5. Features.

Green Wedding Shoes recently featured Becky and Ymir’s glacier wedding, Style Me Pretty featured Annika and Doug’s Icelandic countryside wedding, and Junebug Weddings featured Susan and Jag’s Sikh wedding in Vancouver. These wedding blogs are arguably three of the biggest in North America.

A short while ago The National Post, one of Canada’s two largest papers, contacted us out of the blue. They found us in the ocean of photographers across Canada and we were featured in their weekend addition. Flattered. Honoured. Take your pick. It was very cool to see Nordica make it into a national publication. The web version of the interview can be viewed here.

This final “feature” is not really a feature at all, but an example of the weird and wonderful place our work ends up from time to time. About a month ago, we were following our web site’s stats and all of a sudden, it just went crazy. We’re talking a hundred new viewers a minute crazy. And even weirder was that all the viewers were from Poland. It turns out a Polish cartoon character named “WŁÓCZYKIJ” posted a link on its Facebook wall to an Iceland wedding we did, and this resulted in our site crashing from the influx of viewers. Hi, Poland.

4. Workshops.

A couple of months back, we started offering full-day workshops and online consultations. The Interwebs picked up on this.

We have done quite a few Skype chats since we started offering the consultations, and people are coming from all over the world to Vancouver for the day-long two-on-ones. This makes us happy (and humbled) because we really want to share our story and experiences – so we welcome any photographer who wants to see how we roll.

Also, we have added another slice to the service pie: Photography Business Evaluations. You can read about what that means here.

Staying with the workshop theme, we’ve got one more word for you: Fer. Yep, that Fer. He is a world-class Mexican wedding photographer and he’s coming up to Vancouver for a workshop. We’re helping him with the logistics, and apart from Fer’s general awesomeness, we’re also excited about the venue: Our good friend Matt from the Vogue Theatre is allowing us to host the workshop there. You might remember the Vogue engagement session we did there a while back. That’s happening in March. Sexy like iguana.

3. 2012 + 2013.

Our first wedding of the year happened recently in (freezing, Arctic cold) Edmonton, and we’re gearing up for another busy year. A ranch wedding in British Columbia Interior (with this couple), a destination wedding in Dominican Republic, a fall wedding in Finland, and a July wedding in Iceland are some of the weddings we’ll be travelling for. And of course all the local weddings we have lined up. We can’t wait to get this year going.

2013. Yeah, who knew people planned this far ahead? We’ve started booking weddings for 2013 already and we have some exciting things planned for next year. We aren’t going to let the cat out of the bag quite yet, but let’s just say Europe is on the horizon.

2. Social.

We’ve quietly been active all over the web on different websites, but you probably haven’t had those sites easily passed along your way. By design. But, here are a few places where we can be found:

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/nordicaphoto (also, @allan_cole and @jakobg)
Formspring: www.formspring.me/Nordicaphoto
Google Plus: http://goo.gl/bpwFh
Tumblr: http://nordicaphoto.tumblr.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nordicaphotography

Also, it seems the happy pinners of Pinterest have found us. Pin on. (And if you want to follow us on Pinterest, we’re here: Cole, Jakob)

1. Motivated. Happy.

On the personal side of things, we are two happy dudes and we want to thank all the people we’ve networked with online and in person, and also all the couples we’ve worked with throughout 2010 and 2011. We had no idea what to expect when we started Nordica, and to come as far as we have is very cool. But, we couldn’t have done it without all the input and opportunities we’ve received from everyone, so thank you.

We’re massively motivated right now to smash our potential as wedding photographers, and we can’t wait for all the 2012 action.

Bryan makes beer that would knock your socks off. At his wedding, the beer he served the guests was absolutely awesome. 12% alcohol content and smooth as silk. Delicious.

When we first met Grace and Bryan, we never would have guessed that one of their favourite pastimes together is checking out brewhouses. And as we happen to enjoy slinging the odd pint ourselves, we felt right at home with these two. It’s nice when common interests trickle to the surface, especially when we spend so much time together on a wedding day.

