Cole dominated Jakob in this game…

The Years After Umeå

Alright, so you get the point if you’ve read to this point. I’m from a redneck town, Jakob’s a Finn, we met at school in Sweden and we both have backgrounds in business education. Big deal.

But what about after Umeå and why are we in Vancouver?

Well, after UmeÃ¥, Jakob and the horseshoes up his “you know where” got a sweet job in Stockholm. Literally right out of school. He could probably explain it better then me, but basically he worked as a website content guy for some government thingamajig. Something like that. But what this job allowed him to do was become a fucking all-star in photography and editing. If there was a photo-course in Sweden or a editing workshop to attend, he attended it. It was a dream-job. Maybe he’ll explain it more for all you folks, but basically he did this for about two years after UmeÃ¥.

My years after Umeå was basically a gong show that was comprised of job searches, moving, sleeping on laundry room floors, working at god awful restaurants, inflating a debt, living in villages of 50 people, not telling anyone where I was most of the time out of embarrassment, and becoming more and more frustrated with everything.

To break it down in a little,  here’s an abbreviated synopsis of my ‘moves’ from 2007 to now:

1. June 2007 from Umeå to 100 Mile House
2. September 2007 from 100 Mile House to Victoria
3. September 2007 from Victoria to Kelowna
4. October 2007 from Kelowna to Blue River (yes, Blue River)
5. December 2007 from Blue River back to 100 Mile House
6. March 2008 from 100 Mile House to Umeå, Sweden (yep, back to Umeå!)
7. May 2008 from Umeå, Sweden to Söderhamn, Sweden
8. June 2008 from Söderhamn, Sweden to Stockholm, Sweden
9. October 2008 from Stockholm, Sweden to 100 Mile House
10. December 2008 from 100 Mile House to North Vancouver
11. March 2008 from North Vancouver to Gastown

I think I got that right. So, Jakob was lovin’ life with a pimpin’ job in Stockholm, and I was nomading.

The key ingredient though for this whole nomadic post-Umeå adventure though was this: Therese, my girlfriend, was by my side the entire way. While I was jumping around from idea to idea, place to place, and job to job, she was straight as a frozen rope and didn’t fret or become freaked out by my million-ideas-at-once lifestyle.

Believe it or not, Therese stuck with me even when I looked like this. Yikes.

Here’s Nordica

“For the love of Peter, Paul and Mary! Get to the point of this whole post, Cole!” – I’m sure you’re feeling like that by now. So let’s wind this down folks.

Jakob had a rad job in Stockholm, and I had finally planted my feet in Vancouver with Therese. Calm, stability, happy times. But as I had been nomading, I was also knee-deep in photography the whole time. I had always loved photography because of my kick-ass photographer mother, so it was always hovering in the back-burner.

So when I moved to Gastown, I decided to start a photo blog. I figured a picture a day or something would be pretty sweet, and Jakob had been doing it for a while so those competitive juices started flowing again. I would have to dominate the Finn in photo blogging.

So I started the blog, and without even knowing it, my photography career began. Within a few months, I was doing headshots for people, had weddings on the go, was going to live blogging events, and – this was the part that absolutely blew my mind – people were actually paying me to do something that was part hobby / part passion / all fun. Sweet!

With that in mind, I figured may as well jump headfirst into the competitive shit and get a co-pilot. Enter Mr. Granqvist.

With some serious coaxing and a whole lot of manipulation (pictures of Vancouver really worked), he came in November of 2009. Awesome. Nordica was born.

Nordica Photography

So, there’s the background of ‘us’ and how we got here. Now, why “Nordica”? Well, we liked the name eh. Thought it sounded cool and I always had a vision of opening something similar to Corona (the bar in UmeÃ¥) and give it a jive name, such as Nordica.

But the name itself really connects back to where we met. Northern Sweden has a huge connection for us, and is really a reflection of what we try to achieve with photography. Keep it simple, keep it professional and just be ourselves. Just like our lifestyles back in Umeå.

That last bit is definitely important for us. While some photographers go on and on and on about ‘I became a photographer because I’m a dreaaaamer’ or ‘I call my photography company Beautiful Itty Bitty Cutesy Wootsy Footsteps’ or ‘bla bla bla’ – our story is just being us. Cut the bullshit, keep it simple and just be who we are. Nothing about us is made of fluffy bullshit and really, what you see is what you get.

There you go. That’s Nordica Photography and if you’d like to grab a pint one day and meet us, shoot us an email. We’re always game for meeting folks eh!

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