Michael Krakora Photography

Krakora Studios - New Studio, New Name, Same Great Photos

I wanted to take a moment to bring everyone up to date on some really exciting changes that will be happening over the next couple of months. When I started my career in photography almost 10 years ago, I wondered where it would ultimately lead. While my name has been the business identity since it began, I never worked truely alone.  

Heather for many years has helped me when I needed it most. For the last several years she has been an integral part of what we do for our clients. From our album designs, guest books, order placement and most importantly, creating our look for our images, Heather has been amazing. When she began helping to photograph weddings a year and a half ago, it was a natural step for us to take. Our styles are so similar that even we have a difficult time telling our images apart. Now it is really exciting seeing her promote her own portrait photography. It has been so wonderful being able to work with my best friend. I have her to thank for helping our business get to where we are today.

Now it is time for a change. Time for a name that reflects both Heather and myself. Krakora Studios will be our new identity. Heather and I will still be the ones photographing all of the weddings but now Heather will also be available for portrait work as well. We will also be opening up a new studio on Monroe Street. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done, but we hope to be moved in and open by the middle to end of May. Look for our grand opening celebration and for specials in June and July.

We are also setting up a new website and a new blog. Please be patient while things transfer over. This process is way more complicated that we wish and we have a lot of images and posts to move. Our new website will be www.krakorastudios.com and the new blog will be www.thekrakoras.com. Be sure to update your RSS feeds and subscriptions as we are adding new content even as I type this.

This is the last post that either Heather or I will be making on this blog. Thanks to all of you who have been such regular visitors and please come to our new sites. We are super excited about these huge changes and can't wait to share more with everyone soon.

See you all on the new blog.

Mike + Heather

Getting Ready For Senior Portraits

We are gearing up for the Senior Class of 2010. We will be spending a lot of time outside in great new locations.  Bring us your ideas and we will make it happen.  If you are interested in working with us as a Senior Model, contact us for more details.  We are only taking a limited number of models per school so contact us soon!

Wisconsin Bride :: Featured Wedding

We are so excited that Ruthie + Tom's wedding was chosen to be one of the featured weddings in the latest issue of Wisconsin Bride.  We just found out we will have another wedding featured in the next issue.  Stay tuned!  :o)

And, while I am at it...It is that time of year again. Voting is open for Wisconsin Bride's Best of 2009.  Vote for your favorite Wisconsin Wedding Professionals by March 1.

Holiday Ordering Deadlines

Feeling the cold air and watching the leaves fall reminds us that it is getting to be that time of year again.  The Holidays are approaching and our schedule is filling up quickly!  

All Orders need to be placed by these dates.

Wedding Albums: November 10**
Last Day for Portrait Sessions: November 14
Print Orders: December 1
Greeting/Holiday Cards: December 1
Framed Prints: December 1 
Highlight Album/Proofbooks: December 1

We will be keeping this post at the top until right before the holidays so that you don't forget to make your orders in time. All new posts will be right below this one! 

We are offering many new products this year. But one that we are really excited about are our Holiday Cards.  All designs are customizable and printed on a beautiful heavy-weight paper. Here are a couple of examples to give you an idea of what we can do!

**All products except for wedding albums will be guaranteed by December 23. We will do our best to have your wedding album here in time for the holidays, but because of the custom nature of each album, there is a very slight chance that this may not be possible. 

Website is down ... well, not anymore :o)

For some reason our website is down. We are hosted by hostmonster and all of hostmonster is down as well.  Not a good sign.  I am not sure for how long things will be down. I will keep you posted. 

***Nevermind...now it is back up!***

In the mean time enjoy this hilarious shot of a horse yawning! 

Is it really Wednesday? It feels like Monday.

The Madison Wedding Guild

There are two reasons for this post. The most important is to announce that The Madison Wedding Guild's show location for this Wednesday has changed to The Madison Club! Please make a note of it. The time will be the same, 5:30 - 8:30.

The second reason for this post is to say how great of a time we had working with Jayme from Beyond Elegant Events and Andrea from Fleurishes this past weekend. Working with other members from The Guild is rewarding on so many levels. There is a level of professionalism along with sincere kindness.

SPAM and other annoying things

So, our servers have been working on overdrive and we have successfully transfered our website. This will be the last time. The only thing that is not working now is email. This totally freaks us out. You don't realize how dependent you are upon something until it is gone. Hopefully it will be working by the morning. Until then, I will keep updating the blog. If anyone really wants to contact us, pick up the phone.  :o)

****UPDATE****

If you have tried to email us today we cannot get those emails.  We have had to shut all of our email down because of the spam.  We have over 2000 emails in our email account.  I hate spammers!!!  We are working on it and hopefully have everything resolved as soon as possible.

***************

This is an annoying post that I feel the need to write.  I apologize in advance if any of our clients are getting spammed by us.  Seems that someone with nothing better to do has taken over our info at michaelkrakora dot com address to do with as they seem fit.  It is times like these that I hate the internet.  Be assured that we are working to eliminate this. We will also be switching servers and hopefully this will help solve the problem.  If not, there will be some email address changes in our future.  Once again, many apologies!

Website

I am very excited to say that we have updated our website.  Some of the new features are galleries that are easier to use as well as images, images and more images.  The big plus for us personally is that it is super easy for us to update! The downside is that we are experiences just a few transition problems.  It has been brought to my attention that some of the links to old slide shows are not working and either does the contact page.  So, if you have tried to contact us through the contact page, we are not ignoring you, we just have not gotten it.  For the time being, please email us through info@michaelkrakora.com  We are sorry for any confusion this may have caused.  Be patient, I am working very closely with our web guru and I am sure we will have all of the kinks worked out shortly!

Frames

Mike and I are still trying to digest everything that we learned from the WPPI conference.  You will slowly begin seeing some changes on our end.  One of them is providing our clients with framing.  We have been wanting to do this for quite some time but just were unsure of how to take it on.  We met a great vendor who offered us a "deal we could not refuse" and here we are!  We are really excited about offering frames.  Our goal is to offer a full service to our families and couples who choose us to document their stories. Whether it be albums or frames...we can do it!

Here are a couple of examples of what we can do for the layout of images within one frame. I love seeing all of the baby parts on one page!

 

We're Going to Vegas!

For those of you who don't already know, we are going to Vegas for the WPPI (wedding and portrait photographer's international) convention. We will be gone from March 13-18. We will also be out of town from March 26-31, shooting a wedding in Jekyll Island, Georgia.  Talk about beautiful! We are so ready to get out of Wisconsin for some warmer weather and some inspiration! 

We will be getting back to emails when we can, so if there is a bit of a delay, that is why.