Melissa and Josh’s wedding portrait request was something along these lines: Just do what you do. We’ll give you all the time you need.

Creative freedom is a very good thing.

One of the biggest challenges that we look forward to with weddings is scouting locations, and ideally, never using the same spot twice. So when a couple gives us fee reigns, it’s happy times in Nordica land.

When we arrived at one of the spots we’d picked, we hopped out of the car and scoped things out.

“Vintage Nordica”, Josh said.

Mission accomplished.

The most interesting in-between moments for us usually have nothing to do with photography, and are often what we remember from the wedding. It can be a conversation we were having with the couple while taking their picture, or perhaps something that happened, something we’ll never forget.

Take Daisy and Mali, for example.

We were on day three of their three day Sikh wedding, and we were finishing their portraits beside the Olympic Village in Vancouver. Everything was going smooth – the pictures were turning out great and we were right on schedule for the 6:00PM arrival time at the reception in Surrey, where the 500 or so guests were waiting (about 45 minutes away).

At about 5:15, we cut things off so that we wouldn’t be late.

“Are you sure? We can keep going and get more if you think we should”, Daisy said.

“We’ve got lots – let’s head out so you’re not late”, we replied.

So Daisy and Mali hopped into their car, and we hopped into ours. We fired up our Jimmy (which had just shy of 400,000 kms – we’ll come back to that in a second) and they sort of fired up their VW.

We say sort of because, well, it sort of didn’t want to start. And eventually didn’t. It was dead.

So, here we were on a tight schedule with a stunning bride looking like she was on her way to a fashion shoot, an Indian groom with a bit of a James Bond thing going on, two photographers and a dead car. We did the most logical thing that came to mind and had Daisy steer the car while we pushed it about a kilometer, to a spot where it would be safe overnight.

Parallel parking a dead car with no power-steering wasn’t exactly easy, but we managed. And into the Jimmy we went, which was comedy in itself because earlier that day, we had been joking that it was due to die any day with so many kilometers.

But the Jimmy survived and we made it to the reception on time, and nobody had any idea we had just been pushing around a dead VW 45 minutes earlier.

So there are different interpretations of in-between moments in our industry, but for us, every wedding seems to have some sort of a special memory that sticks. Like pushing a dead car.

Day one:

Day two:

Day three:

Daisy and Mali’s three day Sikh wedding was as intense as it gets. And we’re not just blowing smoke and mirrors here – they partied hard.

5 am mornings, 2 am nights, lots of laughter, lots of tears, wild dancing, serious stage-diving, extreme partying, incredible food and drinks, and lots of love. It was full-on.

Their wedding had it all, and we’re stoked to have been able to come so close to this culture that’s still very new to us.

We’ll post the full wedding soon.

This was our first three day East Indian wedding experience.

Over 500 people, a reception straight out of a Bollywood movie, a never-ending flow of food and colours, and two wicked-awesome people at the centre of it all.

We’re definitely down for more of these. We’ll post the full wedding another day.

We’ve put brides and grooms in a lot of odd spots for portraits.

Allies that smelled like they had dead bodies laying around, precarious cliffs with unsure footing, beside glaciers, the middle of deserts, fields full of animals, a pot field, and on and on.

When we took Annika and Doug away for their portraits at 1AM during a rainstorm in Iceland, that situation really took the cake.

Their wedding was at HOTEL BUDIR, Iceland, located in the western region on the Snaefellsnes peninsula. It’s a very isolated place about two hours north of Reykjavik. To have a destination wedding in Iceland is very rare as it is, but adding this location to the story made this wedding that much more unique.

Once we were finished their portraits, around 2AM or so, it was back to the party, and at around 5AM we asked if we could go out for one more round of portraits. We had to leave at 5.30AM and fly home that morning, but we wanted to squeeze as much as we could out of the wedding.

Annika and Doug were all in, so we did some more portraits. The light at 5AM is much better than 1AM, apparently.

All in all, we photographed non-stop for about 16 hours. If it would have been 30 hours, we would have had no problems.

We didn’t want it to end.